Cherryblossom

He learned to swim before he learned to walk.

A rough, porous egg covered in gray barnacles shivered at the bottom of a still blue pool. Great cracks appeared suddenly in the surface like cracks in a dish, carving through the valleys between barnacles. The hatchling within heaved, incredibly strong, but it unknowingly pushed its own protection into pieces. The water pressed into the cracks, threatening to drown the young dragon the more it fought to be free.

With another great shudder, the egg burst into pieces all around the hatchling and the water rushed inside, enveloping the slimy little creature. It twisted with surprise and pain as it inhaled water, only to shove itself upward with some unknown instinct. By some miracle, the hatchling had been born a guardian, and the fins along its body and the webbing between its toes propelled it to the surface.

It burst through the top and struggled onto a rock protruding from the pool, where it flopped over and heaved for air, dripping with slime and water. When it recovered, it peered around with childishly large and curious blue eyes. The rock it sat on was in the middle of a large, cerulean pool, so blue it almost hurt to look at. Along the edges there were slender brown trees, heavy with fragrant pink cherry blossoms. Even as the hatchling watched, a breeze loosened some of the white-pink petals and they fluttered down to float in the pool, delicate as fairy wings.

The hatchling grew up there in that beautiful, idyllic pool until it was grown and knew it had a name, and that it was male. His name was Cherryblossom. He decided it when a merchant passed by his little pool and offered him fine goods. Upon finding out that he had no money, the merchant asked for a place to stay the night and in return would leave him three books of his choosing. Cherryblossom chose a book on plants and fungi, one of fairytales and artwork, and one of mechanics for the many bits of twisted metal he fished out of the bottom of his pool. When reading, he stumbled across a passage with an illustration of his beloved trees surrounding his pool, and he named himself after the perfumed plant.

Oceansurf Magus

Familiar

Decades of study have allowed these scholars to tap into elemental magics previously known only to dragonkind.

2350