Name: Adhara Halloran
Age: 300
Birthday: October 8th
Gender: Female
Species: Dragon
Category: Staff
Class: College
Subject/Work: Scrying
Appearance Description: Adhara stands at six feet and four inches tall with a motherly presence. She is one of the largest of her siblings though she was the younger of her nest. She has azure colored-hair and blue eyes. Her skin, too, sometimes seems to have a bluish hue though it is mostly a pale but healthy seeming color.
In dragon form, Adhara is seventy-eight feet long with a wingspan of sixty-seven feet. She has a slender build similar to Eastern Earth dragons and long, mostly straight horns. While her underbelly is white, the rest of her body is colored a blue to white gradient, spotted with blue spots of color. Her mane and horns are similarly colored.
Personality Description: A lady from the Mariawa Empire, weak in health, strong in spirit. Adhara once had a twin named Aquarius but when the court announced their assignments, they were sent to different planets. Brave and kind, Adhara serves as the chancellor and leader of Clan Maserift. Though deeply loyal to her friends and family, her stubbornness and grudge against the Empire has left her at odds with her siblings.
Adhara is the sort of lady who would rather lead from the front rather than behind. Used to taking other's orders all her life, she has only just learned how to take control of her own future and desperately urges others to do the same. Aided by her foresight, she has a firm grip on the direction she wants her clan to run in -progressively more and more open to public view on Manta Carlos.
Active Abilities: Draconic Shifting - Adhara is able to transform between her dragon and human forms at will, though doing so takes focus and should not be done within closed quarters. She, like much of her family, are sickly and as such she can carry only up to half her weight (something like ten thousand pounds). Partial transformations are possible but uncomfortable and whenever switching forms, Adhara is unlikely to change back for quite some time. One reason for this is that her general health does not allow for spontaneous transformations. Another a key reason for this is clothing. Anything that she wears while in human form has to be magically broken down and reconstructed when changing forms.
Blessing of the Thousand Currents - Adhara's family has been blessed by the titan of water, a great and powerful entity who dwells in the deepest depths of his homeworld's planet. This titan is the personification of water itself, able to manipulate it at will and also capable of seeing the future through it. Adhara is particularly adept in scrying on fluid materials, whether it be wind or water. On the wind, she can often see quick images of things happening around her in a range of about mile. These images last for several seconds at best, with no real indicator of where they came from. Water is the medium through which Adhara does most of her scrying. This allows her to see either the past or future and she is skilled enough that she can choose which one she wishes to see. Her scrying abilities are strong enough that she can see up to several months into the future or several weeks into the past. In terms of water magic, Adhara is capable of small, general acts. She is able to manipulate water briefly, mainly to allow her to walk on it or prevent it from splashing against her.
Healing Magic - Adhara is trained as a general healer, able to use magic to heal most serious wounds. She does not need contact with her patient to heal them and her magic can work on targets up to thirty feet away. Adhara is best at healing visible surface wounds - internal damage is extremely tricky for her to heal and takes much energy and sometimes even hours of concentration. She is unable to treat illnesses.
Passive Abilities: Draconic Physiology - Dragons of Adhara's species are capable long distance flight. After some training, which she has received, they are even able to fly through outer space. Because of her family's affiliation with the titan of water, Adhara can also breathe underwater.
Foresight of the Titan - Adhara often receives flashes of the present within a mile radius.
Biography: They learned to sit like dolls when they were young and their bones still were deceptively as fragile as those of other children. This, they were told, would stave off some of the strain that their bodies would one day -soon- feel. It had been learned through trial and error, by the lives and crooked bodies of the many siblings before them. Each one had been perfect at some point in time. Each was irrevocably flawed now and had been so since birth. But that was (not) a different time. Things would (never) be different now (ever).
In the court of the Mariawa Emperor, Adhara was born to an aristocratic union both horribly admired and greatly reviled for their beautiful, enfeebling illness. She was the younger of a set of twins perceived as lucky for having both a male and a female, a left and a right. Many of their siblings had already been sent away to far-away lairs where they would serve as advisers (statues) or perhaps even mates (trophies) to clan heads. That this too would be the twins' fate was never up for question. As children of the Thousand Currents, such a thing could not have been hidden. Nobody tried.
Within the winding corridors of the keep, the twins sought out the mysteries of divination but only as far as their teachers would allow. For the sake of perfection, every step had to be strictly governed, least they meet the fates of those siblings who pushed their bodies too far. Bit by bit, they heard stories of this sister who had lost herself in her visions and starved, of that one who had been found dead face-down in her scrying bowl, that brother who had gone mad when fever and over-work had burnt his brain. It was here among the mutters of oracles that they began to truly feel burden of illness and fear.
