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The water calls to her. It beckons with each drop of rain that strikes her skin, every burble and woosh of the shores near her birth clan's territory, with all the coils of moisture around her claws and wings on the foggiest of days and nights. Even when the riverbank that provides them food floods and destroys dens, when rainstorms that watered crops instead crush trees and boulders, when furious swirls of cloud hide danger 'till it's too late while it tries to shield those within it, Myreau hears that same not-voice and knows it is for her, and her alone. Myreau knows it may have been her, once.
Her parents believe her fixation to be a quirk. Her peers think it an oddity. Eventually she ceases to speak of it, and her fascination passes into memory as strange, but harmless in the end.
They don’t know the hours spent at the bank, hidden in underbrush. How she watched the few ocean-eyed dragons of the clan bend and twist currents to their wills the way shadows curl to hers. They don’t know her attempts to act as they did, the resignation and grief when the waters failed to recognize the thrum of her magic, the answering call in her soul.
Myreau could push. She could reach just a little further, squeeze another inch from outstretched claws and tipped-toes and spread wings. This bundle in her chest would spill out and thread through her muscles and veins, it would come to her palms, and through it she might yet touch what lies just out of reach. It will come if she asks, she knows.
She will not be the same if she does.
Instead Myreau unsheathes talons both physical and not, and learns to harness what magic she does hold with a ferocity and discipline that startles even herself. In one hand, healing. In the other, death. The water does not hear but she can, and the water does more than beckon her forth - it teaches, too. Her strikes fall upon enemies like the break of waves on shore, her aid spells like the soothing salty breeze.
A traveller stops by, one day. Myreau does not know when they do, at first, embroiled in her studies as she is. She returns to her clan that eve, though, and meets the visiting imperial while they crowd around the fire as a welcomed guest, stories already spilling from their maw to the open ears of the hatchlings. The visitor themselves is yet young, still growing and barely a fraction of the size she knows an adult imperial can reach, the strangest growths nestled along their back and legs. Little wings, she realizes, feathery and fluttering.
Her soul sings, soft notes like home, and reaches. Before she can pull it in and prevent the ache silence brings, before the waters can go deaf to her once more, a new song reaches back. She meets the imperial’s goggled eyes across the fire, even as their notes twist and twine together beyond everyone’s ears but Myreau’s and theirs. A dozen faces and eyes witnessed only before in dreams bloom in her mind. Echoes and figments of countless lifetimes in her mental eye, each lived backward until it is her and them and a handful others, few but precious in the time before their parting. Nostalgia for something she doesn't know or understand fills her breast.
She takes her meal and leaves for the oceanside, outside the woods the clan calls home. Used to her moods, the clan does not follow. Nor does the imperial traveller.
(Later she comes to them, camped at the outskirts. No one told her their name, nor them hers. The clan does not know she doesn’t need it.
“Hello, Zeviam,” Myreau says in the sanctity of broad wings and conjured darkness, name strange and right on her tongue. “It’s been a while.”
“Hello, Myreau,” says Zeviam. Raw arcana swirls in their exposed gaze rather than the gales she feels they are, deep down, and she basks in the companionship of someone who understands. “Do you have time? Our siblings are waiting, and I’m sure they miss you too.”)