Ryūka Akebane - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Ryūka Akebane

Nickname

None

Race (Grade)

Half-Dragon (D)

Class

Dragon Rider

Height

5'8"

Birthday

Sunspeak 20, 1276

Age

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Birthsign

The Sunscale Wyrm

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Ryūka Akebane at the walls of Emberpeak, with Kazan visible on the ridge behind her

Appearance

Ryūka is a tall, striking woman whose heritage announces itself before she speaks. Her skin is warm olive with a faint heat-shimmer quality along her collarbones and upper arms: not scales exactly, but the suggestion of them, visible only when light catches her at the right angle. Her eyes are amber-gold with a slight elongation at the outer corners, and they catch firelight in a way that other eyes do not. Her dark hair is thick and wavy, worn in an elaborate updo threaded through a headdress of blackened steel and layered dragon-scale gold, a piece she built herself from shed scales and Emberpeak ironwork. A scatter of freckles crosses her nose and cheeks, which sits in interesting contrast to the rest of her, all armor and edge.

Equipment & Combat Bearing

She wears dragonscale plate, custom-smithed by an Emberpeak artisan who owed her a favor and subsequently refused to discuss the job with anyone. The armor is black and gold with deep red gem-work at the joints and breastplate; her left shoulder bears a pauldron shaped into a snarling dragon head that is more intimidating than it is subtle. A crimson cape falls from her shoulders, travel-worn at the hem but otherwise kept. She moves the way people move when they have been fighting from the back of a dragon: aware of space above and below, decisive about footing, never with her back to an open sky. She does not carry a shield. She has not needed one.

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Personality

Positive Traits

Absolute loyalty to those she chooses to trust
Reads danger before it arrives; refined survival instinct
Genuinely warm once her armor comes off, literally or not
Fiercely self-sufficient; has never waited to be rescued
Dry wit that appears without warning
Protective of anyone she considers hers, effortlessly

Challenging Traits

Default trust setting is zero in every relationship
Acts unilaterally when she believes she is right
Authority earns her skepticism before her cooperation
Asking Xaneborr for help was the hardest thing she's done
Has a short fuse if Kazan is called a trophy or weapon
Struggles to rest; resting means trusting the situation

Everyone who ever said they wanted to meet a dragon wanted something from it. Xaneborr is the first name I've heard where that might not be true. Might.

Kazan is not a weapon. He is not a trophy. He is not a mount. Call him any of those things again and this is going to be a much shorter conversation.

Emberpeak taught me what iron can withstand. The years after taught me everything else.

Likes

The sound of Kazan's breathing when he is asleep
High ground, open sky, clear sightlines
Emberpeak-style spiced flatbread, hard to find elsewhere
People who say what they mean and mean what they say
The quiet just after a threat has been eliminated

Dislikes

Being indoors for more than a day without seeing the sky
People who smile too much before they know her
The word "tame" applied to anything she cares about
Negotiations that are actually ultimatums in formal clothing
Waking up in a place she has not checked the exits of

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Background & History

Born of the Peak

Emberpeak is better prepared for half-dragon children than most cities, which is a low bar and still something. The city's deep familiarity with fire magic, draconic languages, and the varieties of creature that emerge from proximity to the great volcanic heat beneath the mountain means that Ryūka's childhood was unusual without being catastrophic. Her mother was a smith of middling reputation and exceptional stubbornness. Her father is a question she stopped trying to answer precisely when she was sixteen, which was roughly when she realized the answer would not change anything useful. Something in her blood runs red and speaks of old fire. She has always assumed it originates somewhere in the peak itself, in the long slow warmth of the thing the city was built on top of. She did not inherit wings or a breath weapon. She inherited the certainty that she could survive anything, which has proven the more practical gift.

The Egg in the Tunnels

She was fourteen when she found the egg in an abandoned smuggler's cache in the lower tunnels beneath the Forge District. She does not know how it got there. She only knows that it was warm despite sitting in cold stone, that it moved when she touched it, and that she spent the next three weeks sleeping beside it rather than tell anyone what she had found. Kazan hatched during a Heatwave downpour, which is the only kind of rain Emberpeak gets. He was the size of a housecat and he breathed a flame no bigger than a candle and he looked at her with his red-gold eyes with the absolute certainty of a creature that has just decided something irrevocable. She had the same feeling. She told no one. She kept him in the tunnels for months, feeding him from the kitchen scraps she could carry without being noticed, teaching him her voice the way you teach anything: by showing up, every day, without fail.

The Years Between

The problem with a red dragon in a city of metalworkers, merchants, and ambitious people is that everyone who learns about one immediately begins calculating its value. The first serious attempt came when Kazan was two years old, still small but already extraordinary. The second came from a Forge Council delegate who used the word "asset" three times in a single conversation and seemed confused when she declined. Ryūka stopped counting attempts after seven. They left Emberpeak when Kazan was five: young by any dragon's measure, but already horse-sized and impossible to pretend away. The years since have been a sustained exercise in staying ahead of people who want to own what they have no right to. They have slept in forest clearings, abandoned mines, the upper floors of towers that were not quite ruins. Ryūka has become very good at identifying threat before it identifies her. Kazan has become very good at knowing when she is about to move. They have not been separated since the tunnels.

The Name She Heard

She heard the name Xaneborr Shadowbane the way you hear most important things on the road: secondhand, from someone who did not realize they were telling her something that mattered. A king in the southeast who can speak to dragons. A city that keeps no enemy lists and whose gates are genuinely open. A man who is, apparently, the kind of person who might understand what Kazan is rather than what he could be worth. Ryūka has learned to be skeptical of good reputations, which travel faster than the truth that built them. But she was tired. Kazan was tired. The road from Emberpeak to Goodberry is long and passes through several territories where being a half-dragon with a visible red dragon is its own kind of announcement, and she made it anyway. She arrived at the city's edge at dusk with Kazan circling overhead, and she stood at the gate and asked, for the first time in years, for something instead of fighting for it. She is choosing, for now, to stay and see if the name lives up to the story.

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Goals

An Accord with the Dragon's Voice

She needs a formal understanding with Xaneborr Shadowbane, not because she cannot fight for Kazan herself, she has been doing exactly that for fifteen years, but because having the backing of a king who is specifically known for his relationship with dragons might finally end the pursuit. She came to Goodberry to meet him. She has not yet. She is working up to it in the way of someone who has never had to ask for protection before and is not entirely sure how the words go.

A Den for Kazan

Kazan needs somewhere safe to sleep that is not a forest clearing or an abandoned mining shaft. He is young and still growing, and he deserves a place he can call his own: somewhere with enough room for him to stretch out, somewhere that will still fit him in two years when he is larger. She has been asking around about what lies outside Goodberry's walls. She is not yet sure who to ask about something this specific, but she will figure it out. She always does.

To Stop Running

Ryūka has not slept in the same place three nights in a row for the better part of a decade. She is tired in a way that has nothing to do with physical exhaustion and everything to do with what it costs to be perpetually ready to leave. She does not know what staying in one place looks like. She does not know what it feels like to make plans past the next week. If Goodberry turns out to be what the stories said it was, she thinks she might let herself try to find out.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Dragon Rider

Bond Companion

Kazan

Bond Companion

ATTENTION!

Kazan is a young red dragon approximately the size of a large wagon. He is Ryūka's bond companion, not her pet, not her mount in any traditional sense, and emphatically not a resource. He is intelligent, opinionated, and has been known to refuse cooperation with people he does not like regardless of what Ryūka tells him to do. He currently sleeps outside the city walls in a ravine she has lined with stolen hay. This arrangement is temporary.