- Messages
- 249
- Character Biography
- Link
Petra had read about dragons and what little was known about the intricacies of their anatomy and culture. Of the history of their species.
They were a naturally secretive lot and the differences between their kind were as varied and complex as her own people's. Yet that unknown had only deepened her insatiable curiosity for the majestic paragons.
The elf had always been a child of study. An aspiring thespian and scholar who sought to learn the wonders of the world through books, and what they couldn't tell her, she would find for herself. Such an endeavor is what had brought her to the throat of the Spine. With tales of the elusive storm dragons whispering in her ear as a siren to a sailor on the high seas. She had come across a few mentions of them in old texts found in the great libraries of Fal'Addas, a trek she had made over a decade ago in an effort to better understand the ways and songs of her people and where she belonged in the world.
She had stayed and visited for a handful of years. Had enjoyed the culture and history of her people and the other races that visited often.
But something had always felt like it didn't quite fit.
The famous city was built from the tall trees of that fabled forest. Closer to the sky than any could hope to be. But it never felt like enough. She always ended up feeling inexplicitly stuck.
That restless and hungry desire for more had served as a catalyst for all the great endeavors of her life. And the failures too.
That same hunger is what drove her now to the coast south of the Spine, having passed her home in Eredale, feeling too uncomfortable to stop there to resupply; instead she took the extra time to ride to Tarlik-Za, restock, and head south.
She had passed Mossdeep a day ago and had finally rounded the edge of the mountains that made up the Spine. From here it was all coastline. Which was the closest place to the storm dragons that she discovered was described in her readings. Petra wasn't sure if the authors were purposefully being cryptic, or if they really had the barest of observations to go off of. Either way, the battered and ink stained field journal she had kept with her all these years, had empty pages that were hungry for sketches and her own thoughts upon the beasts. The idea of finally being published for her discoveries sent an ambitious thrill down her spine that only others who felt the same passion for knowledge and the curation of it could understand.
She just had to godsdamn get there already...
The cool air was a boon on the exercise fevered skin of her mount. She had purchased the black mare when she left Fal'Addas. And the longer she spent with the animal, the more she realized why the stablemaster had sold her the cantankerous nag for cheap. She had already been thrown off twice in her journey. And there were days she was ready to throw in the towel with the stubborn animal. But Petra respected the fierce mare, and despite her vitrile attitude under saddle, she was a reliable mount in difficult terrain and could be trusted to take care of herself. All the same, Petra refused to call the mare the name she had been sold with: Muffin. A more laughable title she ahd yet to come across.
The duo had been riding at a steady decline since the dawn had broke upon a new day. A new opportunity, she softly encouraged herself. From her earlier perusal of her map, she knew that once they had reached the edge of the Spine, as they had done yesterday, they should reach the coast by this afternoon. The only problem was that she frequently had to make stops and find shelter for the intermittent rain showers that seemed to plague this part of the region. Rain, she could handle. Chafe from soggy leather straps, she could not.
She knew that traveling the coast in this kind of weather was not ideal. But her common sense told her that there was no better time to find a storm dragon than in this very weather. The nastier the better. Muffin's perpetually pinned ears seemed to agree otherwise.
****
They had been riding at a steady trot for some time, with Petra mindlessly singing a montage of hymns, folk songs, and even bardic tavern tunes to occupy herself, when the first screaming of seagulls interrupted her thoughts. Muffin's ears perked at the foreign noise. It was accompanied by a swift coastal wind that blew her tangled curls from her face and filled her nose with the smells of salt and brisk water.
They had made it.
With a startled laugh of delight, Petra urged her mount into a gallop. Her cape of starlight snapping in the wind behind her. The turbulent breath of her black mare was in tandem with each strike upon the earth with her hooves. The steamy coils of her breath whipping past Petra, like fog on the wind. The mare could sense her rider’s urgency and eagerly committed herself to the task of haste. Petra reveled in the strength she could feel in each powerful stride beneath her, the passing thrill a welcome reprieve from the monotonous pace of their journey so far.
As they drew closer to the coast, Petra finally saw the edge of a cliffside, and what looked like a beach that led below the rockface. There, she would shelter against the cliffside for the night and begin exploring in the morning. But the elf had never seen the ocean in her 127 years of life, an oversight she sought to correct immediately.
