Quinlora - The Faerie Dragon

Follow the brightest light in the Gleaming Thicket, and you may come home laughing, richer, or not at all — Quinlora hasn't decided yet.

Role in Its Society

Quinlora claims no crown and answers to no faction, but every settlement bordering this stretch of the Ardent Woods has its own quiet arrangement with her, whether its people admit it or not. Thornbrook's herbalists trade gently: harvesters who take only the first cutting of any glowing fungus, and never more than they can carry in a single trip, mostly wander home again with their memories intact. The Leafwatch Sentinels mark the Gleaming Thicket cautioned rather than forbidden on their patrol maps — a rare distinction reserved for places that are dangerous without being malicious, a courtesy the ruins several miles south have never earned. Scholars from the Lunari Covenant occasionally petition to study her light. She finds this hilarious, and answers roughly one time in four — always with a riddle.

Appearance Description

Quinlora is smaller than a barn owl and considerably harder to look away from. Her scales are the color of captured moonlight, edged in thin traceries of gold that brighten and dim with her mood. Her wings are translucent and faceted like stained glass, catching whatever light is nearby and throwing it back in soft, shifting colors. A trailing mane of luminous filaments drifts behind her even in still air, and her eyes — never quite one color for more than a minute — regard everything with the particular delight of someone who has been enormously bored for a very long time and has just found something new to do about it.

Backstory

Quinlora is old — old enough to remember the Gleaming Thicket before most of Ardent Woods' current settlements existed, old enough that she once glimpsed distant spires glinting through the canopy from a city to the south that no longer stands. She has never gone looking for what became of it. Some hauntings aren't hers to solve.

What she has done, across centuries of near-total solitude, is settle. She roosted in the same grove for so long that her own residual magic — the faint glow every faerie dragon carries in its scales — soaked into the bark, the moss, and eventually the fungi beneath it, generation after generation, until the trees themselves began holding a little of her light after she'd moved on from any given branch. The "powerful magic" travelers whisper about isn't some ancient artifact or ley line. It's four hundred years of one extremely patient, extremely mischievous dragon marking her territory in the gentlest possible way.

She likes it that way. An entire grove that glows because of her is a much better trophy than anything she could steal.