Lex

In some ways, Lex is single-handedly responsible for the safety of all who call Clan _______ home. As an ex-apprentice magister of the Frozen Sanctum, she's trained to study slight variations in leylines and ambient magic, detecting catastrophes before they happen. Theoretically, even a small increase in magic could cause the chalcedony of the entire island to detonate if it was sustained for long enough. Of course, Ustasi's wards are designed to prevent that, but every one of Lex's calculations and models show that they shouldn't be sufficient. And really, the massive and abrupt changes caused by the local dragons should be far more worrying than slow and gradual ones.

Even so, every disaster averted is a good thing. Lex doesn't bring it up very often because she doesn't like to brag, but she has kept record of every abnormality she's detected and reported to somebody capable of doing something about it. And a second set of records of every time nobody bothered to do anything with the information she gave them. These two documents are uncomfortably close to the same size. And yet the island hasn't exploded. Lex has an answer for that. Every time the local magic levels surge above the average, it drops back to normal levels within a few days. Except for the arcane power radiating from something within the general area of the clan's vault. Whatever it is, it's quite possible the only thing keeping the chalcedony intact. Lex would investigate, except for the simple problem that Sirene is even bigger than she is.

Lex monitors the environmental magic of the island though a complex apparatus of crystal lenses. Her den is like a miniature sanctum, every wall covered in equipment beyond the comprehension of all but the most specialized scholars. And also a bunch of other devices that she's borrowed off her clanmates. Lex seems to have a thing for highly specialized tools. A lot of what she's collected is more useful for tailoring clothes than magical research, and even more of it she has no idea how to use, but she treasures all of it the just same.

This fascination is facilitated by the unique eyepiece she wears. A crystal lens that lets its bearer see the magical patterns woven into magical items. It's apparently so rare and powerful that Cress has repeatedly begged Lex to let him use it just once. (It wouldn't fit him even if she did let him try it.) She spends a lot of her spare time just looking at her collection, studying the design of every enchantment and leaning how they work. But not how to actually use those tools. That's far less interesting.

Despite all of her efforts to prevent disaster from befalling the clan, Lex is up there on the leaderboard of dragons most often requiring medical attention. Every time she identifies some abnormal magic, she straps on a portable version of some of her sensors and goes searching for more data on the phenomenon. She usually arrives distracted by her arrays of lenses and wires, and just in time to be hit by the fallout of whatever her clanmates have got up to. At least Lex's arrival is a good warning that it's time for everyone else in the area to be somewhere else. She tends to sparkle slightly nowadays, but that's from all the fragments of glowing magical debris embedded in her scales.

Lex can be a bit of an odd dragon to speak to, as her curiosity towards to how all magical items work extends to the minds of arcane dragons. Any conversation with her can easily be derailed towards matters of personal motivation, ethics, and 'why in all that the Icewarden holds dear would you think that was a good idea!?'.

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Only a certain calibre of dragon is qualified to work at one of the ancient sanctums. It's why so few dragons will ever be given the opportunity to enter one. (And why they're perpetually understaffed.) They need to have the magical aptitude for the work, of course. The apparatuses within were designed by arcane dragons, so they were built with the expectation that their operators would be manipulating them with their own innate magics. But it takes more than arcane talent to secure a sanctum position. You need to understand the math required to model the fluctuations in leyline strength. You must have extensive knowledge of historical trends in climate, ecology, and even local culture so that you can correlate that data with the environment. And you need to pass rigours trials and prove you can be trusted with a task vital to the well-being to all eleven flights.

So it really is quite worrying that the head magister of the Frozen Sanctum clearly doesn't meet any of those qualifications.

Not even Lex's excitement at getting to live her dreams of working at the sanctum could make her blind to that. Well, not forever, anyways. Her single-minded devotion to becoming a full magister meant she overlooked quite a lot of what went on at the sanctum. But that was the old Lex. She's a very serious dragon now who doesn't put up with any corruption and definitely doesn't still feel pangs of regret about abandoning her position. She had no choice, anyways. The overseeing magister had no appreciation for the marvels of technology in the sanctum and was simply using the position for his own personal gain. That tundra was far too rich for someone with a research position out in the south of the Icefield, where a veilspun in flight would die of cold exposure before they even fell all the way to the ground. It was basically criminal, what he was doing. Something had to be done about him. If only she had realized that sooner.

It took a few years, but Lex eventually had to admit that all of the passionate work she had done for the sanctum had simply been used to deceive the rest of the ice flight. Whenever she detected a swell in natural ice magic, the head magister would issue a false storm warning and evacuate clans that had spoken out against him. And if the ambient magic dropped in the area, he'd blame one of his enemies and send a squad of gaoler seekers to investigate them for shade corruption. But worst of all, any reports that Lex sent directly to the Oculus were altered by the magister before they ever arrived! How would Lex ever get to work in the great Oculus of the Eleven if everything they knew about her was incorrect?

Was that sufficient justification for sabotaging the entire sanctum?

Yes, obviously. And anyways, it's not like she destroyed anything. Lex flinches at the thought of damaging even a single crystal lens of that beautiful technology. Her plan was to simply remove every lens and sigil from the apparatuses one night and reinstall them in incorrect positions. With those adjustments they'd be reporting data that made things look like the world was ending, and when the gaolers came to investigate they'd find evidence of everything the head magister had done and arrest him. Nobody suspected a thing when she claimed to need to stay late to finish a project, and with any luck she'd finish before the blizzard outside got large enough that she'd have to sleep in the sanctum overnight.

Lex wasn't surprised at how easy the sabotage was. She was starting to feel like she was the only one worthy of working in the sanctum, after all. Nobody else had dedicated their lives to understanding the finest workings of these apparatuses like she had. She was rather surprised by the deep borehole dug out under the sanctum she discovered while disassembling some equipment, however. And the system down there the appeared to be siphoning some of the leyline's power to who knows where was also very surprising. And the giant frost serpent as large as she was that appeared to have formed from all the unchecked ice magic trapped in the artificial cavern? Not actually that surprising. It explained some of the oddities in the data that Lex had been noticing from the last few months. All in all, a night full of discovery that was only slightly marred by her impending death by oversized snake.

She scrambled out of that hole as quickly as she could, the serpent smashing through the stone floor as it struck at where she had been moments ago. She had to get out as quickly as possible — before the snake crushed any of the equipment. Or any of her bones. Lex tumbled as the snake lunged at her again, and was saved only by it impaling itself on the spines on her back and recoiling in pain. She roared as well, the spines being finding a better home between the snake's scales than her own and being torn out from her back as she fled. Ridgeback spines were supposed to do that, so it wouldn't hurt for long, but in the moment it stung far more than the ice shards in the storm outside.

And that storm had really picked up. She could hear voices carried on the wind as well. Lex guessed she'd tripped an alarm with her meddling, brought some gaolers down to the sanctum. Well, if there was anything that could serve as evidence against the head magister, it was this ice serpent. Screaming something about thieves and monsters the whole way, she ran past the probable gaolers, leading the snake right to them. Even after she heard the sounds of fighting behind her, she kept running. She wanted to get out of this awful weather so she could fly to safety. A very far away sort of safety.

The bag of crystal lenses and sensitive equipment she'd slung over one wing wanted to be far away from the head magister that didn't deserve them, after all.