Nasus

When I saw Nasus I thought she looked like a mysterious priestess. I thought her personality should be ambitious, analytical, and maybe a little bit ruthless, but she still has access to a sense of wonder in the right context. I stopped the story before I got as far as I planned, but I have to go to bed!
(Not Sornieth canon btw.)

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Nasus couldn't remember her mother. She was told she was born to a priestess, and she remembered bits of the temple where she spent the first year of her life: marble statues, black smoke trailing from yellow candles, stained glass windows, and underground chambers. When she was younger, she would dream about the geodes housed in those chambers, and how their pulsating glow almost looked like a language she could understand if she just had more time.

After that, her memory gave way to what she had been told: that the king, having no heir, had gone to the temple to ask for guidance and come face to face with a shy, serious hatchling stalking the halls in a miniature version of a priest's robe. The king later told her that encounter was like staring into a mirror. It's true that Nasus had the same sunlight-yellow eyes as the king, the same blue frills on her head, and even the same kind of veiny crimson patterns on her wings. Nasus had not been old enough to know what a sign from the gods looked like, but the king took her appearance as one nonetheless and adopted her as his heir. Nasus used to ask what her mother thought about it. Did she give up her daughter willingly? Did SHE think it was a sign from the gods? But the question was avoided by everyone for so long that Nasus gave up asking it.

So Nasus lived in the royal palace as the king's heir apparent. She could do nearly anything and go anywhere she wanted as long as she had a chaperone, except for the temple just inside the palace walls and the priest's alcove within the palace itself. She made a point of ignoring these restrictions and indulged herself in the princess life-- eating expensive food, wearing royal gowns, and absorbing information; being trained by the best tutors in fencing, dancing, history, diplomacy, and many languages both dead and alive; experimenting with her new persona and perfecting her imperious glare-- for three years. At the end of the third year, the king made an announcement: his queen had finally hatched an egg. He now had his own son. Prince Villas looked just like his father: just like Nasus.

Nasus cursed herself for not noticing when the queen disappeared. She was always gone for diplomacy or visiting her sisters, and Nasus hadn't known her most recent absence was anything different. She was still a princess despite being adopted, but the hatchling was named heir the moment he was born, and Nasus knew she had to find a way to keep herself relevant. She watched how the other dragons responded to the hatchling's presence. She didn't have any natural inclination to feed, protect, or coo at the baby, but she pretended to dote on the small wriggling creature anyway. When her new brother was old enough to fly, Nasus became the perfect chaperone. When Villas wanted to wrestle, Nasus obliged, and when he convinced the fencing master to put a sword in his hand, Nasus became his sparring partner. She made herself a little slow and learned to fake clumsiness, because Villas was a sore loser but he complained just as much when he knew someone had let him win. Nasus smiled when he wasn't looking and thanked her old tutors for the diplomacy lessons. When the king sent tutors to the prince to teach him to read books and maps and to memorize lists of dead kings and queens, Nasus patiently sat with him as he struggled through scrolls and haggled the teachers down to one page of homework (which Nasus usually did for him anyway). She was especially interested in his complete inability to learn new languages with any kind of proficiency. That was one area where she couldn't stop herself from showing off.

The prince grew quickly and one summer Nasus suddenly realized that the two of them were the same size. Villas was unpredictably shifting back and forth from a regal bearing he'd copied from the king and an awkward adolescent stumbling that came out when his brain stopped remembering how long his limbs had gotten. In some ways it was getting harder to pretend to lose their sparring matches. Nasus made a game of matching the prince's movements exactly, teenage blundering and all. When she really wanted to annoy him, she repeated everything he said, and quickly perfected her impression of his sullen, pubescent voice.

Her decision came to her in her sleep. It was one of those dreams where one flies without flapping one's wings. Nasus was floating through the halls of the palace, and as she passed by the forbidden entrance to the priest's alcove, the shadows over the doorway shuddered to life and then began to beat like a heart, getting a little darker and then lighter again with each lub-dub. It was only a shadow, something to be seen and not heard, but even so dream-Nasus could hear the heartbeat echo through the walls and rumble along the floor.

That morning, she staggered dizzily to the chemist and coughed at him until he sent her away with a bottle of something peacock-green and a warning not to take too much or she'd sleep through the whole day. She made it back to her quarters and slipped into the private dining room she shared with Villas just in time to intercept his daily mug of chocolate.
After breakfast, Nasus strutted overconfidently out of their rooms wearing her brother's expensive but ridiculous purple-and-orange silk jacket. Her own clothes were folded at the foot of her bed where Villas lay like a rock, snoring and probably drooling on Nasus's pillows. She knew how to make her brother's nasally voice, and how to sound like she was trying to sound important. She knew how to filter a desire for grandeur like the king's through a net of teenage chaos and come out with a perfect imitation of Prince Villas.

They didn't ask at the door why the prince was suddenly showing an interest in priestly endeavors. They weren't proper guards in the first place, and they might have assumed his father had sent him to pray or make an offering about something. More likely they just didn't want to have to talk to him. That was good, since Nasus realized as she was walking in that Villas wasn't exactly the type to go to the priests about his sister being sick. But it didn't matter. After a few steps into the alcove, she froze and all her disguises fell away.

There were no windows in the palace priests' alcove, and the stone walls and candlelight reminded Nasus of a chamber she hadn't thought about since she was very young. Arranged on a wide, low table in front of the altar were two great geodes, cracked open to reveal glittering, glowing crystals in the center of four half-globes. The light coming from the crystals was pulsing in a pattern like heartbeat, and under that heartbeat was another, quieter pattern. It was a very old language, but this time, Nasus was old enough to understand it. It was the voice of a god-- or maybe it was the voice of ALL the gods, gods of light and darkness and air and water and fire and earth and time all coming together under the earth to form these hidden crystals that whisper until they're found and cracked open so they can emit the light that allows them to sing. As she stared at the rhythmic glow, Nasus realized that she was humming along with it. When had she started humming? She glanced at the offering bowls on the altar, filled with bundles containing herbs and bread and letters and gold coins, and nearly laughed. The gods didn't want these offerings. The gods wanted their language to be understood. Nasus cast away her borrowed clothing and approached the geodes ad she hummed, harmonizing in a sacred conversation between sound and light, dragon and deity.