Mudskipper

{ Mudskipper }
♡ she/her
♡ mature adult
♡ Tundra pariah, healer

Tundras are stupid and primitive, everybody knows that. In the study halls of great flights they speak with distaste of short memories and primitive scent-fixation. The proverbs of the languages of enlightened peoples speak of terrain too harsh for more refined bodies as suitable for them. No one has ever asked why it is that they greet each other in vague reference to scent, or why it is that they eat plants although they have the teeth for flesh. No one has ever considered that the herd-way in which the Tundra dragons of the Lightweaver's country mate, separating love from the parentage of young, might be something other than animal promiscuity.

No one ever will.

There are many who swallow the bitter gall of their reputation and go on to make a name and a life for themselves as great contributors to the arcane sciences or the cloistered wisdom of the better kinds, but there are equally many who can't.

Mudskipper's family were not kind, but saved and scrounged treasure to send her to temple school. There she was passed over for better dragons, demeaned by instructors, and constantly mistaken for a lesser subtype of exalted, a menial enslaved by the shrine.

Eventually her inborn sense of dignity won out over her sense of filial piety, and sometime in late adolescence she ran away. No one looked for her very long. In the Lightweaver's domain, they said, maybe she can come to some good. Feed the sacred animals, or something like that.

Too ashamed to go and live among the flights again, and not religious enough in the faith of her betters for hermitage, she sought out others wandering the sunburnt ruins and began to live as the furthest ancestors of her kind had lived, before ever the structures went up, somewhere far away and long ago.