It was then that a heavy guttural roll of thunder swept in from the horizon and freezing rain began to pelt them, the clouds were dark and angry as they closed in the farther to the shore she rode, the droplets like stinging ice against her smiling cheeks and obscuring her ability to see. She had been too excited to care about the impending storm, she was so close. So close she could taste the electricity on her tongue.
The seagrass atop the cliffside whipped in protest against the growing force of the wind, the gales growing so cacophonous that Petra could no longer hear the drumming hoofbeats beneath her. It was all she could do to point her steed straight and true.
Petra should have realized her reckless abandon in the name of discovery would lead her to making a mistake yet again. She should have noted the tell tale signs that hummed in the air. There was a pressure of energy that built against her skin, the lifting of hair at the nape of her neck. It wasn't until the first bolt of lighting had hit the ground some feet from her that she realized her fatal mistake.
Muffin may have been steadfast, but to demand that she ride into the very throes of a dangerous storm was too much for any horse. The horse gave an equine scream and came to a sliding stop, her hind end slipping in the mud that curated from the rain. The sudden violent stop caught Petra unaware and before she knew it, she was flying over the neck of the mare and landing in a crushing heap some lengths away. She yelled in pain as she rolled with the force of being thrown. Landing in an ungraceful tangle of limbs with her forehead to the ground, in shock, all she could do was pant as she watched through her dark curtain of curls, Muffin running as fast as she could in the opposite direction.
"Fuck." Was all the commentry she could muster. Her body hurt and her pride even more. All of her research and camping supplies were in her pack tied to the back of her saddle. How could she be so stupid? How could she be so impatient? She was lucky she wasn't killed.
Another crack of thunder interuppted her thoughts. She would do well to find shelter as soon as possible and wait out the storm and then try to find her horse later.
WHOOSH
What? Was that the wind?
WHOOSH
No... something was wrong. The wind was a steady scream around her, but this?
WHOOSH
This felt like a force of air against the wind itself. But what wa-
It was then that she heard it.
Past the deafening roar of her own heartbeat from where it clamored in the cage of her ribs like a trapped bird. And past the roar of wind and her growing fear, she could hear a tenuous aria rising from the thunder. It called to something in her blood.
It was made of trumpets and cellos and violins, their sound triumphant. A rallying horn before the charge.
The orchestral crescendo, buoyant and without end. She scrambled towards the edge of the cliff, the symphony a feverish chant in her heart that drove her forward. She felt herself falling towards something within, as if she was racing towards the finish of something. The urgency that thrummed within her was without explanation, she felt compelled to do something, but she didn't know what?!
WHOOSH
The hair on her nape rose when a thundering voice slithered into her head. It echoed of raging storms and caged fury. Of a being so old that surely it had walked hand in hand with creation itself. It consumed every crevice in her mind, swelling until there was nothing but its presence. She couldn't help but feel like a bird trapped in the claws of a great cat.
"Sing." It whispered.
Her sense of self began to bleed away, blending with a being beyond her own mortal comprehension. How could she host something so vast and fathomless within her own head and maintain her sanity for more than a few moments? It was like some great eye had opened in her mind and was seeing into the deepest depths of her soul, assessing her. Judging her.
Would it find her wanting?
She felt it too. The tethers of her sanity, the ends of the threads, threatening to unravel at further provocation. Some part of her grasped at them, that piece of self that was slipping through her fingers like water. Never meant for her to hold longer than a fleeting moment.
Finally, when she thought she would be lost, she felt the phantom voice recede until it was a manageable occupation. Petra gulped in a lungful of air, stumbling forward as if released from a vice grip.
A voice rang out in her head, this time a bellowing command.
"SING!" The words rang faintly of music, made by instruments she had no name for.
And so the elf did the only thing she could do, she sang.
There were no words. Only a melody that began with a cautious cadence. The song built as she focused on that thrumming in her chest. Her growing confidence enough to throw her voice out into the storm.
More bolts of lightning cracked in the air around her, but she ignored them and sang as if her life depended on it.
