Shana sighed deeply, the aroma of her sweet drink drifting up to her nose. It was a nice scent, one that made her thirsty and ready for more food.

She looked around the sparsely decorated guild hall with a sigh escaping her red lips. Her guild mates were late. They were always late. Right now, it was ten in the morning and none of them had even bothered to show up so far, which was more than a little annoying because the woman clearly remembered giving everyone instructions to arrive at 9:30. Sharp.

Today, the Ravenmore guild was opening its doors to new members for the first time in three long years. The reasoning? They were short on people. After a rather major string of incidents, the guild's population had declined. A minor setback, Shana was sure. There were plenty more people available for the picking, individuals whose loyalty would not be so easily swayed. This thought was held certain for Shana and the other remaining members.

Ravenmore had once been a revered multi-member guild, renowned throughout the entire country of Kyros. In its glory days, the guild hall would get more traffic than even the King's market. Job requests were bountiful, the rewards were rich, and there was much respect for even the lowest-ranking members. But everything had changed after the dragon incident. After accidentally letting a powerful dragon loose from captivity, and being responsible for the havoc it had wrecked on several cities, misfortune became inescapable for the guild. This marked the beginning of their deterioration- failed jobs, civilians killed, and property destroyed. Ravenmore's approval rate dropped significantly. Many people looked upon the guild with scorn and scrutiny, and its once revered status became something of a joke. Many members had left, and the ones that remained struggled to keep the rest of the guild intact.

If only we hadn't let that dragon out, Shana thought, a string of guilt in forming her head.

A sudden knock at the door brought her out of her thoughts and she was bolting upright, walking from her seat at a wooden table to the ornate door at the entrance to the guild hall.

"Come in," she said, unlocking the door. In came quite possibly the most disappointing thing she could have expected.

(A/N: Hello there! This is my second completely original fantasy story. The first one, I did not publish on this site and I deleted a long time ago. As it says in the title, this is an SYOC. I am looking for many different characters to be the members of Ravenmore. I am accepting a lot of new characters. I hope to get a lot of submissions. It means a lot to me to have people interested in something like this. I will be posting this story on a couple of different websites, but the one it was really meant for is this one. If you would like to see your OC in this story, just fill out the form and send it to me in a PM. You will find the form on my profile, it is no longer in the first chapter of this story here because I wanted to clean things up. Please, do not send in characters through the review anymore. These characters will be ignored. I use my inbox to carefully look at each form I have been sent. It needs to be through PM. I also want to take time to thank QuestioningTheTheoryOfLove, my amazing new beta reader who will be (and is) helping me fix my work up.)