Thelyron

You need a gentle touch to create a magic scroll. Forming a symbol incorrectly or letting a droplet of ink fall somewhere it shouldn't can ruin everything, causing the scroll to malfunction when its words are spoken out loud. Those who merely have a combat scroll backfire on them can consider themselves lucky compared to someone who activates a damaged breed change scroll. Some errors are more unstable than others, and a particularly bad one might cause the scroll to burst into flames right in the face of the one writing it.

As such, someone with as steady a hand as Thelyron can easily find a place in an arcane clan. Not only does she create and sell scrolls of her own design to travellers, but she makes up for the lack of care and illegible handwriting of her clanmates by doing scribing work for them. It's surprisingly entertaining work, as she gets to be the first to see every poorly-conceived spell that her clanmates' minds can come up with. She doesn't judge though — it's much funnier to watch them try to use magic designed with such glaring flaws. The only edits she makes are the ones that are required for her own safety.

But that's not the only use Clan _______ has for a scribe. Dragons such as Atuin like to spend their time dredging up old tomes and stone carvings from who knows where, and appreciate someone who can copy that knowledge over to a more convenient form. Whether it's pages that crumble at the touch or tablets a spiral's weight in stone, those dragons of years past didn't put much thought into making their knowledge accessible to their successors. Still, they're interesting reads. Thelyron makes copies of the most interesting texts for her own collection.

A collection that is surprisingly large, and kept under enough defensive spells to make even the most paranoid archmage take a moment to step back and admire the effort that went in placing all those wards. (Most of them are of the "fling an intruder out of the room with a gust of wind" sort, but after being tossed a hundred or so times even the most persistent dragon will give up on trying to sneak a peek at her books.) A scribe of Thelyron's magical abilities could easily have found a place on the Focal Point, instead of travelling to the furthest reaches of the Starfall Isles to practice her craft. Thelyron just laughs and claims she's not that skilled. It's just that she knows her clanmates well enough, and that anything she lets someone borrow she's never getting back.

It wouldn't seem like Abayoni would have much use for a scribe, considering the tundra apparently knows everything without ever having to read a book, but she does. Abayoni is a terrible writer, both in that her writing looks like someone replaced a veilspun's shampoo with ink and then spun them around on the paper, and that it's disjointed and impossible to follow even when it is legible. So whenever a student wants a written reference for a lesson, she turns to Thelyron. The pearlcatcher's learned enough from transcribing all these guides to be considered a polymath in her own right. Yet for the most part all Thelyron uses this knowledge for is winning the weekly trivia contests Saburo holds in his tavern.

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It turns out fleeing to the coldest temperatures she could handle wasn't quite enough for Thelyron to escape her past. Minya knew who she was immediately, though it is his job to know that sort of thing. And with some nice, friendly blackmail, he recruited her to the Clan _______ Espionage Department. A department that doesn't officially exist, of course. Silas would never authorize such a thing.

Thelyron was previously something of a con artist, especially skilled in forging documents. If there's treasure to be made in copying rare books, then there's even more to be found in the originals. No matter how many 'originals' there might be. She was particularly fond of making fake breed change scrolls, which were actually just illusion scrolls that might last for a day or two. Quite useful when you might have a mob of half-illusioned dragons looking to forge some retribution into the skull of whoever you were disguised as last week. In fact, Thelyron spent a large portion of her life living under a specific stolen identity, the strap of a pair of goggles concealing the signs that the antlers attached to her head were fakes. She never even committed any crimes under that identity, but an experienced con knows to hide under multiple layers of deception.

What Minya requests of her tends to be much less dangerous than anything she did before joining the clan. For the most part, all she has to is make copies of stolen documents — with maybe just the occasional edit — so that Minya can keep the original while sneakily returning the copy. She also fabricates the paperwork for things that need to be done but the clan leader won't give permission for. Thelyron's never particularly happy about doing that. Not because she doesn't agree that the good of the clan comes before making everyone comfortable with the decisions; she's done worse for the good of only herself. No, the issue's that she's not convinced Minya's much good for any of the clan. Her only consolation is that her current position is probably the best place to keep an eye on him.

But mere forgery isn't enough for Thelyron to want to hide out on a distant island. Before she came to the clan, she had devised a method of advanced forgery. Just like how the written word is one method of storing information, so too does every layer of a pearl store a memory's worth of information — which when put together make up the soul. She developed a device for viewing each layer, and became deft enough at applying nacre to reproduce a pearl near-perfectly. And so, she got into the pearl trade, creating second souls for more gemstones than she'll ever know what to do with. Perhaps the pearlcatchers got their original pearls back, but Thelyron knows not to hope for so much as that. No one goes through so much effort merely for a copy.

Even knowing that wasn't quite enough for Thelyron to realize the implications of what she was doing. It wasn't until her own pearl was stolen that it hit her. Well, when the copy of her pearl was stolen. She was wise enough to make a decoy, and diligently added identical layers to both pearls. But the copy was so perfect, was it not her soul as well? Was half her soul stolen, and now she only had half left? Did she break her soul into a hundred parts by making all those forgeries, and now those parts are scattered all across Sornieth? Thelyron doesn't know, but the crushing weight of maybe tearing her soul to bits was enough to get her to swear off making forged pearls.

Though if her soul is scattered across Sornieth, she hopes those pearls are well taken care of. She deserves it.