Parákata
Parákata - the harvester butterfly, also known as the monarch butterfly. A visiting soul of a child to signal the beginning of the harvest of plentiful foods, gathered to welcome the souls in remembrance of the dead.
Butterflies rely on wings quite fragile by draconic standards, and it is that there are escort dragons from the Nature Flight to guide the delicate insects along their migration. One such migration from the Viridian Labyrinth across to the highland forests between the Shifting Expanse and the Sunbeam Ruins passed through a storm of titanic proportions. A young obelisk dragon was assisting the migration on his very first ever (guided, by his parents) escort. They had assumed a routine journey, though long. Then the sun rose beautifully red, their only warning of the coming squall.
Knocked off the back of his parent, he tumbled into the dark thicket of thorns. Over the howling winds and flooding rains he heard jeering laughter that snapped at his heels. He ran, until the ground gave way from patches of rot. There he found himself in the place of every Nature Dragon's nightmare: The Scarred Wasteland. Cowering in the rotted hole he fell into, he waited for a plague dragon to sniff him out to eat.
The one that found him, however, did not. The tundra dragon spoke with a calm and leveled tone, coaxing the young pup from the rotted hole and into the cushion of his fur. It was thickening for the coming winter, and home to many lice and insects that the young pup chewed on to regain strength as the tundra dragon carried him to where the contagion webbed thick and protective.
There he met the dragon's mate, and realized he had been found by a young lord.
Guided to the acidic nest where bulbous eggs were being carefully incubated, he was welcomed into a home the opposite of his birthright. When he finally told his new caretakers of what had happened, they shared a story that shocked him to his core. The parákata, carrying the souls of children, the simultaneous mourning and celebration of the dead, and the communal with those that have rotted through feast and company with their bones.
With broken wings too fragile to fly and a heavy body molded by the Earthshaker, Parákata was adopted into the lair even if other clans in the Scarred Wasteland hounded for his blood for the creeping danger of the Seedscar. It's not without reason, Parákata has a yearning connection to the Seedscar as the only memory of home within his reach. If his parents searched for him, he didn't know. Perhaps one day he will journey back to the Viridian Labyrinth, a lost child's soul returning for the harvest feasts of the fall. For now, he has come to call Teo and Eileen mother and father for their generosity and their allowance of his pilgrimages to the Seedscar.
