Fade (Silver)

eep um okay
so i realized that her motive was really flimsy
so undergoing a bit of a history revamp
Isn't it lovely?
All alone.
Heart made of glass, my mind of stone.
Tear me to pieces, skin to bone.
Hello, welcome home.
Fade was made for the Villain OC contest!
~~~~~~
The small dragoness glides towards you, unassuming and colorless. You barely notice her bright blue eyes against her gray face. She has no silver scales, powerless.
She stops in front of you, and you need to look down in order to see her clearly. What does such a tiny dragon need from you? To reach things off the top ledge? You chuckle at your own joke.
"Hello," she says, her eyes smiling. She looks nice to you. You reply, a kind greeting, before you realize she is gone. You wonder if she even existed at all. But no, you saw her. You're sure of it.
You barely feel the pinpricks as she sinks her claws into your larynx.
~~~~~~
appearance.
"I was always less than you. Do you know how that feels? No, you don't, Striking, because you were the prettiest and therefore perfect."
A flash of grey. A sparkle of white. A snippet of black. An ephemeral figure whisks around the corner. The feared murderess goes to find her next victim. Few know her name, but it had always haunted her: Fade.
Her eyes are a pale iceberg blue, very notable against most scale colors. Except for gray. Her snout tip is a muddled brownish black, as is her tail tip, her wingtips, and her talons. From these black points, her scales fade in a gradient to a bland light gray. Her scales have an odd metallic quality to them, but this is often overlooked due to their color. Her spikes are an off-white color, as if they want to be perfect and shining but just can't manage it. Because of this unremarkable coloring, she is often looked past and not thought about much.
Her features are delicate and fine, with edges to cut stone. She is small in stature and thin in build, a mere ghost of most dragons her age. She is not extremely muscular, but she is very quick and agile. Her talons are exceedingly sharp, as are her horns and spines. Her spikes are extremely long, and her horns are curved at the tips like a MudWing's. Her snout is slender, similar to a SilkWing's but a bit blockier so that she is recognizable as a NightWing hybrid. Her body is shaped like an IceWing's with some Night- and MudWing influence in the tail and neck. Her scale pattern is similar to an IceWing's, but hold a NightWing base.
She carries herself like an average dragon, not bothering with an arched neck or perfect posture. She does take care to have silent talonsteps to add a layer of mystery to her. This way, she can never be heard in her killings. Her voice is soft and gentle, like a rustle of silk. Her voice is rather high-pitched for her age, but in a youthful way, not squeaky or whiny. She has the type of voice that makes you wonder whether she is hiding something.
When she talks, people become instantly enraptured, like there's an animus enchantment on her voice. She can word everything so it sounds convincing and soft, as if she were a normal dragoness and not a stone-cold killer.
Despite her thinness, she is surprisingly strong. She isn't stronger than an extremely buff dragon, but her agility and speed make up for her strength in spades. She is also quite light, so dragons barely feel her until it's too late. She wears no accessories aside from one copper band around her wrist. It has long since been oxidized and turned green, but you can almost make out the words on it.
For Fade- My light in all the darkness.
She has never once taken it off, even though the clasp is simple. No one but her knows who or where it came from.
personality.
"You're blind. The truth is blazing all around you, and still you refuse to see it. It's my job to show you. Close your eyes, now. It won't hurt a bit."
Fade was almost a normal dragonet growing up. Averagely smart, not too mean or a pushover. She had a few friends to keep up her reputation, but was never really close to them. Her brother and sister were the exceptional ones. So kind, so intelligent, so athletic, so pretty, so perfect. But she never resented them, no. Because life in the shadows meant she got more freedom. Almost every dragon in the rainforest had seen her before, but nearly none knew her name. She was that small dragonet who was always there, quiet. No one noticed when her blue eyes studied them meticulously, searching for cracks and breaks in their shells, their smallest secrets. That was her specialty, the one thing she was better at than her siblings, and having that was enough for her.
She is good at acting, and always has been. She has many faces depending on the situation, and she knows quite a bit about dragon psychology. She is most interested in minds. Toying with them, shaping them, breaking them. It's her favorite pastime, and when she was in school she could always be found in the library reading a scroll by an expert scientist or Ph.D. It was in this that she surpassed everyone, but she never let them know. She let them think she was worthless, and she actually enjoyed it. She loved her alone time more than anything else.
But there was always something underneath, something that she pushed down. An unease, maybe. Something whispered inside her that she didn't have to be powerless. She had constantly ignored it, telling herself that she liked not being noticed, she liked the shadows. But as all the dragonets in her class got achievements, and she slid to the bottom, she realized that the shadows weren't enough forever. She could learn to be better, and one day surpass Brilliance and Wondrous. An answer to a problem she didn't know she had. But once she opened the box, it ate her up. She threw herself into her studies with all her might, skipping two grades and developing a love for poetry and debate. She became quiet and calculative, even more so. She soon surpassed even her teachers, the smartest NightWings in all the rainforest. But still she wasn't better than Brilliance and Wondrous. And that was not enough.