Self-preservation came first. Awkward around familial ties and too used to being good children, the twins separated from each other with the ease of unfamiliarity. Whatever had happened in those distant spheres, Adhara never learned what her twin had done there. She, however, let her interest in her studies dry up, taking up her tools of magic with indifference, even annoyance as illness swung her from good days and bad days without warning. This was one of many elements attempting to devour her life but diminishing its role only made her realize just how little there was for her, just how much was beyond her reach.
The ladies of the court came to her with their stories of illness, of fantastic princesses ailed but only made more good and pitiable and attractive by their disease. For a while, she dared to dream that she was like them instead of the ugly, crippled untouchables that had been glossed over. However, the romanticism died soon, somewhere between the second and third day when nothing in her stomach would stay down.
None of those fair-weather well-wishers would come around then and she came to hate it all -her and their combined hypocrisy. These marks that her peers lauded were signs of disease and perpetuated imperfection. Imperfection that was desired and so different from leper's scars or pockmarks -but were they really? They were not birthed for health or long life, only for their markings. Who would wish that upon their children? And there had been so many of them already! They were easy to replace.
Adhara was stubborn. Adhara was angry. She smashed her distant sphere wide open and trampled her way to her brother's side, intent on fighting (!) anybody who tried to force her back to her own room. What she found was an open door, stacks of bowls, and a very sick Imperial gesturing to the open space across from him. "I saw you coming," he said with a wheeze. She was touched until he added, "Also, you were being loud."
They recovered as best as their poor health could. They fell ill, again and again in the same manner that their elders had. Adhara learned to read fortunes in the stray currents that other dragons created in their haste while her twin fought for snatches of the future in windows and mirrors. Each bout of sickness brought them time to compare what they had learned, to pause in their fervent pursuit of usefulness as the number of their siblings at court grew smaller and smaller.
She was bothered, once, by the discovery that she was the weaker of the pair before her worry shifted to a different factor. The fact that she could not see him in her currents was unacceptable. He had never failed to find her in his crystals. The disparity seemed unjust but she forced the fear down. She could be happy for him instead. They were not merely two companion dolls, it dawned on her. They were siblings, blood and magic bonded, and she loved him.
Later, Adhara would recall her decision with guilt-ridden relief. For all that their lives had been centered on such a single-minded purpose, they had both managed to forget that it would mean the end of their lives together.
Their sovereign was the one to issue the news as the twins stared at each other in disbelief. They were to be separated by worlds, never to meet again. For the first time, Adhara looked fearfully to her parents for help. But her silent plea ghosted passed them and they were like strangers to her. Their approval was swift and final.
Her brother leaned down and breathed in her ear. For a moment, it was impossible to not be calmed by his presence. "Of all the titans, the titan of earth alone understands what it means to lose a sibling." His reassurance was bitter but soothing. She would have a life up on the earth, perhaps even a good one.
But Adhara thought for a moment and her fear for him grew. "The titan of ice was one of the first to leave," she muttered back to him, trying to convey in that one sentence the entirety of her sorrow and love. Her brother was silent then. They were not easily parted.
At night, her dreams slipped onto a darkly marvelous expanse of ice, the features of the horizon faded with foreboding. Her wings were pulled down by a frigid wind that forced her to bend her head down for little refuge against the dead sea. There were fish captured in motion under the surface, undisturbed and unmoving. She breathed out a scraping mist that broke through to the sea life, turning them into dragons. All of this was shown to her with a clarity that she had already lost in real life.
She slept soundly.
In the morning, her twin prepared for his ascent to the surface. She would wait a month or so more because it would be improper for the younger to arrive before the older. Together for the last time, they watched the streaks of early morning sunlight paint the waters of their youth. He nudged her, she blinked at him, and suddenly his glasses were lopsided on her face and she could see the sunlight as clearly as her dream.
"You should wear those," he told her, dismissing her protests by doning a spare. "I would have found a pair for you eventually but I suppose we ran out of time."
What exactly could she say to that? She fixed them as she had always seen him do, the frames digging uncomfortably into her face. Their tutors at court had never let her wear them before; squinting was unladylike but being able to gaze dreamily out from half-lidded eyes was attractive and so full of nonsense that she would have laughed herself sick if the sudden realization of what they had done was not so distressing.
"I'll give them back." The words surprised a laugh out of him and she was glad because it was better than tears. An hour later, she met him at the gates of their home. They shared a hug and then he was gone.
