------------- Tales of the Raptors – Eyes of The Hidden

You know the story of my charge, Chianna Soong. But my story is much longer, and much sadder. Needless to say, you see me as something I am probably not. These eyes would lie to you. Yet in their lies, truth is found.

We should go back, nearly three centuries, to the end of the War of Tryskellias. The Delsians knew it had happened. They said it was the humans’ war, none of their concern. They didn’t know, no one did, that off-worlders had used the war to take control of Arrallon. The Antarian Republic had started it and used it to begin slowly manipulating our world for their own purposes. They were not alone. The Ashiri had come. And where there is light, there are Shadows. My mother and her husband were some of those the Shadows had touched, changing the way their minds worked. But their manipulations had unintended consequences. My mother’s husband felt the call first. They came to the continent of Callona, searching for something unknown. Here they found others like themselves, humans and primitive elves, and even dwarves. They had all been touched. They banded together to try and understand their new powers. It was not long until they had gained power enough to see into the future. What they saw scared them, and drove them to create a secret society for psionics,… The Hidden.

It was not long after that their first place was attacked by the very monsters who had made them. My mother was the only one to survive. She was saved and carried off by a young Mythral Dragon. He had never seen a Delsian Elf before. No one had. So, he assumed she must be Paleurevallan. For a time he visited her in his elven form, until at last they fell in love. And against all edicts and tenants of his church, they had a child, me. But my mother did not survive.

My size and abilities made me strange to the Paleurevallans, and their memory of my mother made it even more so. My father couldn’t take me to his people, for half-dragons were considered abominations in the eyes of the Church of Bahamut. And he couldn’t leave me with the Paleurevallans. Thus began our lives as outcasts, living alone in the mountains, surviving off the land. Magic came naturally to me, as did the powers of the mind. My father soon saw that I was unique, the abomination he had feared. It caused him pain and guilt that I only now begin to understand. In time, he turned me over to The Hidden and flew off. I would not see him again for over a century.

The Hidden trained me as Psi-Warlock, a sorceress skilled in psionic as well as martial combat. And my service to them eventually led me to discover the ugly truth my father had hidden from me, that I was a shapeshifting monster, a half-dragon. It was in the early days of the construction of the fortress at Chia’Khan that I encountered the vile worshippers of Tiamat, the draconians, and the Abishai. After my horrible self-discovery, The Hidden taught me to embrace this new found power. Instead of fleeing from my ugliness, I used it, infiltrating Chia’Khan as a Shaddz Draconian, a spy, the eyes of the Hidden.

I was there for King Nordrage’s rise and fall as the Dragon Emperor. I was there when the Mythral Queen exposed all the Shadow agents in her own clan. And I was there when my father was executed as one of those agents.

What do you see in my eyes? Is it the emerald green of the Paleurevallans? The sky blue of the Delsians? The nictating membrane of the Mythral Dragons? The beast within me? The steadfast guardian or the dutiful spy? Maybe it’s all of those, and none.

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