#even though its population quickly grew too large for her to truly befriend all of them god damn did she try

[arolesbianism]

Also let it be known I have made several rainworld ocs already and have like 3 full campaigns in my head for them mapped out in my head

[bocceclub]

Ariahd’s backstory

for real this time. also the lexicon is a separate post now because it got way too long; you can find it here. @sapropel here’s the massive wall of text as promised!

The Life of Ariahd of Leknos

The Yianlai believe dragons are the offspring of the god of choas, their goddess Valena's greatest enemy. When the Yianlai Empire invaded and conquered the north, their dragon-hunters began killing off the high dragons, until there was only one small population left in the Razka Mountains of Dymaexei. A warlock from the city-state of Leknos stumbled upon an orphaned clutch of high dragon eggs in the high mountains. The mother had been killed by dragon-hunters while defending her nest. Although luckily the clutch had remained hidden from the hunters, it had gone without being warmed by the mother for so long that, despite the warlocks’ attempts to save them, all but one of the developing dragonets died in their eggs. Ariahd, the only one of his broodmates to survive, was carefully nurtured to hatching by the warlocks. He formed a fast connection with Enos, the young daughter of the head warlock, who helped her father care for him after he hatched. As he grew they became close friends, communicating by writing, since as a dragon Ariahd had no ability to form human-like speech. He and Enos altered the Dymae alphabet into cruder forms that would be easier for him to scratch into the dirt with his claws, and even invented pictograms, creating their own shorthand script.

The imperial occupation of Dymaexei meant that Ariahd’s existence had to be kept a secret. Because of this, he grew up very sheltered, unable to venture beyond the high walls of the monastery, his only knowledge of the outside world coming from stories told by the warlocks, and the travelers’ accounts that Enos found in the library and read aloud to him. The two would occasionally sneak out to fly in the mountains surrounding the city, careful to stay under cover of darkness.

While his earlier years were happy enough, as he grew older he began to become aware of the fact that he was likely one of the last of his kind, which affected him deeply. Over the years, as Enos joined the order’s ranks as a novitiate and then as a fully fledged warlock, Ariahd also came to envy her freedom and the ease with which her human form allowed her to move through the world. As she grew older and learned magic of increasing difficulty and complexity, her formidable skill with sorcery was also a source of jealousy for him. He knew he had it in him to be just as powerful, but his dragon’s form was ill-suited to working the complex rituals of human sorcery.

Years passed, and as Ariahd neared thirty years old--still a child in dragon years--he became increasingly restless; as Enos’ duties within the order kept her occupied, he took to wandering the mountains alone, straying further and further from the monastery each time. On one such flight, unbeknownst to him he was spotted by imperial troops. Soon imperial inquisitors were dispatched to Leknos, with orders to dispose of Ariahd and execute the warlocks both for practicing sorcery, a heresy, and for sheltering a dragon. The monastery was attacked, and in an act of rash bravery Ariahd flew out to try to confront the attackers directly. He managed to kill a number of imperial troops but was mortally wounded himself; the distraction he provided allowed a large number of the order, including Enos, to escape into the mountains with the preserved dragon souls. 

The remaining warlocks dragged the dying Ariahd back behind the safety of the monastery walls. Desperate, in agony, and afraid, he begged them to preserve his soul in a vessel to keep him from truly dying. The warlocks agreed. After performing the ritual, they hid Ariahd’s soul vessel in the relic vault, which was located deep in the maze of catacombs carved into the massive rock bluff the monastery sat on. They resealed the relic vault, then committed ritual suicide rather than be tortured and executed by the inquisitors.

