A Collection Of Imperfect Stories

These are not your normal fairytales. 
The heroine is not always breathtakingly beautiful, the prince is not always brave or noble. And the evil witches just might have stories of their own. 
These are the stories that didn't make it into the dragonets books. They were cut out, held far from dragonets ears. Not for lack of happy endings (although there aren't many of those), but because perhaps they teach just a bit too much of the truth. These are stories woven with threads of darkness, the stories that are just a bit too close to reality for some. 
You don't have to read them all, they don't connect in any way. They are just here for you to pick from, if you want something a bit different than ordinary tales.
You might not like these stories. They aren't for everyone. 
But every story, no matter how strange, deserves a chance to be told.
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Notes: 
- If a story doesn't have "complete" written beside the title, it's incomplete. You can see which are complete in the table of contents. 
- I update almost every few days, but I jump around between stories a lot. If you're really invested in a certain story, drop a note for me in the comments and I'll message you when it's been majorly updated! 
- You can also suggest story ideas or prompts in the comments, and I'll credit you if I decide to use them. 
- All artwork is by me unless specified otherwise.
- I've used the category "short stories" for this, with approval from a mod. This is because although the page is quite long, each individual story is separate and fits in the category.
- Similarly, I have not included all the categories that occur here. For example, there is a story that fits in the horror and tragedy categories, but this is not a common theme on the page and so I did not use those categories. Before any stories that fit the darker categories, I will put a warning and a brief summary of what content to expect. 
- Keep in mind that these are dragons, so mostly every story will have a minor blood or death warning. I promise that nothing I ever write here will be worse than or even at the level of gore shown in canon.
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== Stories From The Kingdom Of Rain ==
=== How The RainWings Got Their Colours - Complete ===
Creation myth, some blood, about 4400 words, complete
There was a time, long ago, when the RainWings could not change their scales any more than the other tribes could. They were hatched in any colour of the rainbow, and that was the colour they would stay for the rest of their lives. RainWings did not have stripes or splashes of colour, no. They were painted the same muted shade from their horns to their eyes to the tips of their wings. 
The Queen, at this point in time, had seven beautiful daughters. And oh, how they shone! Their colours were pure and clean, not muted or dulled by gray and white. The first daughter was red. The red of fresh-spilled blood and poppies under the sun. The second was the orange of a pure flame, the third as yellow as the sun. And so the rainbow continued, all the way down to the youngest daughter. It is said, my dear readers, that she was the most beautiful dragon to ever walk the earth. She was delicate and graceful, her horns had just the right amount of curl, and her wings were perfectly proportioned. But her scales were the most gorgeous of all. Bright, gleaming violet, swirled with dark indigo and red. It was said that she was the closest a RainWing had ever come to having more than one colour on her scales. She was perfection. Pure and simple. RainWings came from all over to paint her, to simply brush a talon along her gleaming scales... 
Bored yet? 
Good, because this is not a story about the Queen's most beautiful daughter.
When Mylinoe was hatched, three moons shone bright in the sky. They were the only ones that witnessed her crack out of her egg in the royal hatchery, silent and solemn. Be brave, daughter. They whispered to her. Know that we love you. And that you must be strong. The Queen's eighth daughter. And her last. 
When the Queen had known she was with egg the first time, she had gone, as all new mothers-to-be went, to the Watcher. The Watcher lived on top of an ancient tower in the heart of the jungle, staring at the Moons with her blind eyes. She was old. She had been old when the Queen's mother had come, and all the mothers before her. 
The Queen had approached in silence. 
"Ah," the Watcher had croaked. "So at last you have come."
"Yes," said the Queen. 
For the rest of her life she would wonder how the blind NightWing had sensed her arrival.
"Yes," she said again. "I have come for the futures of my dragonets."
The Watcher nodded slowly, her milky eyes seeming to fix on the Queen, even with her blindness.
"You will have many daughters," she said at last. "And they will be all the colours of the rainbow."
The Queen thanked the Watcher, and when the old NightWing said no more she turned to fly away.
"Wait."
The Queen turned.
"Change is coming. It will be hard, and it will likely hurt. Know this then; that appearances can be deceiving, and that your youngest daughter will one day be the greatest Queen of them all."
And so the Queen left, with this tucked into her heart. 
Years passed, and what the Watcher had said proved to be true, as it always was. The Queen had many daughters, one for each colour of the rainbow. And of course her youngest was the greatest of them all! Why, she hadn't needed the Watcher to tell her that! It was written on every one of her perfect purple scales. 
