Information

Ravenswood
Legacy Name: Ravenswood

The Nightmare Lain
Owner: VeeJayHedgehog

Age: 10 years, 2 months, 1 week

Born: February 14th, 2014

Adopted: 9 years, 9 months, 1 week ago

Adopted: July 10th, 2014

Statistics

• Level: 100
   
• Strength: 101
   
• Defense: 101
   
• Speed: 101
   
• Health: 81
   
• HP: 81/81
   
• Intelligence: 15
   
• Books Read: 14
• Food Eaten: 0
• Job: Register Clerk

When you're in the pound for so long, and for reasons unknown to you, you become familiar with the shadows that pass the walls around you. To pass the time, you learn to listen to the silence and relish in the quiet, your mind wanders to times far flung to the past.

I remember having an owner so very long ago. I was born a Dragarth on the Day of Love, or so I am told by the volunteers who greet us as meals are given out. A Valentines Day pet. Perhaps I was a gift to be given to another? My creation is shrouded in the silence of the shadows.

Answers like that never come easily, and when no one can tell you otherwise, you begin to plot, and plan, a means for your existance to be given meaning... at least something to fool your psyche into believing you aren't as worthless as the other pets within the cages tell you, sneering the words at you just to make themselves seem more worthwhile to the visiting trickle of beings who scour the cages looking for their next object of adoration.

Where I had learned "The Raven", I still don't quite remember.

Perhaps it was from one of the many volunteers who gifted their time to playing with us and reading to us? Perhaps it was one of the heads who, upon notice of my name, began to quote the lines one by one, as a joke or as something more akin to what my name truly meant?

But, as I was loathe to admit, I looked nothing like a raven, merely a dragon of common blood and birthright. Perhaps one day I would inherit feathers of black, as my namesake suggested so plainly? It seemed much like a dream, and a good dream at that. I clung to its fleeting presence day after day, night after night. I watched others in the cages around me being given a home, that sweet dream that evaded my grasping paws so easily.

There was interest in me from many, such a name can only befit one thing, the literary genius and the narrative of that dark night...but as time wore on, I began to take the knowledge of "too many pets, not enough places" very literally - after all, when an owner finds themselves with a single place for a new companion, one had best hope they fill a number of criteria before such a home is attained.

I lost track every few sunsets.

I had forgotten what it felt like upon the outside of the walls, the feel of grass, my previous owner... I remembered them, fleeting scraps of a tapestry long shredded. An old life gone to waste amongst the dust, tallow and soiled like a dirty cloth. I snorted, slumped down and rolled over on my blanket, largely ignorant of the shadows passing down the hallway where my cage sat, facing outwards. The murmur came, soft and sure, from outside my door:

"Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"

Despite myself, I muttered back the words of which I knew so well:
"Quoth the Raven "Nevermore.""

I heard the key turning in the lock, and I looked up, staring back into the face of a woman with gentle emerald eyes, accompanied by one of the pound volunteers. "This one," said she, nodding in my direction with a smile. "I don't care how much he is. He's perfect..."

High above the quiet night upon the wingbeats I adore,
I am he whose lordly name is uttered from the lonely moor,
I am whom so swiftly follows Zefire along the dark night's shore,
Quoth I, Ravenswood, the Nightmare Lain, "Brothers now, forevermore!"