When Adhara herself left home at last, she did so under the silent watch of her parents, conscious of the moment when they turned back to the shrieking of young hatchlings. Already, more of their siblings had been brought into the world. Perhaps this was the reason that their older brothers and sisters had always been distant, because their worries were too heavy to let any others into their lives, because they knew that they would feel as she did the moment that she brought the surface to breathe the fresh, salty air. Others would suffer but she was free and glad of it; if she were sad, then that would be the same as losing. With the vague burden of absence, she fixed her slipping glasses for the hundredth time and spread her wings.
There were many things that Adhara expected of her new position but what she expected least of all was to be free. On a cold, new dawn, she came to her new clan only to be met by a pile of corpses, all of her would-be clanmates rotting on the ground outside their homes. Staring at the bodies, she was seized by a maddening rush of despair, horror, joy, and hope. She feared for the happiness she felt, wondering if she would be like the rest of her kin, rejoicing in the deaths of others.
"What now?" One of her attendants wondered out loud, fidgeting worryngly.
Right then, Adhara could see the beginnings of fractures. She saw a shadow pass over the others' suspicious faces. Already, they feared and suspected each other of ills which had not even occurred. If she stayed as she was and said nothing, then the uneasy peace would come apart at the seams. She made a choice then. She lifted her head and stepped forward.
They built their new clan on the remains of the old, honoring the dead as the previous clan was known to. The homes, they left untouched as testament to the lives that had once been sheltered there but Adhara insisted that they take up the legacy that had been left behind - their books. There, she found the secrets of the earth buried deep in the clan's ancient archives, untouched by any being for generations. She returned with them to the surface and swore to be their new guardian, telling only her closest allies of what she had found. But a graveyard was no place for birthing and soon after they had cleaned out the libraries, they departed with a blessing for those resting bones.
Adhara cast away her old name and became a Halloran, choosing to establish her own dynasty and banish the shadows of Mariawa. Their numbers swelled, boosted by an influx of mercenaries calling themselves the Sidereal Guild - many of whom went on to become key players in the clan. The leader of the guild chose a humble life for herself and her mate, serving as quiet advisers. It was they who pointed Adhara towards Manta Carlos Island, the place of their birth.
Resources: Adhara has a steady job as a teacher at the college and the income to match. She also has her quite substantial dowry which was never opened.
Age: 300
Birthday: October 8th
Gender: Female
Species: Dragon
Category: Staff
Class: College
Subject/Work: Scrying
Appearance Description: Adhara stands at six feet and four inches tall with a motherly presence. She is one of the largest of her siblings though she was the younger of her nest. She has azure colored-hair and blue eyes. Her skin, too, sometimes seems to have a bluish hue though it is mostly a pale but healthy seeming color.
In dragon form, Adhara is seventy-eight feet long with a wingspan of sixty-seven feet. She has a slender build similar to Eastern Earth dragons and long, mostly straight horns. While her underbelly is white, the rest of her body is colored a blue to white gradient, spotted with blue spots of color. Her mane and horns are similarly colored.
Personality Description: A lady from the Mariawa Empire, weak in health, strong in spirit. Adhara once had a twin named Aquarius but when the court announced their assignments, they were sent to different planets. Brave and kind, Adhara serves as the chancellor and leader of Clan Maserift. Though deeply loyal to her friends and family, her stubbornness and grudge against the Empire has left her at odds with her siblings.
Adhara is the sort of lady who would rather lead from the front rather than behind. Used to taking other's orders all her life, she has only just learned how to take control of her own future and desperately urges others to do the same. Aided by her foresight, she has a firm grip on the direction she wants her clan to run in -progressively more and more open to public view on Manta Carlos.
Active Abilities: Draconic Shifting - Adhara is able to transform between her dragon and human forms at will, though doing so takes focus and should not be done within closed quarters. She, like much of her family, are sickly and as such she can carry only up to half her weight (something like ten thousand pounds). Partial transformations are possible but uncomfortable and whenever switching forms, Adhara is unlikely to change back for quite some time. One reason for this is that her general health does not allow for spontaneous transformations. Another a key reason for this is clothing. Anything that she wears while in human form has to be magically broken down and reconstructed when changing forms.