She learned self-defense, her insecurity building until it reached a fever pitch. She became a perfectionist, grooming her life until there wasn't a speck of dirt, yet still no one noticed her. She had become her own worst enemy, a monster inside.
But then she fell in love with the most handsome RainWing in all the rainforest, Striking. During this time, she realized she didn't need anyone's affection to be amazing. She already was. And so she became that dragonet again, but a modicum more vibrant, a bit more noticeable. Things were looking up for her. She began to wear a copper band that shone and glimmered bright, and she was almost as good as Brilliance and Wondrous. She was happy.
Until she overheard Striking laughing about her with his friends. That night, he told her she was just as worthless as she thought. She nodded calmly and walked off, but inside she was torn up, a horror to behold. The deed had been done. The monster released.
Now, Fade is a grown dragoness. She is highly intelligent, dangerously so. She often passes the time people-watching, searching for her next target. She runs on insecurity, her mind forcing her on. She always has to improve, improve, improve. She can't take compliments, feeling as if all affection is fake. She has trouble discerning feelings at a glance and has such low self-esteem that she often reads other dragons thinking she's an annoyance, a powerless tribrid with no worth. 
Her favorite time is dusk, when she is alone in a treehouse on the outskirts of the kingdom. She is a huge perfectionist, and her days are all planned and executed to a T. She is very eloquent, and can weave words into a tapestry like no one else, can spin spiderwebs of language in which dragons are easily ensnared. But she doesn't want to hurt everyone to teach them something, no. She wants to hurt everyone to make them feel her pain.
backstory.
"Have you no idea what you've done, the havoc you've wreaked? No one has the capacity to love you anymore. But I can make it easier. Just give me your talon."
Fade was born the youngest of three dragonets to a NightWing-IceWing hybrid and a MudWing in the Rain Kingdom. Her sister, Brilliance, was the epitome of her name. Beautiful, intelligent, and radiant, she made everyone around her smile. Her brother, Wondrous, was a strong and silent dragon who was very protective of his family and kind to everyone around him. Both were amazements in their own way, special in the good sense of the word, pure perfection.
And then came Fade. She had gotten the short straw, the dullest possible combination of all three tribes. Her siblings were already well established as the golden children of the rainforest, the miracle tribrids that no one could compete with. The small dragonet, unremarkable in every way, had to learn to not care about attention, how to let her siblings be great while she lived a completely ordinary life.
But then Wondrous enlisted into the army, and Brilliance became the one that was overlooked as everyone fawned over the only son, the bravest dragonet, the best. "I can see why he's called Wondrous," they would say. "For he is truly a wonder."
Brilliance began to deteriorate, falling apart at the seams. She was always the best, not Wondrous. She was supposed to be the one that everyone obsessed over, hailed for her academic prowess and astonishing beauty. Jealousy grabbed her in its serrated jaws and shook hard, tearing her up inside and out.
For Fade, this jealousy was contagious. Feelings she never knew that she had whispered to her in seductive voices. Brilliance is broken, you can be great. Don't you want to be the miracle tribrid, the one who has it all? You can be just as good as them. And so Fade tried the spotlight out. She broke her ties with her 'friends', made only to keep her social life up. She threw herself into studies even more than before, surpassing everyone with her long-hidden intelligence and thirst for learning. Even if she wanted to stop, she couldn't. She had opened Pandora's Box, and the overwhelming insecurity drove her on. Now she needed to be perfect. But she wasn't, she wasn't and it nearly killed her.
And when Wondrous came home, Brilliance killed him.
It was Fade's plan all along. If she took out one of the miracles, that left only one to be disposed of. Simple logic, really. So she forged a deep bond with Brilliance, and although the friendship started off in Brilliance's head, a simple way to get her to trust Fade, it turned into a real love later on.
Fade began to plant seeds that Wondrous had planned to enlist just to make Brilliance upset. Fade told her sister that he had wanted to drive Brilliance to suicide so he would have no competition and seem a tragic hero. Brilliance was shocked, and filled with seething rage and unadulterated loathing. Fade barely had to do anything before her sister began to plan the murder.
The night of the crime, Fade was working on one of her first few poems. It was later to go in a collection called Times of Rain and Darkness. But Brilliance was sharpening her knives and collecting dragonbite viper venom to spread over her weapons of choice. While Wondrous was asleep, Brilliance snuck in and slit his wrists and throat, planting the knife to make it look like suicide. The deed was done, and Fade was overjoyed that her plan had worked.
The next morning, when Wondrous' body was discovered, Brilliance realized the magnitude of what she had done. She felt guilt crashing down on her in waves, that much was clear to Fade. Brilliance begged Fade to kill her, but Fade didn't have the heart. She didn't want to kill her only friend.