Ariahd's soul laid dormant, trapped in its vessel in the vault as the years went by. Fifty years later, it was discovered by a Nephiri sorcerer, Yupal. On the run from inquisitors, she had fled across the Mysskaean Sea to Dymaexei and settled in Leknos thirteen years before, where she took up a new identity, married a Leknosian man, and had a daughter, Lys. When Lys was thirteen, the Great Plague struck the Mysskaean. After ravaging coastal Dymaexei, it reached Leknos, carried by those fleeing the ravaged ports. In no time it began running its way through the city; Yupal and her family fell ill, and her husband succumbed to the Plague, leaving her and their daughter alone and close to death. Desperate to save Lys’ life, she broke into the relic vault in the monastery, hoping she'd be able to find something there to heal her. She sensed the strong magic emanating from Ariahd's soul vessel, and stole it. By the time she had returned home, Lys had died. In desperation she attempted to use necromancy to channel Ariahd's life force to resurrect her child, but accidentally opened a conduit that allowed his soul to enter the girl’s body and fuse with her soul, creating the last Walking One.

 Ariahd was taken to the monastery’s infirmary, where the monks were doing their best to heal the gravely ill. For days he lay in a deep sleep, as the two souls within his body fused into one, and the monks caring for him feared he would die. Finally, he awoke. Unable to speak or write with his new hands, he had no way of telling the monks who he was or what had happened. At a loss, the monks asked Phare, a senior monk and accomplished healer, to attend to him. She had been a novitiate before the inquisitors’ attack on the monastery and the warlocks’ extermination, and when she used magic to examine Ariahd’s soul she realized immediately what he was. Phare informed the monks, and they made the decision to take him in (along with countless other children orphaned by the Plague), and began teaching him to be human.

 For about ten years he stayed with the monks, at first simply learning to live in his new shape but later becoming a novitiate within the order. During his tutelage he discovered he had a gift for art, which the monks had him put to use illustrating sacred manuscripts and decorating the monastery with frescoes of scenes from Dymae mythology. Under the monks’ guidance he also began retraining in the basics of magic; while he had mastered basic magecraft as a dragon, in his new form he had to completely relearn how to connect to and channel his own power. When he was skilled enough, they introduced sorcery into his studies, which he quickly excelled at without the restraints of his dragon’s shape.

Despite how much he enjoyed his new life with the monks, over the years Ariahd once again became restless, longing to see more of the world that he’d been cloistered from his entire life. When the time came for him to become a fully ordained monk at twenty years old (his body’s physical age), he decided to leave the order instead, and depart Leknos to seek his own purpose in life.

When it came time for him to leave, he hitched a ride with a loggers’ caravan to the port city of Kymospa and from there caught a ship to the island of Temuz, where he hoped to further refine the painting skills he had first developed at the monastery. While apprenticed there under a master artist he fell in love with Talit, daughter of wealthy cloth merchants and a fellow apprentice. They became lovers, and remained so for the three years of their apprenticeship. During their scant free time outside of the painter’s workshop, Talit taught Ariahd how to sail among the islets and sandbars in the sea surrounding the island. He also started to take a renewed interest in sorcery, especially weather-working, an ancient discipline practiced by Mysskaean seafarers to turn the wind and sea in their favor. It was at this time that he began to feel uncomfortable with his body and realized he thought of himself as a man. At the urging of Talit, who was also transgender, he sought out a physician and sorcerer specializing in flesh-sculpting to help him transition physically. Up until this point he had been using the name Lys, which had belonged to his human host, and which the monks (all except Phare) had called him. He renamed himself Ariahd, which means “he who sees clearly”.

The more Ariahd explored sorcery, the more fascinated he became with it. As the end of his and Talit’s apprenticeship neared he confided in her that he planned to depart Temuz for Dossiwarri, and enroll in its famous Chabawi University to study under the master sorcerers there. Talit, wishing to pursue her own career, was not willing to accompany him to Dossiwarri. The two parted amicably, and remained friends until her death a century later. Talit would go on to become a well-known and sought-after painter, commissioned all across the Mysskaean, and her and Ariahd’s paths crossed often. 

