Lycoris

Lycoris is a character written and designed by Lucy, for the Song Based OC Contest run by Angel. The assigned song was House of Memories (Panic! at the Disco.) Please do not alter the contents of this page or borrow concepts without permission.
Lycoris 	Lycoris
 	
Background 	Background
Creator 	Mezepheles
Attribute 	Tragedy
Element 	Ice
Animal 	Clownfish
Color 	Red
Song 	House of Memories (Panic! at the Disco)
Character 	Character
Age 	Young adult
Aliases 	Princess Orca (former)
Gender 	Female
Orientation	Lesbian
Occupation 	Fish merchant, gardener (hobbyist)
Tribe 	SeaWings
Goal 	She doesn't yet know
Residence 	A secluded cottage in the woods
Relatives 	Queen Coral, Shark, Moray, many other relatives
Likes 	Mist, cool water, birdsong, the color purple, salmon, flowers, warm sunlight
Dislikes 	The texture of stone, seahorses, hot weather, the taste of mushrooms, carving/sculpting
Abilities 	Typical SeaWing abilities
Loves 	Chironex (separated)
Quote 	“I grew some hyacinths. Purple. They mean an apology, did you know that? I wish you could see them.”
Appearance
Lycoris's visage somewhat resembles Princess Anemone's, her scales cloaked in cool and pale blues, layered as if painted across the polished surface of an agate gem. The colors swirl around stark white wings and bioluminescent scales, a gentle background for the ebony shades of her horns and claws.
As a dragonet, newly hatched from her egg, that was all the colors she had, the gentle blues of breaking waves. As she grew, however, the red crept in, sweeping across the edges of her webbing and wings as if spilled onto wet paper, tinging her bioluminescent scales with the subtlest of pink. Under her wings, sharp strokes of crimson paint royal markings, declaring her of royal blood.
She tucks them away, hiding their glory. She casts away the silver and sapphire she loved, replacing them with coarse brown cloaks and ordinary apparel. Her claws are blunted and caked with dirt, her scales chipped by lack of care, dulled and sun bleached.
She folds into herself, as if she could collaspe inward in disappear with enough effort. Lycoris looks out to the world with wary eyes, hollowed with a primal fear fueled by everything too big and small for her to understand. Her eyes gleam brilliant, sapphire blue.
“Just like Orca's,” Queen Coral had said.
Personality
Lycoris is the very definition of secluded, her inner thoughts as hidden as her home is within the forest. She approaches conversations with a formal, stilted fashion, the impersonality she had learned from the palace. Her speech is full of flowery words, and she struggles to hold casual conversation.
Her difficulty connecting goes beyond simple social skills. She's self centered, in an odd way, through self deprecation instead of egotistical attitudes. She constantly focuses on only what she is doing and how she could be percieved, instead of paying attention to how others react. She often struggles to remember details about other dragons, sometimes even forgetting their names. Hatchdays, especially, have always been a struggle for her.
She does not often get outwardly angry, but it's usually because the anger becomes self directed, a boiling hatred towards herself that she has long accepted. She's a perfectionist, always trying to grow her plants just right, to organize her home in the layout she determined correct, and so on. Any mistake is quickly met with frustration, followed by giving up entirely.
She doesn't have many hobbies besides gardening and the carving she keeps on trying despite hating. A lot of her day is simply spent zoning out, only realizing that hours have passed when she finally, finally notices the light in her home has grown dim. She feels out of touch with the world at these times, like her soul had been untethered and gotten lost.
Yet, sometimes she finds a way. She pulls herself out of her slump and listens to the birds, or she wanders down into misty valleys to feel the suspended droplets on her scales. Sometimes, she lets herself rest and percieve the world.
It feels like the first step to living.
History
Lycoris was not born under her chosen name. She was the daughter of Moray and the grandniece of Queen Coral. The queen was present for her hatching, and upon seeing the brilliant blue of the dragonet's eyes, insisted on naming her after the former Princess Orca. She wished to wash the name from the tainted claws of the deceased animus and Moray gladly obliged.
She grew up one against many, a first cousin once removed to the seemingly endless number of princes in the palace. Technically a princess, she was tutored on how to behave as proper royalty. However, she was rarely referred to with that title, for her royal markings were barely visible until red faded in, and her lineage meant she would never see the mantle of queen falling upon her shoulders.
Thus, she wandered the grounds of the Deep Palace, spending her free time staring up to the surface of the water, examining the coral reef beyond with an interest. She never wandered far, unsure if was permitted but certain that asking would be unqueenly.
