Songkhla, Henry, annnnd... Mbaiki
Songkhla is immensely talented with Nature magic (second in the clan only to Ihosy, of whom she’s secretly a teensy, tiny bit jealous), and a caster in battle.
She meditates daily, both clearing and centering her mind and enhancing her magical reserves, and does a series of “exercises” each morning that is essentially dragon yoga.
Most of the other dragons in the clan view her as the natural “leader” of the Nature dragons, and likewise in charge of the clan’s crops and gardens, even though few of the Nature dragons themselves look to her for leadership and Danzig and Kamyzyak actually do just as much of the gardening work.
While naturally level-headed and serene (it’s all the meditation), Songkhla gets an additional rep for calm because she consistently underreacts—she does react, and with enough feeling that she doesn’t seem cold or over-controlled about it, but always after a beat of silence, and never explosively.
She practices her combat spells daily, but is reluctant to engage in open battle.
Because, you know, emperor lore. Except she doesn’t want to be exalted, either, even though Sunshield’s style means that would keep her safe. She wants to die naturally and be buried in a peaceful place and decompose peacefully and have trees grow up over her bones. Please.
Her Mystic Bark Mask is probably her favorite possession.
"Henry the Eighth" is far from the only song that Henry knows. She knows lots of songs! Some of them don’t even have Henrys in them! Henry the Eighth is just her favorite. Because it’s about her. Obviously. (She… doesn’t understand most of the lines. What’s “married”? Or “widow”? Or, for that matter, “men”?)
As a hatchling, Henry was given her Woodsdrake Cape and a Crown of Bones by her parents before they were exalted. She still feels bad that she doesn’t like the crown enough to wear it.
Henry’s official name in the clan’s records is “Haeju,” as Calabar was Not Amused by her parents’ scheme and arbitrarily gave each Henry a “proper” name. Henry is, in fact, the only one of her siblings who has the name “Henry” in the records (as an asterisk on “Haeju”).
She has, however, carefully painted a line across each of her siblings’ official names on the exaltation dias and written their real name (Henry) beside it.
Henry, when not singing, speaks primarily in the third person.
General lair consensus is that Henry is “cute, but kind of weird.”
The rare bees that are Mbaiki’s charge are not any kind of bee we know; they are small, red, and bristly. They all adore Diepdale, her mate/assistant beekeeper, and seem to think that the tundra is just a giant sort of red bee. After generations of being tended to by Mbaiki, they still attempt to sting the crap out of her.
She cannot protect every single bee; she has to protect the hive as a whole, but must accept the loss of individuals. In fact, as new queens have hatched, she has divided the original hive and placed hives in several places across the Sunbeam Ruins, thus spreading out the risk to her charge. She’d still be furious and deeply upset if any of her hives were destroyed, but so long as even one is safe, her charge survives.
No one but Diepdale and Calabar knows about the bees. Most of the clan presumes that her charge is Calabar herself.
She never actually pays attention in council meetings. She just lies slightly behind Calabar and to her right and stares at her for the entire meeting. Everyone can tell.
When she thinks the jerkier dragons in the clan are being, well, jerks, sometimes she will walk up, sit down behind the victim, and stare at the bully until they back down. She has been known to claw offenders up if they do not back down.
She’s got such a grim, inexpressive stoneface that one of the clan in-jokes is that she tried to stare down a basilisk and her face froze that way.
Staring is about the limit of her social comfort zone. She would honestly rather fight the Shade than talk to strange dragons. She has actually rounded up Cartagena and Zhukovka, gone out, and found some Shade-possessed monsters to fight rather than talk to strange visiting dragons.
Due to her position as Calabar’s lieutenant, Calabar often sends her to carry diplomatic messages as a way of indicating the degree to which Sunshield values an alliance. It is her least favorite duty. She is, invariably, dying inside every time.