And so she hid all the weapons and convinced Brilliance to fake her death and run away, which she did. Then Fade was left all alone, her parents' expectations of her set high. They wanted her to become the new miracle, and she found that she couldn't, that she would never be as good as her siblings. But her insecurity was so overwhelming that she just had to try.
One day, in the library, she was studying as hard as ever. That was when she saw Striking walking over to her. In fact, he was looking straight at her. Dragons didn't usually acknowledge Fade, let alone the most popular, handsome, and well-known RainWing in the kingdom. He approached her, sitting down at her table and introducing himself. Poor Fade barely knew how to react, but she forced out a "Hi," and from there they struck up a haphazard conversation.
Soon, they developed a friendship, and that friendship developed into romance. Fade even felt love between them. He gave her a beautiful gift, a copper bracelet with an inscription on it: For Fade, my light in all the darkness. It was the one and only gift Fade ever received. With Striking's support, she learned to feel good about herself and her insecurity was at an all-time low.
But this all came crashing down one night at a dinner date with Striking. She reached over and touched his talon, saying 'I love you' for the first time. As she finished, an odd smile spread across Striking's face. 'I won,' he whispered under his breath. And then he looked Fade in the eyes and said it was all fake. A simple ruse. He told her that she was nothing, a nobody. That no one in their right mind would love her.
Fade calmly got up and walked away, but her mind was a raging inferno. She just barely kept her talons from snapping the expensive plates in half as she exited the restaurant and flew home, no one there to comfort her. And so she ran to her room and cried her eyes out, not emerging for a day afterwards.
And on that day, she was changed. Wrong. She didn't speak, and when she went to her graduation a week after she stood in the back and was a shadow as her name was called and she received a diploma. She burned everything in her room except for a small stone tool she used to sharpen her horns and spines to a wicked point.
She began killing discreetly and at random, dragons that she knew would at least be missed. She didn't kill those that no one looked at twice, as that would defeat her purpose. Because, you see, Fade didn't kill for sport. She killed to give everyone maximum pain. Not her victims, but their relatives.
And perhaps that's the most dangerous part of all.
relationships.
Nightfrost
"I-I wrote a poem, Mother."
Fade was never really close with her mother. They had a working relationship, if any at all. Nightfrost would often ask her dragonets about one achievement they had gotten that day, and Fade's always paled in comparison to her siblings', which contributed to Nightfrost's unwitting disappointment in her. Although Nightfrost did love Fade, her more successful children made her think very little of her youngest daughter. After her two eldest dragonets were presumed dead, Nightfrost placed polarized expectations on Fade to be just as good as her siblings. 
Chocolate
"I love you too, Father."
Fade's relationship with her father was very one-sided on her father's part. Chocolate could only be loving toward all his children, although he did brag more often about Wondrous and Brilliance than he did about Fade. He fully supported her poetry, although he didn't show much interest in reading it. He always tried to make Fade feel loved and appreciated, but after Wondrous' death and Brilliance's faked death, he became a shell of himself and hardly spoke, leaving Fade to face Nightfrost's heavy expectations alone.
Brilliance
"Look, you have always lived in his shadow. They always praised him more, didn't you notice? Come on, if we get rid of him it will be easier for us both."
Fade had a really good and true relationship with her elder sister. At first, they were genial towards each other but they still had a slight friction between them, being that Brilliance was always so popular that she never had much in common with her little sister. When Wondrous went away and Fade began to plant seeds in her mind, their relationship became very close and real. Even though it was built on lies, Fade still felt as if she could trust and confide in Brilliance. When Brilliance faked her death and ran away, she told Fade that she loved her with all of her heart.
Wondrous
"Good work, brother."
Fade never had much more than an amicable relationship with her brother. They weren't very close and never grew closer as she and Brilliance had. Wondrous was always mature and authoritative, so Fade was the same way towards him. In this way they had a relationship that was relatively meaningless but still friendly enough that they could live in the same house. When asked about Wondrous, Fade barely bats an eyelash. There was never much to mourn for her.
Striking
"I-I love you."
Fade's relationship with the most well-known RainWing in the kingdom began as a friendship. He complimented her smarts and built her up, and in turn she was a steadfast companion who was always quick to cheer him up with wonderfully crafted sentences. Soon, their relationship blossomed into romance. They became inseperable, and Fade began to feel love a year later. The dinner date during which Striking broke up with her was their two-year anniversary. Fade never did find out why he broke up with her, and with all her psychological prowess she couldn't decipher the meaning of the words 'I won'. She refuses to believe their relationship was fake and can never face killing him.
Category:Characters
Category:Work in Progress
Category:NightWings
Category:MudWings
Category:IceWings
Category:Hybrids
Category:Females
Category:Content (SilverTheIcewingHybrid)