Elynsynos

Suddenly, she was.

She was not sure how else to explain it. In one moment she simply had not existed. In the next, she stood upon sun-warmed stone as she gazed across the vista.

Her golden eyes blinked slowly as her mind struggled to catch up with her sudden creation. In her distress her strong claws dug into the stone, crumbling the material as easily as sand. Her tail twitched at the end, lashing back and forth through the air as her wings shifted and stretched out wide, then tucked back in.

Physically, she knew herself.

She knew that should she wish it she could soar through the air. Her wings were strong and agile. She knew how she would use tiny muscles to make slight adjustments and how her frills would lay against her body to help her glide through the currents and how her long tail would slither behind her. She knew that she was very strong, and very big -- that she would tower over her fellow creatures save the greatest of them all; knew that her scales, golden like the sights before her, were incredibly tough and that her claws, sharp as they were, would have difficulty cutting through most of her. She felt her steady heartbeat, felt the lungs in her chest gathering and expelling air rhythmically, and she felt the sun's warmth upon her body.

Somehow, she also knew other things.

She knew how to speak and she tested her voice. First, merely sounds. Her voice was strong and clear, a ringing quality giving a faint, tinny echoe to the cadence of her experimental vocalization. When she found words she began to Find names for things. She did not create words herself, but found that as her eyes fell upon flora and fauna and other things that her mind simply knew.

She knew that she was a Guardian. She knew that she would not stay put long, but that she would quickly be drawn by instinct to find something. To cherish, to guide, to protect. That she would die after expending every ounce of her long life and vitae to keep whatever that something, or someone, was... safe.

She knew, somehow, that the world itself was vast. That on her way she would find others like herself, and not like herself. They would be many sizes and many colors, many patterns. They would all be 'dragons', yet they would be separated by something important... What was it...?

Clarity came like a solar flare, staggering her and making her cry out in surprise. Her shout startled a flock of resting birds and shushed the insects briefly so that silence reigned as she shook her frilled and horned head.

Gods.

Her goddess, the Lightweaver, was her creator. She had visions of a place to the southwest of her current location where most of her kind were from, but a brief sense to go in that direction passed as quickly as a breeze. No, her loyalty and nature were as tied to the Light as the color of her scales and no matter which of the gods had initially designed her species she had only one Mother she would one day bow to.