That was it, then. Her greatest daughter had been hatched, for there was certainly no way another dragon could ever be more beautiful than her. The Queen continued to have eggs, but the dragonets were all male after that. And so by the time Mylinoe hatched, the guards only checked the royal hatchery every few days. 
There was only one egg due to hatch that morning. The guards who went in to check on the newly hatched Prince rushed out screaming. There was a monster crawling from that egg, they said. A dragonet so horribly deformed they could hardly stand to look at it. And worse, it was female. 
So begins the story of Mylinoe, the RainWing with no colours at all. 
"You are ugly," her mother told her, fear and disgust written across her snout. "Your scales are clear like glass and your body is twisted. Your eyes are too big and your wings are too small. You are a monster. You are not fit to be a Princess." 
And so the last Princess of the RainWings was sent to work in the kitchens, covered in a cloak so that she might not upset the staff. She wore heavy gloves on her talons to hide her clear scales and the veins that pulsed underneath. 
"You are ugly, " her sisters taunted. "Your scales are clear like glass and your body is twisted. Your eyes are too big and your wings are too small. You are a monster. You are not fit to be a Princess." 
The snatched her cloak away, and though her scales they could see her muscles and veins. When they flipped her over on her back they could see all her organs, glistening wetly in the light. 
"Look!" Cried her most beautiful sister. "Look here, you can see her heart!" They laughed and shrieked with disgust.
Be glad of your heart, the flowers in the vase seemed to say. Pity your sisters, for they have none, and they are jealous.
As Mylinoe grew older, she grew stronger as well. Her bones no longer jutted out from her skin, her crumpled wings unfolded a bit. And although her eyes were still much too big for her head, she did seem to grow into them a bit.
Years of scrubbing floors and stirring pots built up callouses on her talons as surely as the words of her sisters built them onto her heart. She no longer cried alone at night. There was plenty to cry for, of course, but if Mylinoe cried over everything that went wrong she would certainly never leave her bed. 
By the time Mylinoe was nine, she had fallen into an easy rhythm. She knew everything about the palace and its inner workings. She knew how to scan any room she entered and how to note the little details. She had her sisters's routines memorized perfectly, if only so that she might avoid them. Look, the flowers whispered, Listen, murmured the trees.
In the week before the Queen's sixtieth hatching-day a stranger came to the palace in the rainforest. He was a RainWing, of that it was certain, but the exact colour of his scales is a fact lost to history. For the sake of the story, let us say they were blue. He walked with a limp in one of his back legs, and carried a small brown pouch. 
"I am a powerful animus," he told the Queen. "And I have travelled far for you."
"I have a gift for you, you see. I can make you a cloak of all the colours in the rainbow, that will fit perfectly to your scales." 
The Queen readily agreed (her scales were quite a nasty shade of peach), and said that she would love such a gift. A rather foolish move, to agree so easily to an animus, but in her defence she'd been in the shadow of her own daughter for so long that she'd almost forgotten what it felt like to have all the attention on her. Poor thing. She never even stood a chance.
The animus set to work right away. It was a week and a day until the Queen's hatching-day, and he'd need every minute. The Queen offered him her finest rooms in the palace, but he simply tossed a pebble to the ground and from that his workshop grew. 
He asked for only one thing, that each day one of the Queen's daughters would join him in the workshop, and on the last day they would present the gift together. The Queen was wary, but agreed. And so the animus walked into his workshop with the eldest Princess behind him. She did not emerge again. 
The next day, he sent for the next Princess.
As the days went on, each Princess was called into the workshop, and none returned. Stay away, hissed the vines on the trees. Pain, cried the moss as Mylinoe strode past that building that hadn't been there a week ago, holding a bucket of scraps. 
And yet as much as they warned her away, Mylinoe found herself drawn towards the stone structure. She tried to peek in the windows, but they were firmly shuttered. 
On the eighth morning, the animus didn't send for a Princess. Instead, he sent word that the cloak was almost ready, and that it would be done by the next day. He would present it in the evening, at the Queen's hatching-day banquet, and then her daughters would be returned to her. 
It was on this eighth morning that Mylinoe finally stepped up to the workshop. She wore her cloak, but there was little to be done about her head. Her skull showed through her flesh, her jaw muscles glistened in the pale sunlight. Gathering her courage, she knocked hard on the stone door. 
The animus who opened it did not flinch at the sight of her. She took it as a sign to speak.
