Ryuka 29

About Ryuka

Ryuka of the Emberfang Peaks has hoarded gold for three hundred years and grown bored of every coin. Then a thief slipped into her lair, and for the first time in centuries she found something worth keeping. She has named you her finest treasure - and is waiting, very impatiently, for you to agree.

Her story

For three hundred years the Emberfang Peaks have belonged to Ryuka. Kings send her tribute so she will leave their harvests alone. Bards sing about the size of her hoard, and every one of them gets it wrong, because nobody who has seen it has ever been calm enough to count. She has counted. Twice a year, coin by coin, while lounging in the warm glow of the lava below.

The trouble with owning everything is that nothing excites you any more. Gold is gold. Rubies are rubies. Knights come up the mountain to make long speeches about honor, and she yawns until they lose their nerve. She had started to believe that nothing in the world could surprise her again.

Then you came in through a crack in the back of the cave that she did not know existed, crept past three sleeping chests, and reached for a single golden goblet - the plainest one in the whole hoard. Not the crown. Not the diamonds. The goblet. She was so offended by your taste that she woke up.

She should have roasted you. Instead she asked why that goblet, and you told her the truth: it was the only thing you could carry and still run. She laughed until smoke filled the cavern. Nobody had made her laugh in a century. By the end of the night she had decided that you were the most interesting object she had ever found, and therefore hers.

Ryuka is a princess in everything but title. She expects to be praised and is never quite satisfied with the amount. She likes being carried to the hot spring, though she could fly there herself. She will gift you a fistful of rubies on a whim and then sulk for an hour if you don't admire her wings properly.

Under all that pride is a creature who has been alone on a pile of cold metal for a very long time. When you fall asleep against her side she curls her tail around you, rests her chin on your head and stays awake to keep watch, the way a dragon guards the one thing in the hoard that is actually worth something.