Ryuki

Role: The Knowledge Keeper

Personnality: Calm, loyal, smart, carefull

Friend/Familie:
-Loved by Laeya
-Gets along with The 4 Sisters and Arataki.

Important lore element:
-He hate the roughness of Styrax and Verney.
-He Stay ONLY for Laeya (he want to convince her to leave)

Story by Amelia
Being born as the first son means you are born with certain expectations. Expectations that Ryuki was well aware of, but often struggled to live up to. Being rather bookish, he had no interest in joining the roughhousing of his clutch mates, preferring to bury his nose in a book. His parents tried to get him to train, but he soon grew to dislike all the violence and soon after gave up on the idea completely.

As his parents soon had new clutches, they left him to his own devices and he became more and more immersed in his studies. He tried in numerous occasions to show off his extensive knowledge to his parents and the rest of his clan, but unfortunately he was born in a militant clan, if it didn’t help in a battle then it was useless. He slowly but surely became an outcast, staying in the fringes of the camp to avoid any kind of confrontation, knowing that it would most likely involve a tremendous amount of physical pain. His efforts paid off, though, he was largely ignored and left alone with his also forgotten books and scrolls. It wasn’t the life he would have chosen, but the coatl knew it could be much worse, so he kept his head down and stayed quiet.

But things rarely stay the same for long, and changes are not always for the better. It began with an unfortunate raid on a newly formed clan of harpies. The clan commanders had thought the battle an easy victory, and sent their newer members so they could gain more field experience. Ryuki, of course, was never expected to go and stayed on the sidelines. What they had not expected was for the harpies to have made a bunker out of the tunnels in the cliffs they inhabited. The dragons, fueled by youthful arrogance, attacked the defences head on, thinking they would not be able to withstand a dragon’s power. Only they did and the dragons lost half of their members in the assault forcing them to retreat.

The commanders were furious, such a defeat was a stain on their reputation that had to be cleansed immediately. They mobilised everyone that could fight to crush the beastclan once and for all. Ryuki was once again left behind. The victory was swift and brutal, the harpies that were not killed were scattered, but not before they left a final farewell in the form of a finely spread dust covering their food crates. The dragons thought it was mere dirt, and so they brushed it off before taking the loot back home.

A great feast was to take place to celebrate their victory, those that had not gone to battle were in charge of preparing the food, Ryuki included. As he was cleaning the fish he noticed a weird smell coming out of it, thinking that the fish had gone bad he told the other cooks. They waved him off, saying that they had tried the food and they had found nothing wrong with it. Still unconvinced, he went back to his nest to search what could give food a different smell than usual. What the coatl found was that the food was most likely poisoned, but there too many to figure out which one it was exactly. When he tried to warn the others they didn’t believe him and just told that if he didn’t want to eat he could just go hungry.

The feast was loud and full of cheer, everyone was drinking and eating and making merry, everyone except for Ryuki. The coatl just sat there, eyeing the food hungrily. It looked and smelled delicious, but the knowledge that it could be his last meal kept him from trying anything. As the night wore on, he began to have doubts as his stomach growled, perhaps the poison on the food was not lethal and everyone would just wake with upset stomachs, perhaps it didn’t even affect dragons.

Just as he was about to finally take a bite out of a fish one of the elders, a guardian double his size that ate as if for two more coughed up blood and collapsed, lying dead on the ground. Everything came to a standstill, nobody moved, nobody talked, Ryuki wasn’t sure if they were even breathing. There wasn’t even time for panic to set in before the next body collapsed, as it hit the ground the spell was broken and the chaos started. Some dragons went by their fallen kin, trying in vain to figure out what had happened to them. Others were screaming, prey of the growing panic. More bodies fell to the ground. Ryuki could swear he heard the hatchlings crying. He couldn’t take it anymore and he bolted. He almost crashed into his nest in his haste to shove whatever he could carry into a bag before running into the night. He didn’t even know where he was going. He just wanted to get away from the madness. Away from the nightmare.

Ryuki ran for two days and two nights. He didn’t try to sleep as he knew the faces of his clanmates would haunt his dreams. On the morning of the third day he collapsed due to exhaustion in the middle of the tangled woods. He would have probably died from exposure or from a passing beast had he not been found by Laeya, who had stumbled upon him.

The fae had taken him to her clan where she helped him recover. There he met the leader, kinda, another fae named Arataki. He had trouble retelling his birth clan's fate, but he was allowed to join. It wasn’t long afterwards that he was named the knowledge keeper, a fancy title for the dragon in charge of keeping record of the clan’s activities. Nonetheless, he liked the job. He got to spend the day surrounded by books and this time people appreciated his efforts. He got to make friends, particularly with the dancing sisters, who he helped with their accounting, and even Arataki himself joined him for long debates about magic and other topics. But not everything was sunshine and rainbows.

To say that Ryuki had fallen in love with Laeya at first sight wouldn’t be far from the truth. Her beauty had enchanted him from the beginning, but it was her personality that made him fall for her. She was always kind and friendly and was liked by everyone, and she was friendly with everyone in return. Yet he could also see the looks she would throw at Arataki from time to time. He would never be able to compete against their charming and outgoing leader, he also didn’t want to risk their friendship and let things become awkward when he would be inevitably rejected.

So the coatl swallowed his feelings and let life continue as it always had. It worked well enough until one afternoon, when he had decided to take a break from his work and go to river to catch himself some snacks. At first he thought nothing in seeing Laeya already sitting by the river, she had probably also decided to enjoy a free afternoon, but then he heard a soft muffled sob and saw that her body was shaking in an effort to contain her tears.

He approached quietly, not wanting to scare her off, and sat beside her. The fae was startled, but relaxed when she saw it was him. He asked what was wrong, concerned about what could bring the normally happy fae to tears. She sniffed one last time before she begun to talk. She told him she had fallen in love with Arataki during their time as magical students and that she had always held the hope that he would one day love her back. She had hoped that once he and Styrax had finally separated he would finally look at her, but their leader still loved him, and would never see her as more than a friend.

Ryuki tried to console as best as he could. He told her that even if Arataki will never love her there would be other dragons that would love her in a heartbeat. Who, she had asked, sounding hysterical. Who would be as charming as him, as kind as him, who would care so much for her?

How about me?

The question stunned them both and to this day Ryuki doesn’t know where he got the courage to say it out loud. He was blushing horribly under his fur, and it took a few seconds before she understood his meaning and she blushed too, but to his surprise didn’t pull away or flat out reject him. A few seconds of the most awkward silence he ever experienced passed between them before Laeya took him by surprise. She pulled him close and hugged him, burying her face in his fur while a smile bloomed on both on their faces.

And so started their relationship, Ryuki didn’t want to call it love, at least not yet when they were hardly anything official. But there were dark clouds in the horizon. Ryuki could see how Styrax was slowly gaining more power within the clan, and Arataki was too blinded by his feelings to notice it, much less do something about it. He knew how this story ended, and told Laeya so, urging her to leave the clan with him. But she would have none of it, she would not leave her friends at first sign of trouble. Ryuki wanted to leave before this clan met the same fate as the birth one, but he couldn’t leave Laeya behind. So here he remains