Halina

Halina

I can't see you very well, but the breezes tell me everything I need to know.





Halina has always been a daydreamer and an optimist, a dragon with a soft voice and a gentle heart. She was born with unusually poor vision, unable to see much more than what was immediately beyond her nose, with the rest as indeterminate blurs of colors until she got closer. As a hatchling, she liked to make a game of it to herself, gazing off into the distance, and imagining what the blurred shapes might be. Clouds could be the sails of a vast flying ship in the sky, while a grove of trees shaking in the wind might be some furious monster with green hair. She got a reputation for being quiet and a little absent minded, for her tendency to spend so much time sitting quietly and staring off into the distance, as though she was seeing things others couldn't.

Although she was born in the Southern Icefield, she found difficulty in staying there. The vast, unchanging white snowscape was especially difficult for her to navigate. Several times she got dangerously lost, and members of the clan had to be sent out to find her. Those times were especially nerve wracking for the clan, since she always seemed to get lost when there was a blizzard or heavy snowstorm on the horizon. She couldn't have said why she was driven to wander outside at those times, and the one time she said she felt drawn to it was dismissed as an extension of her daydreaming. Several tundra members of the clan tried to teach her to navigate by scent, but although she had some success, her nose simply wasn't as sensitive as theirs. She decided that she would have to find another region to call her home.

Escorted by a bodyguard from her old clan, they flew across the ocean that separated the Southern Icefield from the mainland. Although he expected her to have difficulty, she more often than not outstripped him. There was something exhilarating about flying over the ocean, where the breezes and tides created an entirely different set of air currents. If she closed her eyes, she could feel the ups and downs of the winds as they rode the waves, dipping, cresting, and crashing down again. She made her bodyguard incredibly nervous with a new found game of diving down, following the rise and fall of a wave so closely that her wingtips touched the water on the downbeat. She couldn't see why he was worried that she would be swept under a wave. Couldn't he feel how the breezes around them would lift her up before that happened?

Finally, they reached the mainland, and alighted on the shore of the Windswept Plateau. And the wind sang to her. She had always felt drawn to the snowstorms as they blew up in the Southern Icefield, but shuffled too deep inside the lair as the storms raged outside to truly feel them. But now, every breeze wrapped around her, welcoming her as a friend, and bringing her the view of the land as they saw it for miles around. It was like being welcomed home, and she knew she had found the place she was meant to stay. She let the winds lead her, to the bafflement of her escort, to a nearby clan, and asked if she might stay. The clan, containing many native wind dragons who saw how the breezes danced playfully around her, was happy to welcome her in.

The wind dragons there welcomed Halina, and before long they realized that she possessed a strong weather magic. She had never had the opportunity to practice it at home, but here where the breezes blew constantly, she could feel the very air itself sing to her magic. It compensated for her poor vision as well, since although she couldn't see it, she learned to feel the air pressure, and the contours and patterns of the air currents as they flowed around objects and dragons alike, telling her what lay ahead more clearly than her eyes ever had. Halina learned to use her weather magic, to bring in sunny skies or needed rain, but what she truly enjoyed using it for was a traditional Wind flight art form, cloudshaping. When the sky was full of fluffy white clouds, she sent breezes playing among them, blowing them into new and fantastic shapes. She took a particular delight in finally being able to bring the cloud ships she had imagined as a child to real life.


Halina still retained her dreamy demeanor, although now, more often than not, when she sits still and stares off into the distance she's feeling for what the breezes might tell her. She's known for that, and for her eccentric sense of dress. Her favorite types of apparel are soft, flowing ones that she can wrap around herself, or let trail behind her like the clouds she so enjoys shaping. However, the texture is more important than the appearance to her, which sometimes leads to some odd combinations. Although she favors white and blue, any sort of sky colors, a silky or fluffy texture is much more important, and she has several beloved pieces of apparel in strange colors chosen specifically for their feel. She loves to wrap herself up in a flowing piece of apparel, and pretend she's wrapped up in a soft cloud. (Although she's flown through clouds herself, they're never really as soft as they look from below.)

Halina's mate is SnowsTwilight, an energetic, rather impulsive pearlcatcher, with a love for everything but an inability to focus on one thing for very much time. When he arrived for what he had thought was a visit, he swept into the lair like a playful breeze, and immediately caught her interest. She found his obvious fascination with everything he saw endearing, seeing that his interest in everything overflowed too much to specialize in a single thing. She found herself spending more and more time with him, enjoying his enthusiastic appreciation as she practiced cloudshaping. She saw him fall in love with the clan, and all the different opportunities it offered, and as her fond feelings for him grew, she saw him begin to fall in love with her too, and remain completely oblivious of the fact. He bounced from one thing to another so fast, he never really seemed to have time to focus on the fact that she was one of the few things he kept coming back to, time and time again. It took him a longer absence, at her urging in the confidence that if their feelings were real, he would return to her, to make him finally realize it. When he returned to settle with the clan, and with Halina, he was almost too excited to get his words straight, but she still knew what he meant to say. They have been together ever since, and she always knows when he's near by the energetic breezes his dashing about makes.


Why don't you sit down with me, and we'll watch the clouds for a little while?