Carmynne

In which Carmynne joins the clan:

Carmynne purred softly as she bowed her head, accepting her parents’ fussing and wishes for her travels to her new home, the new clan she would be joining. They were a small clan - only a pair of the newly-born, Carmynne had been told. A pair who had stepped out of the Shadowbinder’s will, when Carmynne herself had grown to maturity as part of a Fire Flight clan, to parents at a remove from those first newly-born in her own clan, which had been well established before her hatching.

Carmynne had been hesitant, being sent to the Tangled Wood, to join those blessed and born of the Shadowbinder, but it was her destiny now. Carmynne’s hesitance had begun to fade, subsumed by a nervous sort of excitement and curiosity, and a pull.

And while the Shadowbinder was a creature of darkness, she was, at least, not the origin of the Shade that all the Eleven fought. Carmynne had even heard whispers of how the Shadowbinder was revered as the mother of her people just as the Flamecaller was to her own dragons.

Sent away from the clan that had been her home since she had hatched, Carmynne proceeded alone across the Sea of a Thousand Currents in the air before landing and venturing carefully into the deep shadow beneath the branches of the Tangled Wood.

She followed the call to find those she had been sent to find, those that would be her new clan, but first she found a small lair along a silty river - one perfectly suited to a small new clan. Beginning as a hollow within one of the damming heaps of driftwood and allowing space to build and expand it above, it was hidden away among glowing fungi and surrounded by the sounds of teeming prey life.

Investigating it curiously, Carmynne marked the location in her mind before taking to the air and resuming her search. It did not take much longer before she spotted an icy-white creature moving amidst the shadowy trees. Her eyes widened, but she circled down all the same - she simply hadn’t expected the shadow-born dragons she was searching for to be. . .

Well, it was foolish; Carmynne had seen many dragons in her life, from all Flights, and she knew that colours and patterns were not determined by one’s Flight, whether born or shifting allegiance like her own.
Shadow eyes rose to hers as she came down, both those of the icy-white Guardian female and the small purple Fae tucked behind her shoulders. Carmynne had not seen him before. She dipped her head, calling out in curious welcome, and the Guardian flared her wings - a deeper red than Carmynne’s own - but not her armouring fins.

They greeted each other easily, as though they had been part of the same clan for their whole lives, rather than barely met. Carmynne felt her heart settle from the pull she had been following since she left her first clan; this was where she belonged, with these two, in the realm of the Shadowbinder. The Tangled Wood was, after all, she thought with a ripple of pleasure, the realm her kind had once been born to dwell within.
Carmynne tucked herself against Eywren’s chest with a sigh and a soft purr, resting her head on the strong base of one wing as her own wrapped forwards in an embrace and Airzen nestled close against her jaw, tucking his own head amongst her spines. Soon she would lead them to the new lair, and they would make it their own together, she thought, and they would be clan, and home, and strong.

Part of my ongoing lore of my clan growing, posted here.