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Post by shyria on Oct 13, 2007 20:40:15 GMT -5
Eyeaaaah I suck at names ^.=.^; Basically, I know I've been horribly behind regarding Eon stuff, but I have been working on the general information in my profile and once we get the discussion for the magical realms proposal idea I can get a proper start on Shyria's history. Also, since I have to keep a regular writing journal for English this year, I decided to rewrite one of Thadius' old stories and throw a bunch of us in. This isn't related to Eon, but I felt like contributing at least SOMETHING to all the awesome stuff in the gallery. Besides, I sort of felt like Thad's story needed an update just because so much has happened in the group since he wrote it, with people hooking up, new people joining, and some leaving (not naming names...). I'll update this as often as I get sections typed up. I already posted the first chapter on DA but I'll repost it here for people who check Eon more often.
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Post by shyria on Oct 13, 2007 20:43:47 GMT -5
“On Meeting a Shadow Cat”
The rain poured down from the sky as fields and roads up and down the Front Range vanished under blankets of water and mud. Thrashing tongues of lightning blazed across the sky in sporadic bursts of elemental fury. And as the various forces of nature writhed and clawed at each other in the skies above, a lone figure traced her way home along a suburban street in Colorado Springs, a black hoodie and battered umbrella her sole barriers from the storm.
“Well, at least the wind isn’t too bad,” Shyria observed aloud. The cold was her primary annoyance; fall storms like the one raging above her made a cup of coffee seem a gift from the gods. Fortunately the commute between the bus shelter and her house was a short one. She’d be home soon enough. Outwardly, little evidence existed to mark the young woman trudging home along the rain-drenched street as anything other than a typical American teenager. She held a steady job at a nearby bookstore and attended classes at Pine Creek High School; Shyria owned a car but preferred to take the bus to the shopping center where the bookstore was to save on gas money. Her appearance didn’t warrant too many odd looks either, except from people who-for some reason or another-found something about persistently dressing in black or dark clothing often combined with witty or snarky T-shirt slogans to get bent out of shape over. More than anything else though, dragons infested Shyria’s wardrobe; an observer would be hard-pressed to locate an article of clothing, accessory, or piece of jewelry on Shyria’s person that did not reference a dragon. Apart from her style choices, Shyria was, for all intents and purposes, perfectly normal.
Of course this outward perception of normalcy was merely a facade. The truth was that Shyria was not an American teenager by birth. In fact, she wasn’t even human. Her birthplace laid some thousands of miles and a dimensional barrier away from America, and she was not born so much as hatched.
Shyria was a dragon. She could breathe fire, but her talents were not confined to just that. As a fire elemental, she could control and manifest flame at will; however, this didn’t mean she jaunted out the front door every day with the intent of reducing entire cities to ash. Dragons were actually far more civilized than humans often gave them credit for. This didn’t bug Shyria though, since humans honestly couldn’t have known otherwise; the centuries-old schism of the mundane and the magical realms somewhat hampered public relations between their residents. However, the division failed to fully sever contact between the realms; beings on both sides could still come and go as long as they knew how the process worked. Magical creatures often sought to expand their knowledge of the human realm just as supernaturally-inclined humans tried to make sense of the magical world. True, not all of these tourists had benign ambitions, but there were plenty of good folk, both human and magical, that kept the bad eggs in line. The most common goal among the dimension-hoppers was simply to do what travelers throughout the ages have always done; to see new worlds and perhaps scratch out a living in one of them.
It was an identical spirit of discovery that led the daughter of the territorial lord of the kingdom of Dara-Arux and a head priestess of Tamara to make a name for herself in the grand state of Colorado. Shyria knew she’d have to return home at some point, being the next in line to rule and all, but she figured she still had a good century or two to do as she pleased. And at the moment, what she pleased meant getting home as fast she could and collapsing on the couch with a coffee and her T.V remote.
The sound stopped Shyria cold. At first, she wasn’t sure she heard anything, but closer examination confirmed her suspicions; something was in the drainage ditch turned flooded cataract by the side of the road. And it was mewing.
“Mrrrrow! Mrrrow!”
