Character type: Dragonrider
Rank: Junior Weyrwoman
Age: 19
Gender: Female
Sexual Preference: Homosexual
Appearance
A girl who looks like Caulan should be in dresses with ribbons and lace and frilly skirts. Not ripped up pants, jackets, and men’s island work shirts layered only for modesty (hey, that stuff’s see-through).
She could wear her hair unwashed and messy to match the clunky boots and holey shirts, but Caulan is rarely predictable, and rarely makes anything easy on anyone. She often has it curled — big sausage curls at that.
Not that Caulan could ever do much to lessen the effect of her features. She is, in a word, adorable, with a face like a porcelain doll, heart-shaped, fine-boned, and perfectly sculpted. Her mouth is full and bow-shaped, her green eyes are big and soulful, and her skin is flawless, even the light blush across her cheeks and faint freckles on her nose.
She is tiny, even for a teenaged girl, shorter than her peers and petite. It has yet to stop her from going toe-to-toe with shit that could crush her skull with one swat.
Personality
Caulan is tough, and sassy. Caulan is also a messed up kid.
The smart mouth and hardass routine do a good job of deflecting attention from the cracks in the foundation, and she does her damndest to enjoy herself as much as she can, screw the rules and screw The Man, but she's still a sixteen-year-old kid who got left holding the messed up pieces of her life and her family like she was the last one to hold them together, and her without any glue or nails.
She's angrier than even she herself knows, and even now burn out is on the horizon; maybe it doesn't hit for another ten turns, but it's creeping after her like a stray dog, and she's not going to shake it, save a miracle. There's all kinds of issues mixed up in her head that she's never looked at, let alone tried to sort out. Caulan is still trying, years after being old enough to know better, to fill in for her father. No one's ever thought to tell her that it's not her job. She doesn't need to stomp around in heavy boots and fill the room with sarcasm and course jokes, she doesn't have to be tough and big and indestructible. Caulie wasn't indestructible.
And somewhere there's the throat-closing awareness, the thick, foul-tasting guilt, that all the years she's tried to be The Man Of The House didn't keep Riliar from starting on his spiral downward, or her uncle from getting more ornery and hard-faced with every year, or stop her mother from winding up dead just like her father.
It's a bit like Caulan forgot how to access the deeper parts of her on purpose, to keep all the things she doesn't know how to deal with from dragging her down. What's left is a teenager who runs quick and hot, shameless and outrageous because she's forgotten why she shouldn't be.
She won't look in on herself, and there's no way anyone else is going to try it either. Caulan can stare a man down, can smirk in the face of real rage directed at her, infuriatingly impossible to shake, to get a real reaction out of, but damned if she can stand under a truly probing gaze. She shies away from real scrutiny — those looks from people who care, who want to dig and know more about her, want to help and make it real, make it serious. She'll do whatever it takes to duck away, breaking eye contact, making inappropriate jokes to ruin the moment, even lashing out if push comes to shove.
She’s the kid sitting in back of a lecture being a distraction, acting out, pretending she doesn’t care, because she doesn’t know how to just knuckle down and try fitting in, and she’s too scared to try and mess it up. It’s easier to pretend she does what she wants, screw everyone who tries stopping her.
History
Birthplace: Unknown Hold, Ista Protectorate, 8.434.2.20
Caulan’s life didn’t start out all that different from your typical backwoods holder kid. She was born after quite a few turns of her parents fruitlessly trying to start a family, and figuring that she was the one and only child they’d ever manage to have, her father curbed his bets and gave her his name, as his father had before him (this would turn out to be slightly awkward when four turns later her baby brother was born). Home life was idyllic, or at least that’s how she remembers it — she grew up hero-worshipping her father, and looking forward to the visits from her dragonriding uncle, and her mother had a way of making chores into games so Caulan didn’t dread them too much.
But when she was nine there was a fire at a nearby holding, and her parents rushed to help fight it, leaving her in charge at home. Caulie didn’t return home when the blaze finally went out, and Caulan reeled with the loss. When the initial grief let up, she devoted herself to filling the void her father had left behind, determined that her little brother not grow up without the kind of strong, amazing heroic figure Caulie had been for her. She’d always been a daddy’s girl anyway, and now she tried to remake herself in his image, and though she wouldn’t admit it, it was as much for her as it was her brother. It kept her memory of him closer, somehow.
Her mother’s death three turns later wasn’t as dramatic — just one of those illnesses that came around sometimes, but Caulan has the creeping suspicion that Rilla could have beat it if she’d not still been heartbroken over her husband’s loss. It left Caulan to look after Riliar and the holding by herself at just twelve. Her uncle offered to take her back to the Weyr and to see her Searched, maybe, but she stubbornly turned him down, not wanting to see her childhood home just given up on.
Of course, she /was/ only twelve, and constantly found herself in over her head with the work needing to be done, and fending off offers from much older men to marry, and her brother grew moodier and more distant with every day it seemed. She grit her teeth and did the best she could until not long after Riliar’s eleventh birthingday she woke up to find her brother gone and a messily written note left behind explaining how he’d gone off with some trader ship to ‘see the world’.
She held up and kept her cool just until her uncle came to visit again, and seeing him sigh tiredly and look at her with such poignant understanding and sympathy, she broke down a little. She was in no place to reject his offer again, and so she packed up what meagre belongings she held dear to her, and left for the Weyr. Her uncle pulled some strings to put her in front of an official Search dragon and have a Wingleader sign off on it, making her an official candidate.
