Inu
(#20073324)
| lay your hand on my lips ; you cannot feel me smile |
Familiar
Growing Jeweler
Click or tap to view this dragon in Predict Morphology.
Energy: 0/50
This dragon’s natural inborn element is Nature.
Female Undertide
This dragon is an ancient breed.
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Personal Style
Ancient dragons cannot wear apparel.
Skin
Scene
Measurements
Length
15.35 m
Wingspan
20.03 m
Weight
3902.96 kg
Genetics
Taupe
Boa (Undertide)
Boa (Undertide)
Robin
Trail (Undertide)
Trail (Undertide)
Flaxen
Sparkle (Undertide)
Sparkle (Undertide)
Hatchday
Breed
Eye Type
Level 25 Undertide
Max Level
STR
133
AGI
8
DEF
6
QCK
40
INT
5
VIT
5
MND
5
Biography
“I came, I saw, and it conquered me.”
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 inu _ taken _ she / her |
Lounging and friendly, a wisp of smoke lingering on her lips, she’s the first to greet you and the last to see you if you go. With her open, easy smile, there is something about her that pulls you in, something in her that says she is ready to be everyone’s friend – as long as they mind their own. Her eyes are not coy but canny, like a hawk’s. Relaxed around her mug, her claws are long and razor-sharp, and she has a habit of clicking them against the handle. Get a little closer, and see that she is one of those who have had the painful privilege of growing up faster than she deserved. Her face looks older than her bearing, and her eyes dart into the shadows of every room before she sits down. Her smile is oddly stiff – it looks practiced, because it is. She never smiled before, not with her mouth. She remembers, in a way, the days when she smiled with her body and every word she spoke was a code. But that was a long time ago, and that is no longer the body she has now. She deflects your thoughts with a laugh. Sit down and have a drink. She’ll foot the bill if she can. All of that was the Before, and the Now is all right. |
“And I've loved, I've lost, but I've moved on too.”
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Inu knows a lot of things, has always known. Most of them she’ll pass along to anyone who asks, but not all. Some are tricks of her many trades that she keeps stashed like aces up a sleeve. One of them is different, and gods forbid anyone should ask her such an odd question in the first place. But it’s this: beneath their coarse, waterproof overcoats, Tundras’ undercoats are downy, softer than a bird’s wing, and shockingly long. They are leaner than one might expect, hidden under all that shag.
That was the Before.
She’s always known the street, the gutters, the wilding places in no-man’s land. More precisely, she’s known where they offer a living. The sixth child of many, she was the smallest Fae in the colony, one more mouth than they could feed, and too slippery to be caught. As a child she was the urchin always on the corner, determined not to beg, chirping after passerby in her clear, toneless voice: “Two dollars to grind your scissors! Three to sharpen your blades!”
Those were the days she fell in love with the sound of metal on metal. That hair-raising shriek sent chills up her spine and made her teeth itch, but the ring as she pulled swords out of their scabbards – oh, she knew she was unsheathing power. The enchanted ones were even better. Her whole body tingled at the rush she felt, holding these weapons of arcane knowledge.
Her family had no money to keep her in school and so she sat on the walls by the school and learned her chicken-scratch alongside her friends, and whenever it bored her, off she would go. Out on the range she watched mages and apprentices and warriors-in-training draw a bead on wooden targets, and decided to try it too. With cast-off parts, she made her own projectiles and fired them off with little starbursts of light.
Bullseye. Bullseye. Nothing was safe. She hunted birds in flight. Pinned cats by their whiskers, one hair at a time. Sniped rats from the rooftops, five stories up. Among the other children, she ruled the streets, but nobody else seemed to care. To them she was just another penniless brat without a future.
That was, of course, exactly the sort of phrase that begged to be proven wrong.
They tell tales of rags to riches. In stories, the underdog is always the winner; you could bet your money on it. And Inu never set much store by stories, but the thought that she had already been shunted off into that dead-end alleyway of hopeless, dreamless nonentity – it rankled her. She could do better than that. She’d grow up.
