CASIMIRA
dragon-shifting daughter of ashhal and ryatah
Her smile steadies when the mare offers her own name, and a light visibly brightens in her eyes at the mention of Tephra. “Tephra,” she echoes, and the name is so easy on her tongue it must be obvious that she is familiar with it. “I was born there, along with my twin brother.” She had loved Tephra as a child, and she tried so hard to make it be her home. And yet, it never was. Their mother – wayward and wandering, impossible to keep anchored – was rarely there, and though they had half-siblings from Ryatah’s other romantic trysts, they weren’t particularly close to any of them.
How strange, that she had died for a place that she felt so detached from.
That she had let herself be shattered into nothing, let her scales be scattered with the ash and cinder as Tephra burnt at the hands of Loess.
There is a sadness that reflects in her eyes, faint and fleeting, but it lingers in her voice when she says, “I wanted so badly for Tephra to feel like home, but it never did.” She shakes her white head, her long forelock cascading across her eyes and along the edge of her face, and she looks again at her companion. “I stayed in Nerine very briefly after I left Tephra, but I live in Hyaline now.” She pauses a moment, the jagged outline of the mountaintops and the mirror-like surface of the lake flooding her mind, and with it a strange rush of warmth. But also, guilt. Guilt because Hyaline almost felt like home, but Badden is not there with her.
“I like it,” she says, maybe as a way to reassure herself that she did not make a mistake. To remind herself that it was not wrong to finally have begun to feel secure – maybe even almost happy – even if it had meant no longer waiting for a piece of her heart to return to her. She looks out at the pale meadow, and she adds softly, “It’s just….an adjustment, I guess, and it’s nice to get away sometimes.”
She shifts the attention from herself, unable to resist the curiosity about her birthland and she asks her, “How are things in Tephra? It seemed like it had recovered well enough from the war with Loess, last I was there.”
@[Warlight]