Relationships
Family
Father: Caulan (Caulie) - deceased
Mother: Rilla - deceased
Younger Brother: Riliar
Uncle: C’launa
CAULAN'S DRAGON: GOLD MIARANTH
Color: Gold
Age: Hatchling
Weyr of Origin: Ista Weyr
Weyrling Class: Sunrunners
Appearance
Though built on graceful lines, it would be unadvisable to mistake Miaranth for a delicate creature. She's slender of bone and build, true, with nary a hint of unnecessary bulk or bulge to her frame, but there's an undeniable strength there, coiled tight beneath sleek, yellow-golden hide. Lean, lengthy legs will make her take-offs and landings enviably smooth, but they'll also grant her an easy, natural gait on land that most dragons lack. Long wings, angled slightly back and broader of sail than one might expect, are clearly built for speed, and once she learns to fly she'll be a rocket among golds, able to easily outrace most of her peer-sisters. She may not be able to maintain her top speed for long, but if she can just harness her patience and master pacing herself, she'll be a force to be reckoned with. Her face, narrow but too gently-curved to ever be angular, her slender shoulders, the front of her wings and the front of her legs are lit by an extremely pale, almost silvery-cast gold – as if she stood, face to the moon, to meet its light on a clear night and walked away with its touch permanently kissed onto her hide where it touched her the most.
Personality
Miaranth will always be a dragon who fiercely values her independence, both physically, mentally, and emotionally. She revels in the strength of her own body, in the things it can do and the places it can take her, and will enjoy testing herself, pushing herself to the limits. It's not about showing off to other people, or about some boring sense of duty. (Miaranth can't understand people who do things only because they're supposed to rather than because they want to – if it's “the right thing to do”, whatever that is, you should still want to do it or else maybe it's not the right thing or maybe you're not the right person?) It's about testing herself, enjoying that which she has been born with and taking it to the highest level she can take it. For her and no one else! Her mind is her own, too, and she'll never accept anything at face value. She doesn't reject things just for the sake of being difficult, no, but she does require an explanation. “Because I said so” or “because it's always been done this way” simply isn't good enough – in fact, it's an insult to her intelligence that she'll greatly resent, and the former response is even likely to provoke her into pulling the “I'm your queen” card, which she rarely employs otherwise. She'd rather be respected for who she is than the color of her hide, you see, but she's smart enough to realize that people are going to get all hung up on her color anyway, so maybe it's not so bad to use it occasionally. She can respect tradition and all, once she understands why it's traditional and why it's really the best way. If she doesn't believe it's the best, way, well… she's likely to just go her own way.
And really, her own way will always be her favorite way. She's not in it to make waves, she just likes being her own dragon – and in many ways, that will make being gold exceptionally hard on her. Early weyrlinghood, with its many restrictions on where they can go and who they can speak to, will really wear on her. Why, she's not some baby who needs to be babysat! She's not going to go fall off a cliff, she just wants to explore on her own, that's all. She isn't going to flip out because her rider hugged somebody. Why, if she thought her rider was going to cheat on her, she wouldn't have picked that person in the first place! What a stupid notion. Miaranth is very secure in her bond from the beginning, and secure in herself, and secure in what she believes her place in the world is – less so in what the world seems to expect of her in return. She can appreciate being admired, but she doesn't like being fawned over, and once she realizes how much status and politics are involved in the wooing of someone of her color, she'll be highly skeptical of any compliments she receives. Not of their veracity (of course she's beautiful – it's her body, she's very well aware and doesn't need to be told!), but of the motives behind them. Her exultation in the idea of flying, of pushing herself and leading the males on a merry chase, will be tainted by the knowledge that they see her as a prize to be won, something to be conquered, not because Miaranth is Miaranth and incredible and a challenge, but simply because she's a gold. She dislikes the idea of being conquered, and she dislikes being just “a gold”. She doesn’t wish to be any different than what she is, doesn’t wish she was green or any other silly thing (she is what she is and you can kiss your own tail if you don’t like it!), she merely wants to be recognized as an individual first, a gold dragon second, rather than the other way around. Likewise, when she's stuck on the Sands tending her eggs while all her fellows fly, she'll suffer from an unhappy sense of cabin fever. Oh, she enjoys being a mother, and enjoys tending the eggs, but struggles with the way it ties her down and keeps her from her beloved skies… and once the adorable little buggers have hatched she'll be all too ready to kick them loose to sink or swim on their own.
That's really the attitude she has about her fellow dragons in general. Oh, she *does* care about the group – quite a lot, in fact — but sometimes she may stubbornly resent the fact that she cares, because it does make things ever so complicated. And her brand of caring isn't smothering them or preventing them from making mistakes, no. She'd rather keep a distant eye on them, letting them do stupid things and get burned for it, letting them learn the hard way. She'll even push them towards a mistake if she thinks they need it – she's certainly got an acerbic enough tongue for it. A clever dragon will learn more from Miaranth by observing her rather than asking her outright: her sharp focus, keen awareness of the sky around her, and prowess in flight will make her a fighter to be reckoned even with a flamethrower on her back, and her near-silent wingbeats and sharp eyesight will make her second-to-none as a hunter. Don't ever make the mistake of telling Miaranth that she's not a fighting dragon!