Blessing of the Thousand Currents - Adhara's family has been blessed by the titan of water, a great and powerful entity who dwells in the deepest depths of his homeworld's planet. This titan is the personification of water itself, able to manipulate it at will and also capable of seeing the future through it. Adhara is particularly adept in scrying on fluid materials, whether it be wind or water. On the wind, she can often see quick images of things happening around her in a range of about mile. These images last for several seconds at best, with no real indicator of where they came from. Water is the medium through which Adhara does most of her scrying. This allows her to see either the past or future and she is skilled enough that she can choose which one she wishes to see. Her scrying abilities are strong enough that she can see up to several months into the future or several weeks into the past. In terms of water magic, Adhara is capable of small, general acts. She is able to manipulate water briefly, mainly to allow her to walk on it or prevent it from splashing against her.
Healing Magic - Adhara is trained as a general healer, able to use magic to heal most serious wounds. She does not need contact with her patient to heal them and her magic can work on targets up to thirty feet away. Adhara is best at healing visible surface wounds - internal damage is extremely tricky for her to heal and takes much energy and sometimes even hours of concentration. She is unable to treat illnesses.
Passive Abilities: Draconic Physiology - Dragons of Adhara's species are capable long distance flight. After some training, which she has received, they are even able to fly through outer space. Because of her family's affiliation with the titan of water, Adhara can also breathe underwater.
Foresight of the Titan - Adhara often receives flashes of the present within a mile radius.
Biography: They learned to sit like dolls when they were young and their bones still were deceptively as fragile as those of other children. This, they were told, would stave off some of the strain that their bodies would one day -soon- feel. It had been learned through trial and error, by the lives and crooked bodies of the many siblings before them. Each one had been perfect at some point in time. Each was irrevocably flawed now and had been so since birth. But that was (not) a different time. Things would (never) be different now (ever).
In the court of the Mariawa Emperor, Adhara was born to an aristocratic union both horribly admired and greatly reviled for their beautiful, enfeebling illness. She was the younger of a set of twins perceived as lucky for having both a male and a female, a left and a right. Many of their siblings had already been sent away to far-away lairs where they would serve as advisers (statues) or perhaps even mates (trophies) to clan heads. That this too would be the twins' fate was never up for question. As children of the Thousand Currents, such a thing could not have been hidden. Nobody tried.
Within the winding corridors of the keep, the twins sought out the mysteries of divination but only as far as their teachers would allow. For the sake of perfection, every step had to be strictly governed, least they meet the fates of those siblings who pushed their bodies too far. Bit by bit, they heard stories of this sister who had lost herself in her visions and starved, of that one who had been found dead face-down in her scrying bowl, that brother who had gone mad when fever and over-work had burnt his brain. It was here among the mutters of oracles that they began to truly feel burden of illness and fear.
Self-preservation came first. Awkward around familial ties and too used to being good children, the twins separated from each other with the ease of unfamiliarity. Whatever had happened in those distant spheres, Adhara never learned what her twin had done there. She, however, let her interest in her studies dry up, taking up her tools of magic with indifference, even annoyance as illness swung her from good days and bad days without warning. This was one of many elements attempting to devour her life but diminishing its role only made her realize just how little there was for her, just how much was beyond her reach.
The ladies of the court came to her with their stories of illness, of fantastic princesses ailed but only made more good and pitiable and attractive by their disease. For a while, she dared to dream that she was like them instead of the ugly, crippled untouchables that had been glossed over. However, the romanticism died soon, somewhere between the second and third day when nothing in her stomach would stay down.
None of those fair-weather well-wishers would come around then and she came to hate it all -her and their combined hypocrisy. These marks that her peers lauded were signs of disease and perpetuated imperfection. Imperfection that was desired and so different from leper's scars or pockmarks -but were they really? They were not birthed for health or long life, only for their markings. Who would wish that upon their children? And there had been so many of them already! They were easy to replace.
Adhara was stubborn. Adhara was angry. She smashed her distant sphere wide open and trampled her way to her brother's side, intent on fighting (!) anybody who tried to force her back to her own room. What she found was an open door, stacks of bowls, and a very sick Imperial gesturing to the open space across from him. "I saw you coming," he said with a wheeze. She was touched until he added, "Also, you were being loud."
They recovered as best as their poor health could. They fell ill, again and again in the same manner that their elders had. Adhara learned to read fortunes in the stray currents that other dragons created in their haste while her twin fought for snatches of the future in windows and mirrors. Each bout of sickness brought them time to compare what they had learned, to pause in their fervent pursuit of usefulness as the number of their siblings at court grew smaller and smaller.
She was bothered, once, by the discovery that she was the weaker of the pair before her worry shifted to a different factor. The fact that she could not see him in her currents was unacceptable. He had never failed to find her in his crystals. The disparity seemed unjust but she forced the fear down. She could be happy for him instead. They were not merely two companion dolls, it dawned on her. They were siblings, blood and magic bonded, and she loved him.
