While exploring the details of a scene where the protagonist is confronted by an antagonist and his posse, after the confrontation, as the defeated antagonist limps away, magic happened: a new character appeared. Her name is Nyxie.
The protagonist says to her, “Nyxie, why do you hangout with those people? You’re not like them.”
When the antagonist calls for Nyxie to come along, she hesitates before going. Later, in the kidnapping scene, when the antagonist kidnaps the protagonist and his family, Nyxie is with the antagonist. She finally has had enough of the antagonist’s antics and runs for help. She brings back help, but it’s too late, the kidnappers and victims are gone. However, Nyxie leads the rescuers to where the kidnappers took their captives. Then, she disappears from the story with an explanation that no one knows what happened to her.
Not revealed in the story is that Nyxie ran away. She thinks the villagers will be angry about her involvement with the antagonist and the kidnapping, and the antagonist will be angry that she had betrayed him. She decides the best thing to do is to go into hiding.
She travels into the Western Mountains, but is unprepared and inexperienced. She is soon ill, malnourished, and in general not doing well.
A dragon finds Nyxie and tries to help her by giving her grass to eat. Nyxie says, “People don’t eat grass,” which surprises the dragon. (This is a running gag in the stories on this world because for some reason the dragons think people eat grass. They’re always surprised to learn it’s not true.) The dragon persists, though, by learning how to care for Nyxie and helping her regain her strength.
Nyxie has only seen two dragons, but she thinks those two are representative of dragons. The dragon helping her is not like them. Nyxie thinks all dragons have a bronzy base color with red, green, and blue highlights distinctive to each individual with additional yellow highlights on females. This dragon has the red, green, blue, and yellow highlights, but the base color is a blue lighter than the highlights’ blue. Nyxie can’t say the dragon’s unpronounceable name, so she calls the dragon Sky.
Also, the dragon is small, like an adolescent dragon — about six meters long from tip of nose to tip of tail where as an adult dragon is about ten meters long. When Nyxie mentions this, the dragon insists she is an adult, she’s just small. Nyxie realizes the dragon is a dwarf dragon.
Nyxie suffers from self-esteem issues. She has a low opinion of herself, sees herself as flawed and inferior, believes herself to be unworthy of love, relies on others to guide her, and is drawn to people who mistreat her because it reinforces her negative self-image. She exists in a constant emotionally impoverished state.
Sky also has issues. While the dragons have never mistreated her — they accept her as she is — she knows she’s different and simply can’t accept herself. She too has run away to live alone; although, she’s an adult dragon and is perfectly capable of caring for herself.
When Nyxie and Sky meet and become partners, their love for each other helps each accept them self.
“We are worthy of love and we are loved.”
All of this magic happened in a brief moment as I explored the details of the protagonist/antagonist confrontation scene. The exhilaration was intense and is what makes writing addictive. Writing the notes about the ideas took a lot longer than the flash of insight that brought them. Now, if only I can find time to write the story. I have so many others queued up.