WHOOSH WHOOSH
She was holding her hands to her chest, above her heart, where it hammered away, when she realized that the the tune she was regaling was that of an old and tragic battle hymn. It told of a pyyrhic victory that left none standing on the battlefield, none but the betrayed. And that at some point in her song, another voice had joined hers in a harmonic duet. It was then that she no longer felt afraid.
WHOOSH WHOOSH
Petra was in the last stanza of her song when she crept to the edge of the cliff, her voice holding the last note with her unseen partner, when she finally peeked over the edge.
WHOOSH
A jeweled reptilian body flew up and past her face, parallel to the cliff. The force enough to knock her up and away from the edge. She landed on her back, staring straight into the grey sky above her. She couldn't make out the moving shape through the torrential rain.
Yes, she had read about dragons.
But none of that had prepared her for what it was like when brought into the very presence of one all of a sudden.
A dark green jewel dropped from the sky in a dive. Petra was sure that it was going to hit her; and refusing to be afraid, she screamed her defiant rage into the sky. Never taking her eyes off of her impending death.
She kept screaming up until the beast extended its mighty wingspan and thundered to the ground. Caging Petra in with all four of its scaled legs.
There was nothing the elf could do but gape at the deep green storm dragon looming above her. The dragon had shifted its wings to hover the leathery flesh over head, effectively stopping the rain from directly falling onto Petra as she stared in shock.
The dragon had two mighty black horns that swept away from its head. Armored emerald plates lined the length of its snout and leathery fins jutted out from the edge of its jaw and back towards its armored crest. But it was their eyes that transfixed Petra.
The iris itself was a shining predatory gold, like that of a sea eagle. The pitch black pupil was slit like a cat’s, with the sclera around the eye just as dark . She lay fascinated as she watched the pupil contract and expand.
Like a moth to a flame, she was unable to tear herself from the chaotic emotions within its gaze. It was like seeing the aural glow of a god.
The power from within its chest radiated in an echo that she could feel in her own. The vibrations enough to rattle her teeth. All the while, that same beginning aria played in a subtle hum in the air.
The same voice spoke in her head a third time, "Hello, Little Lark. You answered my call and faced the Harmony with ferocity. In turn... I shall accept your contract."
"Wh-wha-what?! No, no, no, no. I-I-" Her words wouldn't stop tripping over her tongue, she couldn't get them out fast enough. It was then that the aria sped into a frenzy around her, and a bright golden light began to shine at the base of the dragon's chest.
The dragon arched his neck down, his head coming impossibly close. Petra began to panic and attempt to scramble out of its reach as she watched that light travel up the length of its neck and into the maw of the dragon.
"May we shake the very foundations of the earth with our song, Rider." Was all Petra could hear before the dragon touched the center of her chest with the light. And in that contact it was as if electricity had speared her heart and radiated into every piece of her being. Her back arched in agony and a silent scream caught on her lips. No longer were her ears filled with the rage of the storm around them. All she could hear was the dragon's song reaching into the farthest crevices of her mind. Searing her and rebirthing her anew. There was a far away sensation of crackling heat from the top of her right shoulder to the tips of her fingers, but she was too far gone to react.
It was when she thought she was going to fade from this life into the next that her senses finally started to return. The sudden absence of the storm entirely is what caught her attention first. A seagull cried in the distance. The gentle crashing of waves eroding the bottom of the cliff several lengths below. And the soft touch of sunlight upon her cheek.
A blazing pain pulsed behind her eyes and with a groan she sat up, covering her face with her right hand. But the texture was wrong, it felt... scaly. In surprise, Petra yanked her hand from her face and stared at what she thought was her arm. Except it wasn't entirely her arm anymore. What was once rich umber skin, was now covered in jeweled quetzal green scales. Lighter under her forearm and palm and fading into a deep black to all five of her now clawed fingers. She couldn't believe it, it felt like her arm. What the absolute fuck.
A noise ahead of her caused her to spook and gasp as she looked up. There, sat the dragon. Seeming all to the world, relaxed and unperturbed. It stood easily eight feet at the shoulder, and from what she could tell, about 20 or 25 feet in length. Easily big enough to kill her and a handful of other skilled warriors.
But it wasn't fear she felt now. No. What's done was done. Now? Now all she felt was absolute indignant rage.
The dragon leveled a a calm stare at her. Seemingly uneffected by the angry hitch in her breathing pattern.
