Ebony

Ebony, the eldest of Crueak's and Tijari's mighty brood that never received the call to serve the Wingsinger in exalted service as an acolyte.

Her life had been planned out long before she'd even hatched out of the egg, and so it was nothing in her life went according to those plans.

Dragons, from a far off land of barren rock, and sun bleached sand a lair in the Shattered Plain, had already decided that a Coatl of dark colours and a flashy tertiary would be a most pried addition to their lair. But in their strange, far off land such a thing must have been a great difficulty to come by.

So they sought the aid of a distant ally in the Abiding Boneyard. What the specifics of that alliance as she never learned, nor why it was that when she was little over a week old, it was those ferocious and infested drakes from the Scarred Wasteland that came to collect.

Through a tumultuous terrain, of oozing molds and pulsing fungus, where the air was thick with with rank decay, humidity, and glittering with moats of dust and spores, she was safely guided, and led on and onward, out of a festering muggy land of festering pestilence and out into the scorching sun where silt and sand were littered with bleached white bones long picked clean.

Water was scarce, the earth barren, and heavily the molds of the Wandering Contagion had settled in her lungs. She'd taken fever, coughing, hacking, and choking for days, as she was laid to rest under a shelter of cloth and old bones to sweat through the worst of the illness and the sun's merciless heat.

The water that soothed her raw burning throat, was discolored, sour, and metallic, and the medicines used to keep her stable were pungent, acidic, and bitter.

Bleary-eyed, and brutally aware of how unlucky she would have been without these Plague Drakes to watch-over and guide her, Ebony was relieved, when after another week of horrible travel they made it to the Lair...or to the odd assortment of hodge-podge the diseased savages considered a lair.

There she rested. There she recovered. Word was sent to the dragons in the Shattered Plain. And there she waited...

...For her future to arrive...

...For these strange Dragons from Dragonhome to take her away...

...There she waited...

Days turned into weeks. Weeks bled into months. Months slowly scraped by and turned into a year.

Once a guest, she was now a lair-bound pest. Again and Again they tried to contact their allies in the Shattered Plains. They wanted compensation for taking the time to collect her in the first place. But again and again those same letters went unanswered.

Unwanted, and unnecessary, she was a burden these dragons could not afford, but for all their savagery, they did not cast her out. Cut-off from her family in the Windswept Plateau, and seemingly abandoned by the dragons that would have been her family, she was inexplicably alone. Mumbling and burbling her monotone agony that few dragons could understand, fell on deaf ears.

Her heart rose every day with the sun, and the frail hope of a returned letter. Her heart sank every evening, as no word arrived.

One year became two.

To their credit the Plague Drakes were tenacious and stubborn, and they continued trying to send word, no longer trying to make an exchange, but simply to determine what had come of their distant and worryingly mute friends.

Two years become three.

Unwanted, unnecessary, bereft of a home, living on the charity of those who did not want her, Ebony stopped talking. She stopped crying. She stopped trying. It was a burden to breathe. A burden to exist, living every second of every day on the mercies of those who did not want her, and could not afford her. There was upheaval in the Boneyard Clan, and they had stopped sending messages. They had stopped caring. They gave her a familiar to keep her company, but they could not claim her as one of their own good faith, nor could they cast her out, as she was theirs.

Hopelessly she prayed, desperate for any platitudes from an uncaring world. But the Plaguebringer, did not call her to be exalted. Even the mother of pestilence and blight had no use for her.

No one did.

Three years blurred into four.

Desolation, was her constant companion. Torment, Ebony's one true friend. The Plague Drakes, adjusting to the loss of their leader, and settling into a new routine around a new hierarchy, still refused to cast her out into the wastes. One the one occasion she did fly away into the death strewn wastes of the Abiding Boneyard, had been disastrous. Forced to land in an effort to seek shelter from the blazing sun, she was ambushed by Serthis Warriors.

Exhausted, famished, dehydrated, and sick at heart, she was in no position to fight them. It was the timely arrival, of the plague dragons sent out to find her, that saved her.

With nowhere to go, and nothing to do, she went back to the lair with them, not as a guest, but now as a prisoner. A prisoner they seemed to find both irritating and pitiable in equal measure. They would not cast her out. They would not abandon her. They would not let her go.

Once again they sent a message to the clan in the Shattered Plain. Once again to no avail.

Four years became five.

Under the cover of darkness, the leaders of the Plague Clan she'd been staying with called her for a private audience. A tundra, and Guardian, they were an odd pair, but one that together exuded a measure of authority and power. They may not have hatched in the Scarred Wasteland, but in spirit they true heirs of the Plaguebringer, and it was the Tundra that at last gave her the news.

"We have done all that we can. Our allies have either abandoned their lair, or have been lost to some disaster or Beastclan Raid. We must look to our futures, and to yours. We have sheltered you and harboured you, and have done all we can to keep you comfortable during your tenure. But we must move on."

"Under other circumstances we would welcome you with open arms, but too long you've known misery here. Your heart, Ebony, will not know peace under the scalding sun, or the amid the vibrant viruses that sprawl across our land."

The Tundra nodded. "Somewhere, out there, is a clan for you to call home. A place where you will find purpose, reason, and perhaps peace of mind. And if you're truly lucky life long companionship as we have known. We will be formally sending letters to all lairs across Sornieth. We will find you a place called home."

Suffering... There was too much suffering among his kind. Well... among dragonkind, but that's too large a matter. Morfaen pondered this as his scying portals happened upon Ebony. "I'd save them all if I could, but how would I feed thousand of dragons, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands... *sigh* Maybe just a few... dozen that have nowhere else to go. Can you watch over them? Just until they find other homes...