Wychmire and Enyi have a completely silent friendship that began due to unrequited love.
It’s well known in the clan that Enyi has been in love with Haematica since the day she came to the clan. This hasn’t worked out very well, because Haematica’s parents were warhounds who went to the plague lands to test their mettle and settle down despite neither of them being plague dragons. Meanwhile Enyi is not a fighter and he’s very uncomfortable with blood and diseases.
Wychmire’s affections are for Saber. He could not have made a worse choice if he tried.
Saber and Galbana are the clan’s First Family. They were mated for life first, they had a bunch of descendants and their bloodline is well-disseminated in the clan, and their firstborn daughter is very attached to the both of them and does a lot of work in hoard management. They are a very happy family, and Saber is a happy husband and father. And while Wychmire can be sneaky when he wants to, he would never try and get in the way of that.
Saber can’t sign worth a damn, though he’s doing his best to learn, so Wychmire can’t even hold a conversation with him to begin with. But he always personally comes to make inventory requests of Saber with his Nature Sprite in tow just to have an excuse to spend a little bit of time with him.
He’s one of only 3 fae in the clan, so nobody really understands the way his frills move, and the other fae don’t care enough about him to have noticed.
The only other dragon in the clan who completely realized Wychmire’s feelings is Enyi.
But when he first realized it, Enyi didn’t know any sign either, so from one artisan to another, he offered a small painting of Saber that Wychmire could keep in the same private quarter where he kept his personal sculptures.
Wychmire fretted a little at first--the painting was a guardian’s approximation of ‘small’, meaning it was almost twice the little fae’s size. It wasn’t some tiny secret depiction the size of a gold coin that he could keep somewhere out of the way.
But he took it anyway. He had made little amber statuettes of Saber before, but he had never dared to keep any of them. The paint was different. Unless he did something drastic, it would stay, and if he did that drastic thing, it wouldn’t be easily replaced. He would never, it had captured the things that Wychmire found so wonderful about Saber.
And so in kind, Wychmire had spend a few days observing Haematica, and observing Enyi. When a week had passed, he went to Enyi’s lair and delivered a statuette of Haematica, just a little bigger than a fae was long.
Enyi had looked at the statue, reached out to pick it up, and immediately drawn his hands back, both because they were shaking and because he was crying.
Since then, they have had many such silent exchanges, though the subject matter has moved to the mundane: flowers, the observatory, other dragons both friend and nuisance. And while Enyi has picked up some signing knowledge, he finds that it’s rare that Wychmire signs anything more complicated than ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘thank you’ when they’re together.
Theirs is a very special friendship made entirely of paint and amber.