"I imagine you have questions, Petra Darthinian. But for now, you may call me Norvyk."
They were a naturally secretive lot and the differences between their kind were as varied and complex as her own people's. Yet that unknown had only deepened her insatiable curiosity for the majestic paragons.
The elf had always been a child of study. An aspiring thespian and scholar who sought to learn the wonders of the world through books, and what they couldn't tell her, she would find for herself. Such an endeavor is what had brought her to the throat of the Spine. With tales of the elusive storm dragons whispering in her ear as a siren to a sailor on the high seas. She had come across a few mentions of them in old texts found in the great libraries of Fal'Addas, a trek she had made over a decade ago in an effort to better understand the ways and songs of her people and where she belonged in the world.
She had stayed and visited for a handful of years. Had enjoyed the culture and history of her people and the other races that visited often.
But something had always felt like it didn't quite fit.
The famous city was built from the tall trees of that fabled forest. Closer to the sky than any could hope to be. But it never felt like enough. She always ended up feeling inexplicitly stuck.
That restless and hungry desire for more had served as a catalyst for all the great endeavors of her life. And the failures too.
That same hunger is what drove her now to the coast south of the Spine, having passed her home in Eredale, feeling too uncomfortable to stop there to resupply; instead she took the extra time to ride to Tarlik-Za, restock, and head south.
She had passed Mossdeep a day ago and had finally rounded the edge of the mountains that made up the Spine. From here it was all coastline. Which was the closest place to the storm dragons that she discovered was described in her readings. Petra wasn't sure if the authors were purposefully being cryptic, or if they really had the barest of observations to go off of. Either way, the battered and ink stained field journal she had kept with her all these years, had empty pages that were hungry for sketches and her own thoughts upon the beasts. The idea of finally being published for her discoveries sent an ambitious thrill down her spine that only others who felt the same passion for knowledge and the curation of it could understand.
She just had to godsdamn get there already...
The cool air was a boon on the exercise fevered skin of her mount. She had purchased the black mare when she left Fal'Addas. And the longer she spent with the animal, the more she realized why the stablemaster had sold her the cantankerous nag for cheap. She had already been thrown off twice in her journey. And there were days she was ready to throw in the towel with the stubborn animal. But Petra respected the fierce mare, and despite her vitrile attitude under saddle, she was a reliable mount in difficult terrain and could be trusted to take care of herself. All the same, Petra refused to call the mare the name she had been sold with: Muffin. A more laughable title she ahd yet to come across.
The duo had been riding at a steady decline since the dawn had broke upon a new day. A new opportunity, she softly encouraged herself. From her earlier perusal of her map, she knew that once they had reached the edge of the Spine, as they had done yesterday, they should reach the coast by this afternoon. The only problem was that she frequently had to make stops and find shelter for the intermittent rain showers that seemed to plague this part of the region. Rain, she could handle. Chafe from soggy leather straps, she could not.
She knew that traveling the coast in this kind of weather was not ideal. But her common sense told her that there was no better time to find a storm dragon than in this very weather. The nastier the better. Muffin's perpetually pinned ears seemed to agree otherwise.
****
They had been riding at a steady trot for some time, with Petra mindlessly singing a montage of hymns, folk songs, and even bardic tavern tunes to occupy herself, when the first screaming of seagulls interrupted her thoughts. Muffin's ears perked at the foreign noise. It was accompanied by a swift coastal wind that blew her tangled curls from her face and filled her nose with the smells of salt and brisk water.
They had made it.
With a startled laugh of delight, Petra urged her mount into a gallop. Her cape of starlight snapping in the wind behind her. The turbulent breath of her black mare was in tandem with each strike upon the earth with her hooves. The steamy coils of her breath whipping past Petra, like fog on the wind. The mare could sense her rider’s urgency and eagerly committed herself to the task of haste. Petra reveled in the strength she could feel in each powerful stride beneath her, the passing thrill a welcome reprieve from the monotonous pace of their journey so far.
As they drew closer to the coast, Petra finally saw the edge of a cliffside, and what looked like a beach that led below the rockface. There, she would shelter against the cliffside for the night and begin exploring in the morning. But the elf had never seen the ocean in her 127 years of life, an oversight she sought to correct immediately.
