Scáthach is just an ordinary wanderer, and possesses no magical abilities whatsoever. None. Nada. Not a chance. Just an ordinary mirror with a pet bird. Nothing to see here.

Nothing.

Please ignore the veritable jungle that is her room, hidden away in a back hallway of the fortress. The plants there somehow grow when there's not even any soil, which is a completely normal thing for trees to do.

This lair is located on Arcane territory; why is she even trying to deny being a magic user?

During her travels, Scáthach has met many an interesting dragon. All of which now owe her favours, for unknown reasons that don't involve the magical skills she definitely doesn't have. At least, this is her explanation for the number of rather strange gifts the clan has been receiving. But what could she possibly have done for somebody to have owed her a hundred sets of cosmologist's fieldtools?

Nowadays, she's one of the dragons who maintains the traveller's shelters throughout the southern isles. She restocks the preserved food and other supplies, making sure that there's enough there for a tired dragon to survive the cold weather. Well, she only claims to do that much. The plants in the area seem to grow so that these shelters can be seen from above, but not from the ground, and those who have stayed in them report feeling incredibly safe, as if the hideouts were heavily warded. Scáthach claims to know nothing of any of this.

She does know who's staying in those shelters though but definitely not through some sort of spying flower, which is quite useful for Amphitrite. How else would the messenger dragon be able to deliver messages to clan guard members out on extended missions? Or future visitors to the clan, who'll be too bewildered by how Amphitrite managed to find them to question why she had their mail in the first place.

She'll never let Rhys see her personal arboretum. Not because of any ill feelings towards him, but because it's pretty clear he'd never leave. She does give him the occasional plant as a gift though, which he then uses to decorate the outside of the fortress. The ivy-covered look is in this season.

The clan is quite appreciative of her wide knowledge of the rest of the world, whether it's about foreign customs or ancient lore relating to highly dangerous things that'll be fun to mess with. As much as she tries to hide it, Scáthach does actually like to share what she's learned. Well, as long as the questions don't start getting too inane. No, she doesn't know what colour water dragons prefer for their hats, and Kushiel should really stop asking.

Strangely, her tome appears to be blank to those who try reading it. "Those" would be Tolmac, who has tried borrowing it a few times. One of those times the book grew vines and tied itself to Tolmac's face, and yet that still hasn't been enough to dissuade him from borrowing it.

But really, there's no way Scáthach could possibly be a wizard. She doesn't have a pointy hat! Those are a dead giveaway.

---

Mirrors prefer to be in packs, and Scáthach is no exception. She might seem like a loner, but that's merely a facade. Her only goals point towards helping the clan, although she doesn't want to be given credit for anything she does.

In her previous pack, Scáthach was a dragon of much renown. Too much renown, in fact. She never became the leader, but the actual leader leaned on her wings to the point where she may as well have been. And as the only caster, he and other dragons called on her magic for aid constantly. Eventually, feeling as if her claws were worn down to the bone, she fled her pack, hoping to just be able to take a break for a while.

And yet, she still couldn't rest. Even if nobody knew to ask her for help, every clan she visited had some issue or another that her magic could resolve. When she travelled though wildlands by herself, she constantly ran into lost and injured travellers, as if the Gladekeeper had cursed her with a plague of needy dragons. At least she had some consolation that the needy beastclans couldn't have been sent by the Gladekeeper, but that didn't make them any less destitute.

It's not like she could have turned a blind eye to their plights. No part of her could let tundras starve because their plants wouldn't grow, or let a fae colony collapse due to being built in a dying tree. And there was that wedding where the reception area had been scoured by a forest fire the day before! How could she just fly away from that? (Scáthach would admit that she probably didn't need to grow enough flowers to drown a few imperials in. Though the happy couple's faces were a convincing argument otherwise.)

The last straw came when she had travelled all the way to Dragonhome, and was taking a breather in a dusty ravine. She undid the last of the waterskins she was carrying, and drank deeply of the liquid that masqueraded as water but had evolved past that days ago. According to the map a grateful snapper had given her, there should have been a clan around here somewhere, but apparently they felt like hiding themselves and whatever water they hopefully had.

Well, when she found them an hour later, they did have a lot of water. Too much, actually. In an attempt to revitalize their dry and lifeless section of the Shattered Plain, they'd pooled together their treasure to hire a water mage to bring more water to their clan. Which was now a pool of dirty, stagnant water, as the mage had made a slight error in their calculations.

The dragons were fine, having taken shelter on a nearby plateau. But with their home destroyed, they were going to have to abandon it and beg another clan to accept new members. They were, if it weren't for Scáthach who was having none of that.

With a renewed vigour, she got to working her magic. Vines tore a gouge in the earth, creating a river to runoff the excess water. Lilypads and lotuses marked where the other mage had revealed a wellspring that supplied the new oasis. And all around the water grew ferns and a wide variety of trees, such that the oasis was nearly impossible to see before you had fallen into it.

What wasn't impossible to see was a passed out Scáthach, who was sprawled out on top of a palm tree that had sprouted underneath her. It would be a few days before she awoke, which would give the clan's dragons a few days to figure out how to live in a wholly new sort of environment. That, and to figure out how much to tell all the inevitable dragons who would be very confused upon flying over a sudden oasis in the middle of the wasteland.

After she awoke, Scáthach felt like a sieve, magic constantly leaking out of her reserves. As she accepted yet another favour from a grateful clan, she decided on one thing. She needed a vacation. Immediately.

And so she left, heading for one of the furthest corners of Sornieth. A trail of wildflowers bloomed in her path, Scáthach no longer caring enough to bother to control her magic. Well, until she realized those flowers would lead help-seekers right to her. She got her power under control right after that.

It turned out that even that corner had a dragon clan, but Scáthach had realized during her journey that she wouldn't be able to handle the life of a hermit. It had only been a week or two, and she was desperate for some sort of social stimulation. There was nothing for it but to make sure these dragons wouldn't want to ask her for help, and to not bother assisting anyone who didn't ask.

The former she could manage. The latter? Not a chance.