This was serious. Racing to the edge of the ditch, Shyria scanned the surface of the water for the source of the noise. Finally, a nearby streetlamp illuminated a small, squirming burlap sack bobbing in the water. Shyria’s reaction was instantaneous. An unspoken command yanked the sodden bag from the abyss and into Shyria’s outstretched hand. Unwilling to waste any more time, Shyria hurriedly stashed the bag in the front pouch of her hoodie and raced down the street. She could feel the bag’s occupant squirming around in its prison. Good, Shyria thought, whatever was inside the bag was still alive. She was very anxious to meet her captive in person, and as her house finally loomed through the pouring rain, she would soon get that chance.
Shyria fumbled with her house key for what felt like ages in the downpour before she finally got the door unlocked. No lights were on in the dwelling; Shyria typically wound up being the first occupant home. Kama always worked late at her restaurant and Taro and Tusami tended to stay out together as well. Flicking the lights on in the kitchen and grabbing a clean towel from the hall bathroom, Shyria placed the towel on the kitchen table, drew the bag from her pocket, and emptied it onto the table. Out of the bag flopped a small black kitten, shivering with latent cold but otherwise unharmed from his dip in the gutter.
Shyria immediately noticed three unusual traits about the kitten. The first was that it was wearing glasses. Shyria also pondered over why, if someone meant to drown the cat, they bothered to give it a collar and name tag. Finally, there was the matter of the cat’s tail; it began as a single appendage but forked in mid-length and thus ended in two separate tips. Even though the tail’s appearance puzzled her, Shyria somehow sensed that it was not the result of injury. Sensing the dragon’s confusion, the kitten performed a brief trick of wriggling the two tips one at a time before burrowing into the towel for warmth. Shyria smiled and helped the kitten dry off. Once dry, the tiny feline wriggled into Shyria’s arms and settled into a mass of purring black fluff.
“You’re no ordinary cat, are you Thadius?” the dragon inquired to the tiny fluff ball in her arms-Thadius happened to be the name on the cat’s collar so Shyria chose to address it as such. “Well, in that case you’ll fit in just fine around here.” Thadius peered back up at Shyria with his big blue eyes. His expression indicated that he had sensed something unusual about Shyria just as Shyria had clued in to his own supernatural nature. “Smart cat” Shyria responded as she placed the kitten back on the table and took a step back. “Sorry if I scare ya” she quipped before vanishing in a quick flash of flame.
The fire vanished as quickly as it appeared. Shyria again sat before the table, but now in her natural form. She was rather short in human form-only about five-foot two inches-and even her dragon form topped barely four inches beyond that. However, even a small dragon like herself managed to occupy plenty of space, being nearly twenty feet long with a wingspan to match. At the moment her bat-like wings folded loosely at her sides while her tail coiled around her flanks. Her soft, leathery scales were colored inky black, save for a brown underbelly and identically colored wings. Vibrant blue stripes traced the length of her spine from her brow to the tip of her tail, which bore a bony, arrow-shaped tip edged in blue. A series of tribal-style blue markings wove a path from her eyes to the base of a jaw trimmed by blunt yellow-gold spikes; from the back of her skull two identically colored horns traced a gentle S-curve in the air. Completing the vibrant palette of Shyria’s markings were scarlet-red, flame-shaped patches that turned the backs of her wings into an inferno.
Now contrary to what a human might think when confronted with a scene like this, Thadius wasn’t the least bit scared. If anything, the only part about the transformation that bothered him was the risk of catching his tail on fire courtesy of an errant flame. The kitten took a running leap and made a perfect four-point landing on the dragon’s head where he promptly settled back to purring. Shyria smiled and reached up to give her hitchhiker a scratch behind the ears. He was going to fit in just fine.
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Post by Anon on Oct 14, 2007 15:06:29 GMT -5
Oooooooooooo!!!!! The Tusami approves! You said you uploaded it to DA? Well then, I'm going to have to head over there and make a few comments and give you a big +fav...
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Post by shyria on Oct 14, 2007 21:19:13 GMT -5
Yay! Thanks Sami-sami! *snuggle*
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Post by kaito on Oct 15, 2007 18:29:56 GMT -5
Ooooo that's awsome! Keep writting!
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Post by shyria on Oct 17, 2007 17:38:34 GMT -5
Thanks Kaito! *much pop-tart love*
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Post by drakkensheild on Jun 7, 2008 2:37:16 GMT -5
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