Post by Orianna Èirigh on Feb 22, 2023 13:05:03 GMT
22 Nightall 1499 DR
Orianna’s hand reaches out, fingertips trembling in anticipation. It was risky, idiotic, even hazardous to her health… but she had to know. It was like a compulsion, a need born from the gaps in her memories that returned for-… reasons she could not remember.
She sucked in one last piece of air, then laid her hand flat against the amethyst crystal.
A roaring sensation — or was it a sound? — rushes through her mind, searing it. She has left her body. She is formless, weightless, timeless, but not without thought. Not without understanding, even if it is only the size of a single grain of sand in a vast cosmic desert.
And she sees.
-a dragon roaring inside the cave-
-a form — scales, wings, horns, and tail — covered in stars and constellations… a familiar form that looks like a-
-claw rending flesh, amethyst scales tearing away from a snarling draconic form, a single moment in a fight before-
“Orianna…”
Lucky’s voice comes from so far away as she slowly rises up from the dark. Orianna opens her eyes blearily. The tabaxi’s worried sapphire eyes are peering down at her, as strong arms holding her firmly upright.
“Orianna, are you all right?” he repeats.
“Wha…” She tries to stand but has a moment where her cloven feet aren’t able to get under her. Lucky assists as she tries again. “Y-Yes… I am. It just-” The roaring is fading away — the roaring of a dragon, “… it was a vision. It will pass…”
This moment, along with the name given to her by the aspect of Bahamut she and her friends had met, was what brought Orianna to a different part of the Academy. Stellarum Tenebris. A dragon covered — or was it made of? — stars and constellations. How difficult could it be to find out about this being?
It turns out, not very hard at all.
Art by Sandara Tang
Orianna finds a large, illuminated tome that she rests reverently onto a stand. Donning a pair of cloth gloves, she studies the illustrator’s interpretation of the dragon for a long time, trying to find familiarity between it and her vision. After a while, she begins to read the page written in an ancient form of Draconic, making her own notes in a book her tail holds up for her.
“Stellarum Tenebris, is a… hmm, I think the translation is ‘low level’, intermediate god known as the Star Dragon.”
She pauses, glowing violet eyes flicking up to the illustration before falling back to the archaic words.
“Also known as… The Star Forger and the Mother-” The words catch in the mouth. Orianna clears her throat and tries again. “Mother of the Night Sky.”
A prayer shrouded by hidden memories she cannot remember comes unbidden to her in a voice that makes her heart ache with longing.
“O my Mother, stretch Yourself over me, that I may be placed among the imperishable stars which are in You, and that I may not die.”
Closing her eyes and unconsciously brushing the back of her hand against her dampened eyes, Orianna continues reading. “She is a… queen? No. The head of a draconic pantheon…” Her brows furrow as she reads on a little faster now. She realises the entry in the text isn’t that large and before she’s aware of it, she reaches the end.
“Strange,” she observes. Then begins to mutter and frantically scribble in her notebook. “A draconic pantheon different from the widely known one… with Stellarum possibly having an unknown link to either Lathander or Selûne.”
As Orianna continues to reread the tome to make her notes, a flood of emotions — thoughts of a home she does not remember, of a family whose faces she cannot see — rises up from somewhere underneath. It pulls her under into a cathedral of confusion, where she remains for the rest of the day, lost, unable to breathe or speak or understand why, where, or how she has come to feel this way. Only that she does.