Aurdra

Aurdra knows what it is to be lonely.

It seems her parents are always gone. She knows it is 'for the good of the clan'; she has been told so many times that she could recite the responsibility speech in her sleep. But that doesn't stop her from missing her father when he is away for weeks at a time. It doesn't make her resent her mother any less, when she goes out hunting and comes back to spend time with the newest hatchlings. Now that she is old enough to hunt herself, Aurdra usually feels more kindly towards her mother. It's just that she's lonely.

For a while, she let herself be caught up in dreams. There were other young dragons around, after all, and some of them were quite handsome. But they went off, one by one, to new clans or to follow the Windsinger's call. All except Arvyn. He was older than her, but he was always kind. And he knew what it was like to have younger siblings and dysfunctional parents; she felt as though they had some kind of connection.

So of course, when Arvyn made a nest with Cinnabar, Aurdra should have been heartbroken. She thought she was for a while. But after a few days of moping around the lair, giving her mother black looks and ignoring Arvyn altogether, she realized she didn't feel sad. She didn't feel any different at all; she was just lonely, as she always had been.

When she saw the shiny wildclaw boy wandering aimlessly, she was curious. And when she met him, she saw in him the same loneliness that dwelt in her. By the time they got back to the lair, she felt curiously protective of this Dmitri. He was worried about his flowers; Aurdra spewed a blistering string of invective at the first dragon to make a joke about them. He seemed overwhelmed by meeting so many new dragons all at once; Aurdra shepherded him away from the crowd and reassured him in her private cavern. When he told her, haltingly, about his past, she nodded and put a sympathetic wing over his shoulders. And somehow he was comforting her too, seeking her out at every opportunity to make sure she was still there. Listening when she lamented about her absent father or distracted mother. After a week, they were inseparable.

And so it was that Aurdra, no stranger to loneliness, found the end to her loneliness in a stranger.