"I am here to ask if I might see my sisters."
The dragon stared at her. He began to laugh.
"No," he said. "You may not come in. Only those with royal blood may cross this doorstep."
"I am Mylinoe, the eighth RainWing Princess. I demand you let me in. I must speak with my sisters." 
"You are not beautiful," he told her. 
"No," she said. "But I am brave." 
"You are ugly," he sneered. "Your scales are clear like glass and your body is twisted. Your eyes are too big and your wings are too small. You are a monster. You are not fit to be a Princess. Get lost!"
He slammed the door, and she fled in tears. Not for herself, she'd long stopped crying over words spoken to her. But for what she witnessed beyond the door, lying on the workbench. Her sister's perfect violet scales, scattered like puzzle pieces, some still wet with her blood.
Mylinoe ran into the jungle, her cloak tearing from her as fled. She stumbled into a clearing filled with flowers, and began to sob. 
Why do you cry? asked the ancient trees.
My sisters... he sobbed. I must help them.
They are so cruel, the vines hissed.
They have no hearts, the flowers sang.
No, said Mylinoe, But I do.
The jungle was silent. Considering. 
We will help you, it said at last. Because you are our daughter, and we trust you. We will protect you.
It was a different dragon who returned to the animus's workshop that night. Only a day before the Queen was to receive her gift. The trees had covered Mylinoe in flowers. They spilled over her wings and shoulders, danced down her tail. She was vibrant. Every inch of her was covered in colours. Only her eyes could not be changed, a colourless slushy gray.
Most versions of this tale claim that Mylinoe was not afraid. That she stood straight, wings neatly folded, tail curled calmly behind her as she waited for the door to open. This is not true. She was shaking so hard that petals fell from her like rain. Her claws tapped an irregular rhythm against the doorstep with the force of her trembling. But she was there. And sometimes, just being there is enough.
She did not hesitate to knock on the door. And her voice was steady as she spoke to the dragon who opened it. "My name is Mylinoe. I am the eighth RainWing Princess. I have come for my sisters, and I will not leave until I have seen them." 
"You are ugly," he told her.
"Yes," she said. "But a Princess all the same."
The dragon was silent for a minute, then nodded. He stepped back swinging the door open with a flourish. And Mylinoe stepped into the workshop.
"Come," the animus said. "Eat with me."
So Mylinoe sat at the plain wooden table and ate starfruit with honey. Don't drink the wine, murmured the flowers woven through her horns. So she didn't, and when his back was turned she switched their cups, quick as could be. Good, said the flowers. Good. 
Within half an hour he was asleep, drunk on his own drugged wine. Mylinoe stood on silent talons, and went to find her sisters. The workshop, it seemed, was much larger on the inside than the outside. She hunted through many rooms. Quick and quiet. She called her sister's names as loudly as she dared, one by one. Half an hour passed. No answer. But she knew. Knew it in her bones. They were there and they were hurting, and she was going to find them, or she would die trying. 
The workshop was a maze of rooms, and several times Mylinoe wondered if she was going in circles. Finally she found the stairwell leading into the basement. It smelled of mold and blood and pain. Mylinoe trembled as she stepped downwards, her talons clicking on the wet stone. There were no torches to light the way, but Mylinoe with her abnormally large eyes was well suited to the darkness. She called her sister's names, one for each step. Her voice wavered and shook. She did not cry. And when she reached the bottom step of the curving stairwell she peeked around the wall and saw them. A single torch lit the damp room. In the corner bound with vines, lay her sisters. Across the room, finished at last, hung her mother's cloak of many colours. One of her sisters peered up at her with violet eyes. Large, owl-like eyes that were the only spot of colour left in her once-brilliant sister. She reached out a shaking talon. 
And Mylinoe began to laugh. 
"Mylinoe?" Whispered the sister with beautiful yellow eyes. 
Other voices began dragging themselves through the dark as one by one her sisters woke. They pulled apart, and without looking at their eyes there was no way Mylinoe could tell them apart. For their scales were clear as glass, all the colour drained into the cloak behind her. Their eyes had been stretched too large, their wings had crumpled and broken as the scales were stripped from them. 
Look at them, the flowers buzzed. Who's the monster now?
Nothing had changed, Mylinoe realized. Her sisters had always been the monsters. And she could see then, how easy it would be to deny her beating heart. To tell them that she too was a monster, she'd become a monster so they wouldn't break her. She could leave them here, and no one would ever know that she could've done anything.
Do it, the flowers urged. They deserve it. Slit their throats and leave.
