Glorfindel

Dare to be who you are. Dare to challenge the world. Dare to stand for those things you love.

* * *

Ever since she was a hatchling, she'd known that she was ugly.

'Plain' was the word they used, but she wasn't an idiot. She knew the fine print that came with the word: basic, boring, ugly.

She couldn't even blame them - ordinary red, ordinary white. How could she compare to her siblings, marked with patterns and glowing with colour? How could she measure against her lair-mates, shimmering and vibrant? Sometimes, she hauled her wings up against the light and desperately searched for a marking, something that would prove that she belonged.

And, well, she couldn't exactly blame her parents for not naming her. Why should they, when they were sending her off to serve some deity?
A great honour, they told her, and she tried to believe it. It was the fate for dragons like her, after all. Hardly any of the sparkling hatchlings were being sent away - only the drab, plain ones, born for servitude. Like her. She was okay with it, she told herself.

Until suddenly, she wasn't.

It was the silliest of things - she was sitting outside, the night before she was due to be dispatched, staring into the sky. And man, was it wonderful. Pinpricks of light dotted the vast velvet night, swirling far above her head and shooting far into the distance. The sky was open, the horizon endless. A breeze whispered in her ear, rustled through the leaves, and it felt like -

It felt like a moment. An instant when she realised that this was wonderful, that the sky was vast, that she wanted to follow the trail of stars, no matter where it might have led her. That this night could have been the first of many, and that this peace could have been hers. And that dragons had told her she'd never amount to anything, and she'd never thought to question it.

The unnamed dragon looked back at the bright, glowing lair once, and slipped away into the night. She named herself then, something on par with this intoxicating new life, and followed the trail of stars like she'd wanted, soaring with the constellations, giddy with the breeze and drunk on freedom.

She was Daring, and she was basic, boring, ugly.

But she was free.