Aitu

It was noon on the summer equinox, the sun so glaringly bright that the ruins seemed almost to glow. The crumbling pillars and columns of the Mirrorlight Promenade weren’t the only things reflecting the harsh sunlight however; a bleached Fae skeleton lay scattered in the centre of a small courtyard, its pure white bones brighter than snow on a sunny day. Heat had been collecting on the bones since the sun had first risen, and now they were so warm that one could almost imagine that they were still within the body of a living dragon. Perhaps the bones thought so too, as they began to stir. Just a finger bone at first, a vertebra, a wing bone. Suddenly they rushed together as if drawn by a magnetic force, assembling themselves into a complete skeleton that raised its skull and opened its bony maw up to the sky. A violent ripping sound could be heard for miles around as the sky descended towards the skeleton, a swirling vortex that changed from pale blue to white as the ruins reflected their glow up into it. The sky flowed down the skeleton, tangling in its ribcage, filling out the tail and its paws, fanning out beneath its skull to create mockeries of the frills that had once existed there, until all but the wings and secondary frills were recreated. And still the skeleton drank in the sky, as light collected over the bones and in the eye sockets, sealing in the alabaster galaxies, glowing brighter, brighter, brighter until everything just… stopped. The sky receded back into the heavens, the glow of the Light energy surrounding the skeleton flowed into its eye sockets, coalescing into what looked almost like eyes. The ruins were peaceful once more, though they no longer glowed quite as brightly as they had before the cataclysmic event. The creature examined itself. It knew that there was supposed to be something there where its bones hung limply from its back and head, but it could not remember what. It wandered the ruins for hours before eventually spying a roll of crimson fabric, left behind by traders who had fled in fear from the chaos of its rebirth. Acting on instinct it cut at tore at the fabric, using a similarly abandoned needle and spool of thread to tightly affix the shimmering cloth to its bare bones.

Satisfied with its new silhouette, the creature set off. It knew not where it was headed, but it had no desire to remain. The ruins reminded it too much of before, when it had been immobile and empty. It walked, slow but determined, never pausing for rest even at night. It traveled through the Tangled Wood and the Scarred Wasteland, meeting dragons of all kinds along the way. Days became weeks, became months, became years. It became he, became Aitu. As he neared where the Wandering Contagion gave way to the Crystalspine Reaches, his wings caught on the flesh-like membranes littering the rotted landscape, as though the Plaguelands were not ready to let him go free. He tore himself from its grasp, small fleshy tendrils still stubbornly stuck to the material of his wings. After crossing into Arcane territory, the rotten membrane reanimated, forming arms that reached out blindly to the world around them. He kept them, perhaps from some sense of kinship, two entities that had gone from inanimate to living, or perhaps due to his painfully weak physical form benefiting from the protection they provided. At the very least, they unnerved those who may have otherwise chosen to pick a fight with him.