Temeq

It was no accident that he passed his Trials.

He was proud of himself. No, he was. His family was... well, puzzled at best, grievously disappointed at worst. But his older cousin had gone off years prior to take the Trials without telling any of them--sure, his cousin had said something unsettling about avoiding the fate of an Emperor, but that must have been a cryptic but false goodbye.

He had always looked up to Naydrim. That side of the family, Plagueborn, had always been strong and resilient and--tough. His immediate family, researchers in the Arcanist's name, quietly disapproved of such barbarism and preferred their telescopes and books. He was like them, a small soft civilized creature, but he wished he were thick-skinned and could live in the wild with nothing but his brawn and wit and--

His mother disabused him of the notion when he was much younger. His father agreed, expounding upon the benefits and joys of living in the Starfall Isles. Why would any dragon want to live where the ground bleeds and festers, instead of a land of levitating crystals and near-infinite magic?

His cousin didn't return, and letters abruptly stopped coming. Eventually, once he was an adult himself, he left his family and ventured Plaguewards, trying to chase down rumors of his cousin's whereabouts. He found a scattered trail of crumbs that led him to believe that his cousin had taken the Trials of Necromancy.

And he eventually found out that his cousin had failed.

Those who failed the Trials either died or were left half-mad as boiling vectors for who-knows-how-many diseases. The only ones who could reliably find and fix a wandering ghoul were necromancers themselves, but the few that Temeq found had no interest in venturing into the wilderness to find a dragon they doubted was alive at all.

So Temeq went by himself.

There were hundreds of bodies in various stages of decay. Not many were Imperials, and none of the Imperial corpses and skeletons he found were anywhere near each other. That was small comfort, for he had no way of knowing if one of them had been his cousin.

A senior necromancer stopped him when he drew too close to the Wyrmwound and asked his business. He explained his purpose, but the necromancer didn't seem to believe him. She refused to allow him further unless he submitted himself to the Trials, which she bluntly said would be a certain death for someone so soft as him.

'If I succeed, and if I find my cousin, will I be able to fix him?' he asked her.

'If your cousin is alive and a ghoul? Yes,' she answered, 'but the odds of that are infinitesimally small. Don't throw your life away on a whim. You will not survive Mother's touch.'

There would never be a better way to prove his family--and this stranger--wrong about him. He underwent the Trials.

It was awful. The absolute worst experience of his life. But he survived, and he succeeded, perhaps to his own surprise and certainly to the startlement of the overseeing necromancer.

During his renewed search for his cousin, Temeq encountered another Imperial who had just finished--only barely--her own Trials. She was much larger and older than he was, and she bore the scars of a long life hard-lived. He had no chance to protest before she declared herself his protector.

He didn't want a protector--or, no, he didn't want to need a protector. But hadn't he just proved himself strong? He didn't have to be lonely to be strong. They could search together. She wasn't bad company, although she was gruff and tactless and as blunt as all Plagueborn seemed to be.

Now, he just needed to find his cousin.