Years passed dully within the palace, where she knew of everyone but spoke to nearly none. She had a couple relatives she spent time with, tutors that dragged her off to lessons, and the queen. Queen Coral, so excited by this new dragonet. She had countless granddaughters, but always returned to Lycoris.
Lycoris was meant to be a better Orca, better than the late princess that had been so underhanded. Yet it always seemed like Coral expected her to be exactly the same, always asking why she wasn't more ambitious, why she wasn't as clever, why she wasn't as talented of an artist.
That, that was something that always grinded at her ears. Lycoris was not an artist. She tried, she always tried to sculpt but the wood would snap in her talons and stone unresponding to her countless attempts to scrape it. The queen always regarded this with a quiet sigh of disappointment. Wishing that she would be better, like the other Orca.
She wasn't that dragon! But she was a princess, and princesses were always meant to be proper and respectful. So she'd suppress her frustration and apologize politely, and her life continued, every day identical to the last.
Eventually, it was a dragonet that disrupted the monotony of her life, appearing on the edges of the palace's gardens. They were in their adolescence, just like her. However, what really piqued her interest was the color of their scales, a gentle purple she had never seen before.
Their name was Chironex, and the two became friends quickly. It was an odd pair, a SeaWing commoner that saw the garden as a frontier to explore, and a princess who viewed it as the edge of her world. Chironex was curious and friendly, cheerful with an atrocious sense of humor that left Lycoris giggling. They were so casual and friendly, physically affectionate in a way that her family had never been.
They seemed to know everything. Any topic she brought up, they would interject with a fun fact about jellyfish, or a little tidbit about the orbit of the moons, and it left her fascinated. They also, perhaps most importantly, listened to her. They wanted to be around her, in a way that many of her friends never had. She immediately latched onto them as an emotional support, letting out her unfiltered thoughts around them. They always listened.
She often gave them gifts, usually little pieces of jewelry or her half completed sculptures. She never liked them much and she was sure the praise Chironex gave was sugarcoated, but she was glad to hear it anyway. Once, she gave them duplicated copies of the tablets Prince Turtle had enchanted years ago, two for each of them so they could always write back and forth.
It didn't all go perfectly. Chironex got caught once in the gardens, and Queen Coral had personally come down to tell them off. She was angry in a way that Lycoris hadn't seen before, upset that “a commoner would dare soil her gardens with their clumsy talons”. They moved their meeting spot out of the palace, but Chironex was clearly shaken by the experience, barely responding when Lycoris wrote to them.
They were always a very honest dragon, willing to speak their mind and able to formulate their points in a way that anyone could understand but also sounded very smart. Lycoris had always liked that, listening to them talk about something she didn't understand. She always ended up agreeing with them. However, after that point, they always had something else to talk about.
They had mentioned it a couple times before, of course, but it all seemed to spill out now.
They despised the queen.
That was wrong, wasn't it? Queen Coral ruled the kingdom, and even though she was a little mean about Lycoris's statues sometimes that didn't mean she was evil. She helped dragons! She kept a close eye on the curriculum, she worked with a council to ensure voices were heard, and she did go out to visit the rest of the kingdom all the time.
Chironex said she acted like a celebrity. They talked about how she demeaned the poorer SeaWings, how she required students to learn from the scrolls that she wrote. She ignored her citizens' needs. She only showed up to get showered in praise, to sniffle in disgust at the environment she left them to stew in. Then there were the murders. The violent executions for the dragons that failed her.
Lycoris didn't remember Coral killing anyone. Chrionex mentioned that it happened a lot more during the war, the one that happened decades ago. So Coral must have changed, right? Not that Lycoris believed she'd punish dragons so violently, either.
Chironex had scoffed at the thought.
It was easy to ignore those conversations back then, even as unease started to grow. Lycoris knew was that she loved Chironex, even if they had ideas and thoughts that she was afraid to think about. Even if it made her regard the queen with fear and concern, even if it made her doubt. She could just ignore all of that. She loved Chironex, and that was what mattered.
Yet her life in the palace tumbled on as well, and when her 7th birthday came and went, it felt like she was suddenly supposed to be much more of a royal than she was before. Coral expected her presence, showed her the laws, and dragged her even closer. She was older than most of Coral's granddaughters, and the change was isolating. She was a proper princess now, Coral insisted.
She had less and less time to spend with Chironex. The queen brought her along on trips, showing the good she had scattered across the Kingdom. Look at that library on the island, stocked with scrolls Coral provided. Of course, the paper was inaccessible to those that lived deep on the ocean floor, but did that matter? Of course, it was all her own writing, but she pushed important messages in those tales. She was their queen.
