Aleena

Aleena
The Oracle













Personality:

A thing which is a gift to one is a curse for another. To some dragons, such a phrase is only an idiom, casual wisdom passed on to hatchlings from their elders; common sense prettied up with a bit of fluff. To Aleena however, it is the harsh truth that haunts her existence. A burden which weighs heavily on her back, manifesting in intrusive visions that render her blind and senseless and thrashing in horrible pain. Indeed, a gift will never be the words used to describe her premonitions and Aleena will not suffer anyone else describing it as such. To tell her that she is blessed by the Tidelord or that she only needs the patience to understand what is shown to her will at best earn the callous a smack to the face with an impatient tail.

As far as retaliation goes, that is rather tame for Aleena could very well give them a glimpse of their future, and she has never once seen anything nice. To that end, Aleena is almost always shunned whenever she goes. Once the wonder and glamor of her abilities wear off, and the ugly truth of it is revealed Aleena is deemed unstable and unsafe to be around. Those who wanted to be supporters and friends prove only to be of the fair-weather sort and, she is left to fend for herself.

Years of this repeated treatment has forged Aleena into a cautious nomad. With her ability to extend her trust to another dragon in tatters, she has taken to avoiding large clans or areas densely populated with the rest of her species. Solitude has become her default state, so much so that she is uncomfortable when approached by others and becomes flustered, defensive and borderline aggressive when in their presence. Aleena is clueless about social cues. There is no such thing as table manners or indoor voices or taking into account another's feelings as she has shed such rules and conventions long ago. To put it bluntly, she comes off as rude and uncouth, a fact that does not bother her as it serves to keep others at arm's length.

Those who take the trouble to observe Aleena (from a safe distance of course) will see how hyper-competent she is. She has survived on her own in the wilds of Sornieth and is a formidable fighter and resourceful scavenger. Being aligned to the water element unsurprisingly makes her a powerful swimmer, and with her coloration, Aleena is able to disappear into the murk to avoid detection. It is to the waters that she takes to whenever her visions strike her as Aleena does not like being vulnerable in front of strangers, and her curse has a tendency to leave her weak.

When all is said and done, Aleena lives in fear of what her visions may bring her next. While she has long since given up hope of a happy ending for herself, Aleena is compassionate towards the animals and plants that she shares the wilderness with. Perhaps it is because she knows that they will not judge her for the visions that she sees, or because she has experienced first hand what it feels like to be small and weak but Aleena takes the time to nurture her surroundings, a defiant act of positivity in the face of all the darkness in her life.


Background:

Born in a Clan that made its home overlooking the unfathomable depths of the Leviathan Trench, Aleena's world always danced on the knife's edge. She remembers staring into the dark depths of the sea beneath the sea, waiting for her pearl diver parents to come home and thinks that perhaps a touch of that inky nothingness somehow crept its way into her head to cause her visions. As a youngling, she had never been afraid of that yawning divide, always eager to listen to her father's tales of grand adventure.

It was Aleena's erstwhile dream to follow in the footsteps of her parents, hailed as heroes in the Clan for the treasure that wrested from the deeps which were added to the hordes or sold to the surface for pure gold or gems. Precocious and a talented swimmer even at a young age, Aleena was thought to be a shoo-in as a diver, but for dragons who claimed to be privy to the Tidelord's prophecies, they were too confident of the future.

Aleena's first vision came to her a handful of years before the age of majority. What started as a quiet dinner in their den became upheaval as she thrashed on the dinner table, bleeding from the nose. Aleena screamed about eyes from the deep and a giant maw swallowing unsuspecting divers for hours. A steady stream of healers was called in to see to her, and when she finally calmed, the Clan Elder decided to put a stop to diving activities for a fortnight. Only three days later the guards on the borderlands reported seeing a hulking, shadowed mass close to the top of the trench. Aleena had saved lives. Taking the fact that there was now a very young and very powerful seer among them now, the Clan rejoiced. There was much talk about being blessed by the Tidelord and how Aleena would be sent to train with the Oracles, but the visions did not stop. Aleena's day would be shattered with violent imagery accompanied by bouts of shrieking and pain. She would even go so far as to attack onlookers unable to discern them from the shadowy monsters she was being made to see.

At first, the trained Oracles of the Clan sought to teach her how to harness her abilities, but it became clear that this was something beyond their control. Instead of thinking about Aleena's well-being, hubris and self-preservation kicked in. Whispers began to start that these horrible visions could not be from the Tidelord. Some posited that it could be the work of the strange creature that Aleena had first seen, while others even went so far as to accuse her of being an agent of monsters or a charlatan and an attention seeker. Meanwhile, Aleena's parents grew more and more worried about their daughter's mental state. It broke her mother's heart to see Aleena always in pain and, after a particularly bad episode, her father packed some supplies and spirited her up to the surface. There she was left on the edges of the Reedcleft Ascent. Aleena remembers her father apologizing profusely to her as he talked about how he hoped that being out of the sea would lessen her visions. He would never know how wrong he was.

From then on, Aleena's life was nomadic. She ran into different Clans from time to time, but things always ended up the same way. The idealistic Wind dragons were disturbed by her ability to predict calamity while the industrious Fire dragons had no time for magic. She spent several years in the lands of the Plaguebringer and though she met those who were empathetic to her affliction as they called it, Aleena could not stomach being near such disease.

At the end of her meandering journey, she ended up in the Starwood Strand a place both magical and dangerous. Tired of moving from region to region, Aleena carved a little home for herself, viciously fending off both dragons and beastclan alike. She became a frightful legend until one day a little butterfly flew into her secret lair and a Coatl came into her life. Mariposa was different from the others, she did not ask Aleena a million questions about her abilities or immediately try to teach her to harness them. The first thing she asked about was if Aleena had enough food, water, and shelter before leaving again when she was told to. Over the course of months, Aleena felt as if she was being watched, but it was never oppressive. Helpful trinkets and baskets of supplies would turn up when she needed it and little by little she found herself warming up to the idea of Mariposa's presence.

They have only just started to communicate, and though friendship is something that Aleena does not dare hope for, she has told herself that she will enjoy this arrangement as long as it lasts.