Aantaulos

Living Luminance

Familiar

A brilliant dancing balloon that chooses to float neither up nor down. Unreliable for a birthday party.

1500

Son of a god of Void and a water priestess, Aantaulos is, by all appearances, a very odd creature. In his draconic form, it's hard even to see the bogsneak beneath the writhing smoke and patches of other dimensions crawling across his scales. In humanoid form, he towers over his entire family and most of the clan besides, but if one can peek through the finery his mother gifts him, they will find a surprisingly soft creature, sad and sweet and yearning all at once.

Aantaulos cannot help his odd looks; his swaths of hair billow around him with wreaths of stars, just like his father's, and however much he tries to pull it back, braid it, or tame it, it always flies free in great clouds of nebulae. His eyes have always glittered and glowed far more brightly than he would like, and bad luck seems to follow him more closely than his own shadow. He tries desperately to learn etiquette, perfect his Sornen and Feyling accents, and fit in any other way he can, but in truth, he will simply never be as normal as he wishes he could be. He is too much a child of the Void.

So Aantaulos spends a good deal of his time hiding in various pocket dimensions, mourning and tearful. He cloaks himself in void when he goes out in public, listens to everyday conversations like they are his only sustenance, and leaves gifts for dragons he admires, as often as he can. His anonymity is probably for the best in these cases, because as much as Aantaulos studies, he will always struggle to understand draconic customs. Seeing the reactions to his gifts of glass skeletons and bottled shatterbone vulture song, Aantaulos only falls further into misery, grieving that he will never find a place in the clan.

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Tongue-twisted, silent-stuttered, would that his words for once ring true: but nay, god-born though he is, his pleas echo unanswered. None shall know the warmth of his ozone-glow eyes, the care of his fumbling hands, the spun-sugar softness of galaxies half-contained in his hair. Is this to be his life, self-sequestered in shadow? Despair hollow as the Void knells within him, but querulous hope also, thready and scattered as the shining stardust in that deepest-dark, and he reaches—he reaches—

oh, would that someone reach back.

This flood of tears could drown a thousand universes, a thousand-thousand, yet he weeps on. A final prayer; cruel benediction: let this cleansing tide wash over him, that he may find the strength to reach once more.

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