Later, Adhara would recall her decision with guilt-ridden relief. For all that their lives had been centered on such a single-minded purpose, they had both managed to forget that it would mean the end of their lives together.
Their sovereign was the one to issue the news as the twins stared at each other in disbelief. They were to be separated by worlds, never to meet again. For the first time, Adhara looked fearfully to her parents for help. But her silent plea ghosted passed them and they were like strangers to her. Their approval was swift and final.
Her brother leaned down and breathed in her ear. For a moment, it was impossible to not be calmed by his presence. "Of all the titans, the titan of earth alone understands what it means to lose a sibling." His reassurance was bitter but soothing. She would have a life up on the earth, perhaps even a good one.
But Adhara thought for a moment and her fear for him grew. "The titan of ice was one of the first to leave," she muttered back to him, trying to convey in that one sentence the entirety of her sorrow and love. Her brother was silent then. They were not easily parted.
At night, her dreams slipped onto a darkly marvelous expanse of ice, the features of the horizon faded with foreboding. Her wings were pulled down by a frigid wind that forced her to bend her head down for little refuge against the dead sea. There were fish captured in motion under the surface, undisturbed and unmoving. She breathed out a scraping mist that broke through to the sea life, turning them into dragons. All of this was shown to her with a clarity that she had already lost in real life.
She slept soundly.
In the morning, her twin prepared for his ascent to the surface. She would wait a month or so more because it would be improper for the younger to arrive before the older. Together for the last time, they watched the streaks of early morning sunlight paint the waters of their youth. He nudged her, she blinked at him, and suddenly his glasses were lopsided on her face and she could see the sunlight as clearly as her dream.
"You should wear those," he told her, dismissing her protests by doning a spare. "I would have found a pair for you eventually but I suppose we ran out of time."
What exactly could she say to that? She fixed them as she had always seen him do, the frames digging uncomfortably into her face. Their tutors at court had never let her wear them before; squinting was unladylike but being able to gaze dreamily out from half-lidded eyes was attractive and so full of nonsense that she would have laughed herself sick if the sudden realization of what they had done was not so distressing.
"I'll give them back." The words surprised a laugh out of him and she was glad because it was better than tears. An hour later, she met him at the gates of their home. They shared a hug and then he was gone.
When Adhara herself left home at last, she did so under the silent watch of her parents, conscious of the moment when they turned back to the shrieking of young hatchlings. Already, more of their siblings had been brought into the world. Perhaps this was the reason that their older brothers and sisters had always been distant, because their worries were too heavy to let any others into their lives, because they knew that they would feel as she did the moment that she brought the surface to breathe the fresh, salty air. Others would suffer but she was free and glad of it; if she were sad, then that would be the same as losing. With the vague burden of absence, she fixed her slipping glasses for the hundredth time and spread her wings.
There were many things that Adhara expected of her new position but what she expected least of all was to be free. On a cold, new dawn, she came to her new clan only to be met by a pile of corpses, all of her would-be clanmates rotting on the ground outside their homes. Staring at the bodies, she was seized by a maddening rush of despair, horror, joy, and hope. She feared for the happiness she felt, wondering if she would be like the rest of her kin, rejoicing in the deaths of others.
"What now?" One of her attendants wondered out loud, fidgeting worryngly.
Right then, Adhara could see the beginnings of fractures. She saw a shadow pass over the others' suspicious faces. Already, they feared and suspected each other of ills which had not even occurred. If she stayed as she was and said nothing, then the uneasy peace would come apart at the seams. She made a choice then. She lifted her head and stepped forward.
They built their new clan on the remains of the old, honoring the dead as the previous clan was known to. The homes, they left untouched as testament to the lives that had once been sheltered there but Adhara insisted that they take up the legacy that had been left behind - their books. There, she found the secrets of the earth buried deep in the clan's ancient archives, untouched by any being for generations. She returned with them to the surface and swore to be their new guardian, telling only her closest allies of what she had found. But a graveyard was no place for birthing and soon after they had cleaned out the libraries, they departed with a blessing for those resting bones.
Adhara cast away her old name and became a Halloran, choosing to establish her own dynasty and banish the shadows of Mariawa. Their numbers swelled, boosted by an influx of mercenaries calling themselves the Sidereal Guild - many of whom went on to become key players in the clan. The leader of the guild chose a humble life for herself and her mate, serving as quiet advisers. It was they who pointed Adhara towards Manta Carlos Island, the place of their birth.
Resources: Adhara has a steady job as a teacher at the college and the income to match. She also has her quite substantial dowry which was never opened.
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