O'in lacks any definitive style, but he tries and is always clean and groomed. If he had his way, someone else (with excellent taste) would pick his outfits out for him and save him the anxiety.

O'in's childhood is murky and filled with sad stories he doesn't remember. He never met his parents, his mother having died giving birth to him and his father succumbing to the plague that ravaged dragon kind. All he knows of them come from the stories his older half-sister, Kossama, has told him.

His mother, Olissa, had been a healer. She fell in love with a gallant bronze rider, and when the plague drove him south, she'd refused to be parted from him. They went together, her pregnant, with a small group of fellow riders. Olissa vowed to use every skill her craft had lent her to help however she could.

But fate is cruel and it came swift. Her bronzerider died before he ever met his daughter, and Kossama always had to stop at telling this part.

Olissa was skilled as she was kind. Another from their group, a brown rider, fell for her and provided as best he could for her and her young child. It was not long before he gave her another, at the greatest cost. Here, also, Kossama would stop the telling, except to say that the brown rider disappeared with his grief.

Kossama's story was secondhand, though. Neither sibling knew their parents. On cruel days when Obennin was incessant, Kossama would chide him that his father and his beast still ran mindless through the jungle, betting both were little more than monsters now. And Obennin would cry, wailing that at least he didn't know for certain his father was dead.

The shared trauma bonded them more than it broke them, though. Through hazy memory, both had to imagine it was the shreds of kindness in the riders left living who had come south with their parents that guided them eventually to Katila. In that haphazard Weyr, they found a haphazard childhood. They supped on sparse charity and the desperation of busy kitchens and dirty corners that couldn't afford to care about the size or skill of the hands that touched them.

Obennin followed his sister's lead unquestioningly. Kossama always had a plan. She made sure they had food enough not to starve. She found them the work that kept them in the good graces of the Weyr. She was the one that said they should be dragon riders, called it their birthright, and said it loud enough that everyone accepted them as the weyrbrats they were. She was the one that said "Telgar" when they were able to come back north. She dragged Ben out onto those hot sands for turns and turns, waiting to Impress. She was always in charge.

Until she wasn't.

Until she revealed to Obennin how much time she'd been spending in the infirmaries, learning from a pretty young man with steady hands. Until she'd decided that her calling was really to go to Fort, to Healer Hall, in the footsteps of their mother. Of course, Obennin should stay. She'd be bound to the craft, would have no time, and the Hall would have no space. Of course, Obennin was still meant to be a dragon rider, and he shouldn't give up the place he had in Telgar, the friends he'd made. And of course Kossama was coming back.

But four turns on, Kossama was not back, and Obennin was standing those hot sands alone growing older than most of the group standing with him, and bored. He was fretting about his future.

Sure that he was destined to die listless, right there on the Hatching Sands with no one to notice amidst all the excitement (and on the verge of expressing this thought aloud), all of O'in's anxiety coagulated, then evaporated into a simple, "Oh."

In memory, it is the nonchalance of Cunaguaroth's sudden, psychic request for food that sticks with the blue rider.