It was then that a heavy guttural roll of thunder swept in from the horizon and freezing rain began to pelt them, the clouds were dark and angry as they closed in the farther to the shore she rode, the droplets like stinging ice against her smiling cheeks and obscuring her ability to see. She had been too excited to care about the impending storm, she was so close. So close she could taste the electricity on her tongue.
The seagrass atop the cliffside whipped in protest against the growing force of the wind, the gales growing so cacophonous that Petra could no longer hear the drumming hoofbeats beneath her. It was all she could do to point her steed straight and true.
Petra should have realized her reckless abandon in the name of discovery would lead her to making a mistake yet again. She should have noted the tell tale signs that hummed in the air. There was a pressure of energy that built against her skin, the lifting of hair at the nape of her neck. It wasn't until the first bolt of lighting had hit the ground some feet from her that she realized her fatal mistake.
Muffin may have been steadfast, but to demand that she ride into the very throes of a dangerous storm was too much for any horse. The horse gave an equine scream and came to a sliding stop, her hind end slipping in the mud that curated from the rain. The sudden violent stop caught Petra unaware and before she knew it, she was flying over the neck of the mare and landing in a crushing heap some lengths away. She yelled in pain as she rolled with the force of being thrown. Landing in an ungraceful tangle of limbs with her forehead to the ground, in shock, all she could do was pant as she watched through her dark curtain of curls, Muffin running as fast as she could in the opposite direction.
"Fuck." Was all the commentry she could muster. Her body hurt and her pride even more. All of her research and camping supplies were in her pack tied to the back of her saddle. How could she be so stupid? How could she be so impatient? She was lucky she wasn't killed.
Another crack of thunder interuppted her thoughts. She would do well to find shelter as soon as possible and wait out the storm and then try to find her horse later.
WHOOSH
What? Was that the wind?
WHOOSH
No... something was wrong. The wind was a steady scream around her, but this?
WHOOSH
This felt like a force of air against the wind itself. But what wa-
It was then that she heard it.
Past the deafening roar of her own heartbeat from where it clamored in the cage of her ribs like a trapped bird. And past the roar of wind and her growing fear, she could hear a tenuous aria rising from the thunder. It called to something in her blood.
It was made of trumpets and cellos and violins, their sound triumphant. A rallying horn before the charge.
The orchestral crescendo, buoyant and without end. She scrambled towards the edge of the cliff, the symphony a feverish chant in her heart that drove her forward. She felt herself falling towards something within, as if she was racing towards the finish of something. The urgency that thrummed within her was without explanation, she felt compelled to do something, but she didn't know what?!
WHOOSH
The hair on her nape rose when a thundering voice slithered into her head. It echoed of raging storms and caged fury. Of a being so old that surely it had walked hand in hand with creation itself. It consumed every crevice in her mind, swelling until there was nothing but its presence. She couldn't help but feel like a bird trapped in the claws of a great cat.
"Sing." It whispered.
Her sense of self began to bleed away, blending with a being beyond her own mortal comprehension. How could she host something so vast and fathomless within her own head and maintain her sanity for more than a few moments? It was like some great eye had opened in her mind and was seeing into the deepest depths of her soul, assessing her. Judging her.
Would it find her wanting?
She felt it too. The tethers of her sanity, the ends of the threads, threatening to unravel at further provocation. Some part of her grasped at them, that piece of self that was slipping through her fingers like water. Never meant for her to hold longer than a fleeting moment.
Finally, when she thought she would be lost, she felt the phantom voice recede until it was a manageable occupation. Petra gulped in a lungful of air, stumbling forward as if released from a vice grip.
A voice rang out in her head, this time a bellowing command.
"SING!" The words rang faintly of music, made by instruments she had no name for.
And so the elf did the only thing she could do, she sang.
There were no words. Only a melody that began with a cautious cadence. The song built as she focused on that thrumming in her chest. Her growing confidence enough to throw her voice out into the storm.
More bolts of lightning cracked in the air around her, but she ignored them and sang as if her life depended on it.
WHOOSH WHOOSH
She was holding her hands to her chest, above her heart, where it hammered away, when she realized that the the tune she was regaling was that of an old and tragic battle hymn. It told of a pyyrhic victory that left none standing on the battlefield, none but the betrayed. And that at some point in her song, another voice had joined hers in a harmonic duet. It was then that she no longer felt afraid.