Three years after arriving in Temuz, Ariahd bid his master and fellow former apprentices goodbye and set sail for Dossiwarri. Upon arrival in the city, though, his money and belongings were stolen. Determined to earn back what he had had saved up to to pay the university’s entrance fee, he took up work as a dock worker, staying in a squalid hostel in the Dymae Quarter and practicing hedge-magic on the side for extra coin. He also continued to further his transition, having taught himself flesh-sculpting from what he’d gleaned from the Temuzo sorcerer-physician.

A group of Dymae university students—Lesta, a physician in training, Kenoad, studying poetry, and Pallas, an apprentice architect—who were also regulars at the wineshop he frequented in the Dymae Quarter noticed that he always drank alone, and decided to befriend him. They offered him a room in the house they shared, and pitched in to help him pay his entrance fee.

Ariahd was accepted into the university, easily passing the entrance exam, and began studying under the formidable Dossiwarrim sorcerer Fatawa Bernu. When Fatawa saw Ariahd’s natural aptitude for magic, she brought him and a few other select students into the university’s under-school—a small circle of faculty and students dedicated to preserving the practice of disciplines banned by the empire, among them necromancy, shape-changing, and martial sorcery. Ariahd also studied, along with a select handful of other students, under Ilan-Afis, an Eshtari sorcerer, in the art of weather-working. The Dossiwarri had long enjoyed the knowledge and prosperity the sea trade brought to their city, but were not sailors themselves; weather-working had been developed primarily by Dymae, Temuz, and Eshtari seafarers over the centuries, and a sorcerer from one of those cultures had always been employed by the Chabawi University to teach the discipline to its students.

One of the other students to be inducted into the under-school was a young Dossiwarim man named Washadi; during their education he and Ariahd became first friends and then lovers. During this time Ariahd finished his physical transition to his satisfaction. As their studies dragged on, tensions were growing between the people of Dossiwarri and the imperial ruling class. When the long-festering resentment finally boiled over into a full-scale revolt one hot summer, Ariahd and Washadi, along with countless other sorcerers studying at Chabawi, were called to lend their aid to the rebels. During one of the skirmishes Ariahd was seriously wounded, and had to be put into a magically induced coma by the sorcerer who healed him. When he awoke, he was told that Washadi had disappeared in combat, and was almost certainly dead. Once he had recovered enough he searched day and night for Washadi, but in the chaotic aftermath of the revolt his efforts proved fruitless.

Heartbroken, he packed his scant belongings, found a ship in need of a sorcerer, and departed from Dossiwarri. He would not return for another ten years, whereupon he discovered that Washadi had been captured and imprisoned by the empire, but had escaped and made his way back to Dossiwarri. In the decade following his return he had married and started a family, but extended the invitation for Ariahd to stay in Dossiwarri, telling him he’d put in a good word for him at Chabawi University, where he now taught medical sorcery. Ariahd declined, choosing instead to continue working as a ship’s sorcerer.

After sailing the Mysskaean Sea (and beyond) for decades, Ariahd grew tired of life at sea. He made his way to the far north and settled in Nossk, the capital city of the island nation Gumir, where he works as a painter in the present day. While most of his business comes from mourners commissioning funerary portraits of their dead loved ones, he is also often paid by the city counsel to paint the murals that adorn Nossk’s government buildings, temples, and municipal spaces. He lives with his partner, a Vazkyrohk sailor named Skovej Tide-Runner, in a small house in Nossk’s artisan quarter. The two met five years ago when their ships wintered in the same port, and from then on became inseparable. Skovej crews on a whaling ship during the summer, but spends the off-season with Ariahd in Nossk. They own a longhaired black cat named Renjir, who Skovej found as a stray kitten wandering the city docks. After almost a century of wandering, Ariahd all the more appreciates the small comforts of domesticity, taking great pleasure in living a quiet life among his books and paints; his past as a dragon seems so far removed from his current life as to be a dream.