DU Cynder Adult Ref

Within the context of my work, Cynder's naturally grown adulthood takes on a far different shape to that of her corrupted form, and it manifests itself in many different ways: Phsyical, emotional, and magical.

The ref you see here is of Cynder as a young adult dragoness, around the age of 18-25 dragonyears old (around 180-250 human years).

Cynder is no beanpole as a natural adult. She eats well (or as well as she can in a household where her godmother cooks too much), and sticks to a regular, rigorous exersize and training regime. Consequently, Cynder has developed a strong, healthy physique, worlds away from her borderline emaciated youth and corrupted mockery of aduthood, forced onto a child.

One of the most striking things to gradually occur to Cynder's body, however, is the gradual change of her scales from black to purple, as she grew older. Starting from the extremities and the snouth, as her old scales were shed or lost, they were replaced more and more by purple scales, and a sprinking of purpleish-silver scales on her snout and the edges of her underbelly, taking on the appearance of freckles.

The cause of this transformation was Aether in the blood. To facilitate Cynder's initial corruption, Malefor infused Cynder with a noticable, and slowly growing amount of Aether and Dark Aether (or as the magio-scientific community of Avalar would refer to it, Daether) into her blood. As an adult dragon, the magic was enough to grant her a limited roster of powers. However, when Spyro freed her of Malefor's curse, he not only unintentionally infused her with significant trace quantities of pure Aether of his own, the amount of magic inside Cynder remained unchanged when she was shrunk back into the body of a hatchling, greatly magnifying the concentration of Aether and Daether within her veins. As she grew, it grew with her, gradually mutating her as it multipled and increased until Cynder, for all intents and purposes, effectively became a purple dragon herself, with all the strengths an drawbacks that brings.

On a happier note, as Cynder reached maturity, she was graduallly able to distance herself from her past, by learning to cope with her baggage. This was further aided by public perception shifting very much in her favour. The young dragoness was titled by the Empress of Avalar to become the Duchess of Avalarian Provence, along the Mediterranean Coast. As time went by, Cynder would become better known as the just and fair Duchess, or the Princess of the Avalarian Empire, the Purple Dragoness, or the legendary hero who saved the world alongside Spyro: She would become better well known for her good deeds, than she ever was for her time as Malefor's slave, a dark footnote in her story. Consequently, it has had a very beneficial effect on Cynder's mental health, and by her adulthood, she has largely managed to shake off most of the damage her time as Malefor's puppet had done to her psychque, self-esteem and her general mental health. Of course, being surrounded by a loving step-family, and having the support of a loving partner certainly helped!

Although Cynder was never able to remove her bracers and choker, she would continue to wear them quite happily, both due to the fact she secretly quite liked how they looked on her, and because they came to be a reminder of how far she had come. She would later accompany the pieces with a scarf of her own making (due to a love of knitting she would develop in her teens). On officially business, or when she wishes to demonstrate her ducal position, Cynder also wears a silver coronet, carefully shaped into the form of a rose and its thorny branches, all studded with an array of sparkling jewels. Lastly, she would be chosen to be the bearer of a pair of magical rear ankelts known as The Perfect Wings, an ancient, magical and extremely powerful pair of Air Dragon artifacts, but that's another story...

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Soo, yeah! This is my interpretation of an adult Cynder in my work! I wanted to try to do something different from the norm, where Cynder is always this rather lanky, skinny dragoness. I'm not sure how well I pulled it off, but I would like to think this has done a good job of making this version of Cynder more my own.

The artwork here was created by the lovely StarstruckDoodles and I'm very, very happy with their work, thanks again!

Cynder belongs to Activision *retch*.