Shangwuxue

(( I hatched an XYX male whose eyes match his body colors! O_O ))

Shangwuxue was the first Nocturne.

He hatched into Clan Gladeflood, who took his egg by force from the chest-monster that would later become his best friend and protector. The clan was eager, so eager, to welcome him as a representative as his race. He received the best of everything, including--when he was old enough--mates. Coatls and Wildclaws only, oh yes.

He was born with strikingly beautiful colors, but--as lost eggs often are--plain in gene. The clan scrimped and saved to bestow upon him gene magic that would enhance his natural coloration until he looked like dawn breaking across a snow field, all glittery yellow and dappled white. The best of everything for their Nocturne, their Shangwuxue.

...but the clan was slow to learn how Nocturnes worked. How they would adapt like water to the container that held them; how they did not need nor want the company of their own kind, but instead required another species to mold to. Shangwuxue was left too often to his own devices and nearly started to imprint on his own familiar, that slobbering Ectoplasmime, before someone realized and saved him from his own birthright.

Wildberry saw him distressed and came to him when no one was looking--for they would have shooed her away, a mere Spiral!--and said hello. She was cautious and treated him as though he was fragile, because everyone else did that too, but when Shangwuxue turned to her with such a desperate craving for company, her detachment broke down and she gave him everything she had to give--her thoughts, her ideas, her knowledge, her hopes. He learned about flowers, herbs, roots, fruits, about stars and the cycle of the moon, about the small creatures in the undergrowth and the birds in the canopy.

Through Wildberry, Shangwuxue came into himself and did not fall into the long Nocturne sleep, and he learned more about the world around him than he ever thought possible.