WHOOSH WHOOSH
Petra was in the last stanza of her song when she crept to the edge of the cliff, her voice holding the last note with her unseen partner, when she finally peeked over the edge.
WHOOSH
A jeweled reptilian body flew up and past her face, parallel to the cliff. The force enough to knock her up and away from the edge. She landed on her back, staring straight into the grey sky above her. She couldn't make out the moving shape through the torrential rain.
Yes, she had read about dragons.
But none of that had prepared her for what it was like when brought into the very presence of one all of a sudden.
A dark green jewel dropped from the sky in a dive. Petra was sure that it was going to hit her; and refusing to be afraid, she screamed her defiant rage into the sky. Never taking her eyes off of her impending death.
She kept screaming up until the beast extended its mighty wingspan and thundered to the ground. Caging Petra in with all four of its scaled legs.
There was nothing the elf could do but gape at the deep green storm dragon looming above her. The dragon had shifted its wings to hover the leathery flesh over head, effectively stopping the rain from directly falling onto Petra as she stared in shock.
The dragon had two mighty black horns that swept away from its head. Armored emerald plates lined the length of its snout and leathery fins jutted out from the edge of its jaw and back towards its armored crest. But it was their eyes that transfixed Petra.
The iris itself was a shining predatory gold, like that of a sea eagle. The pitch black pupil was slit like a cat’s, with the sclera around the eye just as dark . She lay fascinated as she watched the pupil contract and expand.
Like a moth to a flame, she was unable to tear herself from the chaotic emotions within its gaze. It was like seeing the aural glow of a god.
The power from within its chest radiated in an echo that she could feel in her own. The vibrations enough to rattle her teeth. All the while, that same beginning aria played in a subtle hum in the air.
The same voice spoke in her head a third time, "Hello, Little Lark. You answered my call and faced the Harmony with ferocity. In turn... I shall accept your contract."
"Wh-wha-what?! No, no, no, no. I-I-" Her words wouldn't stop tripping over her tongue, she couldn't get them out fast enough. It was then that the aria sped into a frenzy around her, and a bright golden light began to shine at the base of the dragon's chest.
The dragon arched his neck down, his head coming impossibly close. Petra began to panic and attempt to scramble out of its reach as she watched that light travel up the length of its neck and into the maw of the dragon.
"May we shake the very foundations of the earth with our song, Rider." Was all Petra could hear before the dragon touched the center of her chest with the light. And in that contact it was as if electricity had speared her heart and radiated into every piece of her being. Her back arched in agony and a silent scream caught on her lips. No longer were her ears filled with the rage of the storm around them. All she could hear was the dragon's song reaching into the farthest crevices of her mind. Searing her and rebirthing her anew. There was a far away sensation of crackling heat from the top of her right shoulder to the tips of her fingers, but she was too far gone to react.
It was when she thought she was going to fade from this life into the next that her senses finally started to return. The sudden absence of the storm entirely is what caught her attention first. A seagull cried in the distance. The gentle crashing of waves eroding the bottom of the cliff several lengths below. And the soft touch of sunlight upon her cheek.
A blazing pain pulsed behind her eyes and with a groan she sat up, covering her face with her right hand. But the texture was wrong, it felt... scaly. In surprise, Petra yanked her hand from her face and stared at what she thought was her arm. Except it wasn't entirely her arm anymore. What was once rich umber skin, was now covered in jeweled quetzal green scales. Lighter under her forearm and palm and fading into a deep black to all five of her now clawed fingers. She couldn't believe it, it felt like her arm. What the absolute fuck.
A noise ahead of her caused her to spook and gasp as she looked up. There, sat the dragon. Seeming all to the world, relaxed and unperturbed. It stood easily eight feet at the shoulder, and from what she could tell, about 20 or 25 feet in length. Easily big enough to kill her and a handful of other skilled warriors.
But it wasn't fear she felt now. No. What's done was done. Now? Now all she felt was absolute indignant rage.
The dragon leveled a a calm stare at her. Seemingly uneffected by the angry hitch in her breathing pattern.
"I imagine you have questions, Petra Darthinian. But for now, you may call me Norvyk."
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