Cecille

-- GLAZIER --

Appreciative | Noncompetitive | Faithless | Perfectionist

Her parents were beautiful, Cecille being a child the first time she saw a family photo of them together. It had been the first time she'd seen them from an outside perspective. Perhaps they were the loveliest dragons in the clan, seeing the sheer amount of artisans they traveled with day to day. Singers, weavers dancers, they all performed some sort of art that displayed a type of beauty. She wanted to capture her parents beauty, but the veilspun was too reserved for something as bold as singing or dancing, and weaving, while certainly a time-passing activity, didn't enrich her mind as much as she's hoped. Gemstones certainly sparked something in her soul, but it never felt quite right, like scratching around an itch when it burned in the center.

As she grew older, she learned that she too, was beautiful like her parents. It only made sense. She saw the pictures, the paintings, and Cecille carried their beauty in her own features almost exactly. They were all so identical they could have blended together, or taken over one another's identity, and no one would notice, and there was still beauty in that. She had tried to get into jewelry making, so close to scratching the itch, the craving for beauty and perfection, but her soul still had a sliver of longing. Her mind still wandered as she beaded necklaces and looped in clasps. She had an eye for jewelry, but it still wasn't quite right, watching the light glint through the gemstones as she held them to the light.

They had travelled to the Starfall Isles where she saw it, a toy hand telescope. She'd seen them plenty of times, truthfully, but something about the colorful, fractal pattern of the wrapping had her pick it up. Garish, sure, but beautiful, putting it to her eye and seeing nothing but the dull colors. It wasn't until the shopkeep laughed, the embarrassment in her cheeks hidden by her coloration, did she turn it towards the sky but away from the sun. And the colors were brilliant. As she turned shapes overlapped and transformed, creating new fractals and geometric patterns, and the light in her eyes filled her own soul. She wanted to make this. To create this somehow, but she didn't know where to start. Yet a few more minutes travelling in the strip showed her the artists workshops, a large, factory-like building that had been divvied up into smaller rooms allowing artists to create and sell their work.

Initially, she apprenticed under another glazier, who painted and kilned their glass to get the colors they want, but as they passed, leaving everything to Cecille, she found it easier to buy pre-colored glass to save her the time of a boring task (painting) and allow her to focus on the design and creation of the stained glass, most of it done without the kiln. Her first truly successful piece was finally capturing the beautify of her family, where the reds, blues, and greens sat on the workshop window welcoming anyone in. She worked in peaceful silence for a few months before the other half of the workshop was rented out to an over-excited but good-hearted mirror named Kintsugi, and she made use of the kiln in the back.

Kintsugi would oo and ahh over Cecille's own work, saying how beautiful it was in the light and always finding something to compliment on every piece, and had the mindfulness to ask the veilspun if she wanted any criticism. What she had thought would be a professional relationship at best blossomed into friendship, and when the red dragon wasn't working on her own pieces, she would sit on the shoulder or the head of the mirror, watching her throw and mold pottery as though hypnotized by the wheel.

Cecille's family had long since moved on from the territory, and yet the wind of travel seemed to push at her own wings, so she started packing up, telling Kintsugi that she wasn't renewing the lease and planned on travelling. Apparently that meant they were travelling, and took the first boat out to Dragonhome. Another thing Cecille hadn't expected was Kintsugi meeting a dragon she had met before, another mirror that looked teal at first glance, but if you stared hard, realized was truly steel in color with a bright cyan tertiary that tricked the eyes. He was a friendly sort, not overly-loud or easily-excitable, but was very easy to read. He had his own veilspun between his wings, with brown eyes so dark they almost disappeared into his scales, and the snakes on his head have her uneasy.

Living in Dragonhome hadn't been her plan, the place is dusty and there is almost no art or beauty anywhere, and yet the people persist. Why do they persist? They get so much from trade or exploring. The land is inhospitable and they struggle to grow crops. Water is scarce and they find new ways every day to stretch it, to delay the inevitable drying out that Dragonhome is so well known for. And yet they persist. She wonders if she can capture this zest for live, the want to survive and keep going, in her work.