Lyneth

{Lyneth}
♡ young adult
♡ she/her
♡ Ridgeback mercenary

The Sun rises daily, the stars shine at night, and Ridgebacks lie and steal. These things everyone knows.
The greater flights do not generally trust such dragons with magical secrets or custodianship of great hoards, almost no matter their talent, and consequently, when they leave their home in the Shifting Expanse, they must find their way in the cities and lairs of the better flights despite long centuries of bias compounded by a reputation for barbarism. There is no room for even a concept of collective ownership in those cities with their professional treasurers, standing armies and hereditary priests, to say nothing of the meaning behind the tendency this individual has of referring to things as beside or with herself and not belonging to her.

Lyneth is a quiet, prickly individual with sticky fingers and a keen sense for the minds of other people, though she tends to fixate on a few associates, and to start to generalize about other minds in the vein of close acquaintances if she has no real need of someone. She and her sickly sister Eurfryn had a difficult chickhood, being unwanted hatchlings of a deeply harried and religious bonded pair that already had more mouths to feed than they could hunt for.

Lyneth's magical aptitude and curiosity about the properties of shadow was especially annoying to them, not because they disliked magic (the Shadowbinder forbid) but because to pursue it was something incomprehensibly far above the station of a child destined probably for god-slavery and at the very best for the priesthood, /if/ the sages saw her as fit to dedicate. So she learned to suppress it and focus on earthlier pursuits, and fell in with a merry band of thieves and grifters to collect the treasure necessary to buy reagents to suppress Eurfryn's sickness.

When they were turned out at a late adolescent age, Eurfryn, the clutch runt and family idealist, declared herself a Protector of the Small and committed to a convoluted and unnecessary chivalric code, probably out of a desire to help others not suffer her own upbringing. The best Lyneth could do about this was encourage her to at least take her game someplace she was unlikely to die for it, like the water-cistern ruins only vagabonds lived in, and transition her own less savoury but more pragmatic activities out of the limelight.

After a long and predictable while of having their behinds handed to them, the two of them met the wandering martial artist Glenda, who had left the Gyret freehold to see the Citadel Ruins on the advice of a conspecific of theirs. She saw potential in them, or maybe determination, or just wanted to do the kind thing and minimize the odds they'd get killed, and so she conveyed them to the Ruins, where the new, anarchistic Ruinflight allotted them a place to lair, in token of their friendship with their mentor.

Lyneth has made very few friends there, though she has a grudging friendship with the indefatigable Rockskipper, and respects Bizila for a similarity of mindset.