Einar

Einar was fortunate, to happen upon Aghi when he did. Any earlier, and she would not have had the time and energy to stop for him, much less talk to him and deem him worthy of recruitment. Any later, and the Outpost would not have been desperate enough for another fighter and healer to accept him and his Longneck brother.

But perhaps it would be better to start from the beginning. Einar was hatched as one in a clutch of five right on the outskirts of Light's territory. Curious and adventurous right from the start, and with parents who had four other (just as troublesome but much louder and more attention-grabbing than Einar himself) hatchlings to keep an eye on, it didn't take long for Einar's adventurous wandering so take him one step too far... and have him fall right down into the Carrion Canyon in the neighbouring Lightning region.

It was a long fall, especially considering the fact that he wasn't fully fledged yet at the time and hadn't learnt how to fly yet. Ironically, the rocks and gravel that broke and flayed his body and frantically clutched pearl on the way down were probably what saved his life in the end.

Well, those and the roving pair of Ridgebacks who found him shortly thereafter and healed him so that he didn't bleed to death. The two convinced him to stay with them until he was fully healed and could fly back on his own strength, ostensibly because tensions between the Sunbeam Ruins and Shifting Expanse had been high lately and they didn't dare risk returning him to his parents themselves.

(In reality, they considered his state to be proof that his parents didn't really care for him. Which meant that they would be within their full rights to borrow him from them and make sure that he was properly taken care of.)

While he was healing and carefully mending his pearl as best as he could (it would always be irregular, and he'd never quite regain some of his childhood memories, but there was enough left that he'd still be himself, thankfully), the Ridgebacks taught him everything he needed to know, as well as Ridgeback customs and habits.

They became his second set of parents, and while he never did learn to like fish, and never would manage to grow their impressive spines, he was essentially a Ridgeback.

But all good things must eventually come to an end, and his missing memories somehow made him even more eager to return to his siblings and blood-parents and the friends he vaguely remembered. He wanted to re-learn what he had forgotten. The missing memories were an annoying itch, and he had the uncontrollable urge to fill the void where they should have been.

The Ridgebacks let him go, recognising that he was just about an adult now and that they did not have any right to keep borrowing him if he himself did not wish to be borrowed. They helped him to the border, and told him when and where to find them if he ever wanted to visit, or if things didn't work out with his family and he wanted to come back. Einar hugged him and flew away with a heavy heart, but he felt like he needed to know his blood-family, like he wouldn't be complete if he didn't manage to fill in those missing memories.

So he went.

He found them.

It wasn't even hard.

The hard part was that they had long mourned him as lost and dead, and then moved on.

No, they had not even mourned him, they had mourned some strange version of him that no longer existed, that he wasn't even sure had ever existed. His memories were broken, sure, but...

...they couldn't be that wrong, could they?

Einar suppressed the strange thoughts and feelings and smiled at his mother and father, because they loved him. Anyone could see that.

So Einar... Einar would try to be their Einar. Their little hatchling who had died too early, because that was who he had been before his pearl had broken, so maybe that meant that that was who he was meant to be? That the other parts of him, the ones who came after that, were simply a result of having had his mind and soul broken and shouldn't be there.

Einar tried.

He tried so hard.

It just... wasn't enough, and it came to a point when he almost clawed open the face of one of his sisters when she just wouldn't listen.

Horrified, Einar fled.

A couple of days alone in a cave helped him set his priorities straight. Maybe he wasn't the dragon he would have been if he hadn't fallen and broken his pearl and found his Ridgeback parents.

...but maybe that was okay.

He certainly liked his snarky-tough-desert-self much better than his happy-curious-scholar-self. He had been miserable, trying to be something he was not for the past month.

Einar disliked being miserable approximately as much as he disliked water, which was a a hell of a lot. So, he decided, he wouldn't be miserable. It really was that simple, wasn't it? Gathering his courage, he went back to his blood family and told them: "Sorry, this doesn't work, but I'm glad I got to know you. Bye!" (Well, maybe not in those exact words - he tried to be more tactful than that - but that was the gist of it.)

And then he went back to his Ridgeback parents.

...or he tried to, at least. They weren't at the meeting point. They weren't at any of the meeting points and when three of the scheduled times and places had passed without seeing them, Einar decided to work backwards and check the old ones and their usual paths between them. Perhaps they had simply gotten held up somewhere? That happened fairly often when they were travelling together and his parents noticed something or someone interesting.

So Einar looked.

He... eventually found them.

They were barely even a mile from where he had said goodbye to them, and Einar was too late.

They were dead, and Einar was lost.

They had been his home.

His true family.

He did not know what do do without them, and so he did... nothing.

Just lay there, curled up to their rotting corpses.

Unmoving, unthinking... unfeeling.

It all hurt too much.

He would have died there. If not happily, then at least without regrets as to his own death, as he had nothing left to live for.

He would, but he didn't. A Longneck Mender found him and carefully (and stubbornly) nursed him back to health, never mind that he didn't want to live, and that he was a dragon; designed and created to kill and to conquer territory, taking it away from the Beastclans.

He hated that Mender, in the beginning. Weak as he was, however, he couldn't do anything about it, and as time passed he could not help but draw parallels between the Longneck and his dead parents. He grew to care for the strange beast, who in turn (for some strange reason) cared for him.

They grew to become brothers, together in their loneliness, roaming the desert and taking what they needed to survive. It was perhaps not the best of existences, but they had each other, and they were satisfied.

Satisfied, but not happy.

So when they one day encountered an old Imperial trudging across the desert, covered in old and new scars and swearing a blue streak, dragging a broken wing along the sand, they took the opportunity for something more.

What they had in mind (getting another companion) wasn't quite what they got, mind you. The Imperial was wary, especially of the Longneck, and she had the most vicious vocabulary either of them had ever heard, but she subsided eventually and let them help her, the Longneck healing her wing while Einar kept an eye out for the pursuers she swore were on her trail.

She introduced herself as Aghi, and said that while she couldn't stay - she had pledged herself to a Clan - they were welcome to come with her, and get a couple of good meals and a safe and warm place to sleep for a couple of nights as thanks for their help.

The brothers were never ones to turn down free food, so they accompanied her to her Clan, eventually running into those pursuers of hers and helping her fight them off.

When she admired their viciousness and promised to put a good word in with the Clan Leaders, should they want to join, they just laughed and shook their heads.

Once they arrived at the Outpost Clan, however... there was such warmth and hope and life there that they just couldn't bring themselves to leave.

So they took her up on her offer, and stayed. And they were valued, welcomed and loved, but most importantly: they were finally happy.

• Einar's name means "lone warrior".
• The mith plush was made by his daughter Bastet.