CASIMIRA
dragon-shifting daughter of ashhal and ryatah
She had thought it would be strange to return to Tephra, even if it was only partially. The land of her birth had never felt much like a home, no matter how hard she had tried to turn it into one. But then, Hyaline didn’t feel entirely like home, either. She was beginning to think it was just something wrong with her; the same thing that kept everyone locked out, the walls that she had unknowingly built when trying to keep the dragon contained. That maybe girls like her weren’t meant to have homes, and it would be easier to just accept this hollow, misplaced feeling inside of her chest.
But she was afraid that if she kept the walls up for too long if she continued to hide within the darkness and the solitude that she had created for herself, that Savior would disappear. Just the way Badden had, because she had never really given him a reason to stay.
So she chose to have her newest children in Tephra, both to be close to Savior, and because it simply made sense. They are twins, just like she and her brother, just like Savior and his sister – it seemed fitting they should all be born in the same place, beneath the same sky, and with the same volcanic glow in the distance.
Maybe then she could fool herself into believing this was meant to be, that it was something to hold onto.
She had stayed, letting the twins learn to walk and strengthen their legs here rather than in Hyaline. She had stayed, and while it was easy to reason that it was because they were too young to make the journey to Hyaline, she knows she stays because of Savior.
Because every time she catches sight of him from the corner of her eye she thinks her heart sparks to match the fire opal on his skin, and heat spreads like dragonfire through her veins. Her pale blue eyes find him now, drifting from the place where the twins play to settle on his familiar, handsome face, and she wills away the shyness that always seems to capture her whenever she first sees him. She closes the space between them instead, wrestling her insecurity and uncertainty all the while, until she is close enough to reach and touch her pale nose to his shoulder. “They look so much like you,” she tells him, the awe clear in her voice when she looks back at the twins – both white opal, and Worship with his wings and Rare with her delicate pink flowers woven into her mane and tail. They were stunning, and she still found it impossible to believe that she had any part in creating them.
@[savior]