Whenever she brought up what Coral was doing to Chironex, it immediately brought in a tension she couldn't dissipate. It stressed it out, having a partner who hated so much of Lycoris's life, for reasons she could not comprehend. She'd never seen any of the things Chironex talked about, but they always spoke with such a conviction that she was sure they weren't lying.
She brought it up one day, that perhaps, their perception was incorrect? That everything was better than they made it out to be. And, for the first time, (perhaps not, but every other memory with them was washed with the pink of rose tinted lenses,) Chironex grew angry, at her.
The fight ended with Chironex storming off, and Lycoris uncertain on what she should do.
Yet, in the end, her way out of the situation was presented by one of the other princesses, A first cousin once removed or whatever the relation was. Murre told her, with the most matter-of-fact voice, that Coral would rip her to shreds if she found Lycoris was still spending time with Chironex.
She wasn't sure how Murre had found out, but panic sent her into a flight. Convinced Chironex hated her— and that Queen Coral would too, it was only a matter of time— she ran. She left the palace for the first time with barely anything except the two stone tablets.
She smashed the first one soon after, so she could force herself to stop thinking about them, to stop drafting an apology she never learned to write. They deserved more than her anyway. They probably hated her, after how she left. The other tablet she left untouched, and nearly forgot about for some time.
That was a mistake.
She found herself an abandoned cottage in the woods, formed from rotting boards and bricks of dried mud. She wandered into a nearby town and found someone to fix it up for her, giving up a silver bracelet. Only then did she finally look down on the tablet, watching how Chironex responded.
It started with questions, Chironex asking her why she wasn't responding, worrying about her, fretting. However, as the weeks dragged on, it became long solilquys, gentle questions, as if Chironex assumed she didn't have the tablet anymore.
She smashed it too, after they started doodling little images of her on it. The guilt suck in with serrated teeth, as she wished and hoped and desparately wanted to reach out to them, but she was too far away and she was scared to go back.
They would hate her if she returned. She was surprised they didn't already. They deserved better than her, and it was better if she just left them quietly, like she already did.
She started fishing in a nearby stream, and found that selling what she caught made her a modest living. She fixed up her home and decorated it, a little, and tried to make herself a new life under a new name. However, she spent most of her time staring into space, her mind somewhere else as she ran through what else she could have done, wondering if she could still reach out.
Her health suffered, and it felt like she was deterioating in that home, trapped in her own thoughts, until a small succulent caught her eye in the marketplace. She didn't know how to take care of plants, but she bought it anyway, asking the merchant awkward questions until she left with a manual written in a scrawl she found unreadable.
The rhythm of taking care of the plants helped, having these living things relying on her to survive. She started taking care of herself more, so she could take care of them.
She misses Chironex. Pain eats her up, and she just desperately hopes that they don't hate her. She hopes, more than anything, that their memories with her are still bright.
She's so, so sorry.
Time in her cottage feels slow, or perhaps fully stalled. She still finds it hard to move on, despite the years that have passed. 
Yet, despite it all, recently she's noticed the changes. She goes out more. She talks to other dragons. Perhaps she can find a way to heal.
Relationships
Queen Coral - Coral was the centerpiece of her dragonet years, a mother figure more than Moray ever was. She was, equally, overbearing in a way that Lycoris wouldn't recognize until much later. She only saw the Princess Orca that was dead long before Lycoris hatched, and that was all she wanted her to be. 
Moray - A mother that wasn't fully present for her. Despite being Moray's only child, Lycoris was often pushed to the side, her mother always busy working for the queen. They barely know each other, and Lycoris assumes that she doesn't mind her disappearance much.
Chironex - A past lover, one that Lycoris has elevated to idolized heights. She misses them every day, wishing to apologize to them, afraid of how they'd respond. She convinces herself she doesn't want to bother them anymore, that she shouldn't ruin their life more than she already has. She loves them more than anything.
Trivia
*Lycoris is a genus of flowering plants, with the common name of hurricane lilies
*The plants surrounding her home are not in the best condition, as she struggles to learn how to properly take care of them and her attempts to keep them orderly often kills them
*She doesn't have anything to remember Chironex has, concerned that it could come across as unsettling.
*She doesn't mind the loneliness of her home too much beyond the fact that it lets her stew in her thoughts, since she spent most of her time alone and unsupervised in the palace as a dragonet.
Gallery
Base by Plasmawolf2016
LycorisLucentfalls.png|Mezepheles
Category:Characters
Category:SeaWings
Category:Females
Category:Status (Nobility)
Category:Occupation (Merchant)
Category:LGBT+
Category:Content (Mezepheles)