Ballad

@joydom

[Here's Ballad's! Doing a bit of jumping around in terms of order this week, but everyone's will get done. c:]

Once upon a time, there was a flower who fell in love with a boy made of fire.

The flower had sharp thorns that pierced the boy-fire’s skin whenever he came close. “I’m sorry,” she would say, “that I am not as elegant and beautiful as you.” For the boy-fire danced and flickered in a way that she, so solid and material, could never match. She was meant to draw blood; he was meant to draw the eye.

So the rose began to plan, for she loved the boy-fire so much that she would do anything for him. “I will become what he is,” said the rose. “Then I too will draw eyes. But how do I become fire?” The rose thought and thought. And finally, she found a way. To become fire, she would have to be reborn. The thorny rose set herself alight. Out of the rose’s petals came the burning-girl.

The burning-girl sought out the boy-fire.

“Look at how beautiful I am,” she said, and twirled in a fire’s dance. Her eyes flickered like live embers. “I have no more thorns. They have all burned off. Now I am beautiful like you.”
But the boy-fire shook his head.

“You will always be a rose. Now you’re just a rose on fire.”

And the burning-girl fell to ashes.

Ballad
The Thorned Rose
Brave -- Tenacious -- Playful – Stubborn – Crude
Coliseum Battler

It was desperation that drove her to become someone new. In love—or so she believed—with a dragon who wouldn’t even look her way, Ballad decided to change herself into an elegant skydancer like him. A coliseum fighter, she defeated enemy after enemy to scrape the treasure together, loathing her own brutality and longing to be by his side. He couldn’t love a brute of a ridgeback like her, so graceless and crude. Nobody could. But who wouldn’t love her when she was beautiful and elegant like him?

After she had scraped together the treasure and transformed, she sought him out. She thought of how his eyes would light up and how they would talk for hours, having found themselves so deeply and suddenly in love. But she was wrong. She couldn’t make him love her, no matter what shape she took. He let her down less than gently, appalled at the lengths she’d gone to win a heart that wasn’t hers to win. Broken by his rejection, Ballad retreated into herself. Days and months passed in isolation as she mourned over a love that had never had a chance to grow.

But something else began to grow out of her introspection. Seeds of her own personality remained—a personality she had never nurtured before, so desperate had she been to shape herself into something else. Yes, she had thorns, but didn’t everyone? Ballad slowly emerged from her isolation as she tested her newfound sense of self. She began to cherish the rough edges of her former personality that remained. Crude jokes told with a playful air made others laugh and smile—much to her delight. And a little bit of stubbornness went a long way towards getting what she needed. The change in her attracted other members of the clan; new friendships blossomed. She caught herself smiling more often than not. Eventually, she took up battling again and found that her love of fighting was even stronger than it had been. Now it had been honed by her love for her clan and her desire to protect them from the Beastclans.

One day, Ballad woke up and realized that she no longer felt alone. She had an entire clan to love her now.

On that day, she sought out Ashmane to apologize. She had realized that changing herself for him had been a horrible mistake—for both him and her.

“You’ve changed,” he said, simply. It was the beginning of a rocky but rewarding friendship.

At first out of pity and then out of genuine care, Ashmane took Ballad under his wing and taught her how to adapt to her new skydancer form. He is quiet and stern, almost rude—but she’s found that she doesn’t mind as much. With his help, Ballad has become just as fierce a fighter as she ever was as a ridgeback, combined with the elegance and intelligence of a true skydancer fighter. He will never love her like she wanted, but he’s a far better friend than a partner anyway. Besides, she isn’t a venus flytrap; she is a rose, and those who love her will eventually come. She is enough.