***
When the first rains begin to fall, and spring heaves its violent back to buck winter off the land, the whole forest turns liquid. Dewdrops rained down in Inu’s wake as she scouted through the trees, dancing between the dripping branches. The sun turned everything to light around her, but the view could wait. She was on the hunt.
All that glittered – some was ice, some was rain, but what remained was treasure. Castaway weapons, wrecked wagons, lost belongings. Scrap metal paid the best, and the floodplain delivered the innards of the river into her hands every year.
Something flashed in the mud. Her fins perking, she darted forward, digging into it with her paws, her claws clicking on something smooth. It was a piece of armor. Tugging it out, she turned it over. Time and river had almost rusted it through, but in some places, she could still see the rivets that used to hold the plating together. It was far too big for a Fae to wear, but it would fetch a pretty sum. She dragged it up on a rock, to return for it later.
And that was when the deluge hit her in the back.
A confused tumble of dark and light, the roar of bubbles in her ears, and frigid water filling her mouth – that was all. Far away upstream, the river had burst its icy confines for the year.
When she woke, she was in the arms of someone she had never met. A shaggy thing hovered over her, too close for her foggy eyes to focus. “Who are you?” a voice asked. It was a nice voice, resonant and a little woody.
“My name is Inu.” Hearing her own raspy croak jolted her, made her realize she could not be dead if she could speak.
His name was Raesh. Or rather, she decided it was, because he did not seem to know. He was a Tundra, or rather, she decided he was, because he was shaped like one, but he looked at the world like an old god seeing everything for the first time. They spoke so little that time blurred, and counting days seemed like a luxury. It was like living a dream, one of those half-waking experiences you had at the break of dawn, when everything was dewy-gold and not quite real.
Something about him took a part of her and turned it into something different. She could not help but look at things the way he did – perhaps because her world was the city, and here in the woods, this was his world. But it all seemed like a trance, an illusion, surreal and strange. She couldn’t understand it.
One night, she sat up, looking at the moon glimmering down at her through the leaves, and tried for the hundredth time to straighten the tangled jungle her brain had become. The moon had phases, and it was waxing gibbous, that was a fact. She must be somewhere in the Viridian Labyrinth, that was a fact. Her name was Inu and she had been rescued from a flood by a strange Tundra called Raesh, that was a fact. What was missing, that made her thoughts feel ephemeral as sunbeams on a cloudy day?
Beside her, Raesh stirred, as if he had heard her thinking his name. His eyes blinked at her, green as glass held up to the sun. What are you, she wanted to ask, but she knew how he would answer – a tree. More surreal absurdity. So she kept quiet. Right now, shattering the liquid haze with her voice seemed like sacrilege, and she did not know why.
Instead she did something she had wanted to do for a long time. Folding her fins open in a wordless question, she leaned over and slid her fingers deep into his fur. His green eyes widened, and then, after a moment, turned a lovely shade of emerald as his pupils dilated. For all that he seemed not to know, this was not one of them. His wide, velvety palm pulled her down, and after that whether or not she was dreaming no longer mattered.
to be continued...
relationships
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Raesh—Friend »────────────────────────────────────────────› A good one. The heart this head used to rely on, and vice versa. Just because I've changed doesn't mean he has, and I hope he stays that way. | ________ |
art
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Scattered:
original shadow / silver / tangerine
{ bio was accidentally deleted, 12 scatters }
until 15 oct 2020 vermillion / camo / yellow
murk / vermillion / iris
phthalo / bubblegum / dirt
taupe / robin / flaxen (BLESS you...)
original shadow / silver / tangerine
{ bio was accidentally deleted, 12 scatters }
until 15 oct 2020 vermillion / camo / yellow
murk / vermillion / iris
phthalo / bubblegum / dirt
taupe / robin / flaxen (BLESS you...)
Click or tap a food type to individually feed this dragon only. The other dragons in your lair will not have their energy replenished.
This dragon doesn't eat Insects.
This dragon doesn't eat Meat.
Feed this dragon Seafood.
Feed this dragon Plants.
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Exalting Inu to the service of the Windsinger will remove them from your lair forever. They will leave behind a small sum of riches that they have accumulated. This action is irreversible.
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