"Mylinoe? Is that you?" Her violet-eyed sister, the one who had been so beautiful. She sounded terrified.
So Mylinoe stepped forwards, and held out a talon to help her rise. And as her sister reached up to take it, the door behind them banged open. The flowers drew back, squeaking shrilly as the animus entered the room. 
He was furious. 
"I'd enchanted myself to heal quickly a while back. I hadn't known it would make poison go through my body much quicker. An interesting experiment, I must admit. Although... may I say that I was a bit... worried when I woke to see you gone."
He stepped towards Mylinoe, and her sister drew back. 
"This workshop is filled with dangerous items, you know. I'd hate it if you were to get hurt. Or lost, of course. And if, by chance, you saw something that you weren't supposed to see..." His smile turned dangerous, a darkly twisted thing. "Quite a good little liar, aren't you. Why, I never even guessed that you'd switched the cups."
He paused by the cloak, running a talon over it almost reverently. He murmured something softly, too low for Mylinoe to hear. She tensed, preparing to run. But her sisters... she couldn't leave them. Her heart would not let her. The animus must have caught her glancing at where they lay, because his smile grew ever wider. 
"They've been awfully cruel to you, haven't they."
"Yes," said Mylinoe. It was the truth. Her sister's already large eyes widened in fear. 
The animus held out the cloak to her. "Come see it," he said. Mylinoe stepped forwards, but did not touch the cloak of many colours. 
"Smart dragoness," he crooned. "No doubt you would try to stop your mother from wearing it as well. But I have a secret for you, little glass dragon. Would you like to hear it?" 
"And what," Mylinoe asked, "would be the payment?" 
"Ah. You are awfully clever. In fact, your cleverness is what caused this whole mess. So no, there is no payment owed, although I would like to make you an offer." 
"Tell me your secret, and I shall hear your offer." 
At this the animus leaned in closer, his snout only inches from her ear. 
"Your mother is dead," he hissed. "And your sisters are soon to follow. I sent a knife to kill her as soon as I awoke, an enchanted knife that can cut through any material." 
He held up the knife then, the blade still stained red. It had no doubt returned to his talon the minute it finished its awful work. 
Mylinoe did not give him the satisfaction of flinching. He would have been better off telling her that the Queen was dead, for she had accepted long ago that she had no mother. 
"Is that all you have to say?" 
He hissed his displeasure at her. "My offer, if you would hear it." 
She dipped her head in a mocking bow. "Of course. By all means, ask away." 
"Take the knife from my hand, and use it to kill your sisters. Then the cloak will be yours, as well as the throne of the RainWings. You would be the most beautiful dragon in Pyrrhia, and no one would ever call you a monster again, with your scales in every colour of the rainbow. I would be your closest advisor. And of course, we needn't stop there. We could rule kingdoms, my darling. Why, with your mind and my powers, we could rule the world." 
I would be lying if I said Mylinoe didn't consider his offer. The flowers all whispered different things, a cacophony of silent sound. 
Enough, she told them. And strangely, they fell silent. She turned to the cloak, the colours swirling in a way she'd never seen before. To the animus, his talon outstretched, a silent offer lingering there. She looked to the knife, and then to her sisters still curled on the floor, the sisters who'd hurt her almost every day of her life. At last she looked inside herself, to the heart so tough and calloused. And there she had her choice. 
"Thank you," she said. "But the colour of my scales will not change the colour of my heart. And I have never wanted to rule kingdoms." 
His face twisted in rage, and then he was moving. Lunging not for her, but the cloak. The knife clattered to the floor as he gripped it with both talons and swung it over her head. It was cursed, she realised with no small amount of horror. And then the world went dark. 
Back in the workshop basement, the animus watched Mylinoe carefully. The cloak didn't quite fit her right. It was made for a dragon who did nothing but lounge on a throne all day. It was not made for a dragon with twisted limbs, a dragon muscular from days spent working in the kitchens. But it would be enough, he reassured himself. There were three curses on the cloak. The first being that the wearer could never take it off. 
"Mylinoe."
She snapped her head to him.
"Pick up the knife."
She did so, her movements rough and jerky. Dead flowers tumbled from her as she moved. And there lay the second curse, the curse of utter obedience. The wearer would have no thoughts of their own, would obey his every command. Mylinoe held the knife, face blank, awaiting his next order. 
"Kill them."
She turned towards her sisters, raising the knife. And then she hesitated.
"What are you waiting for? Kill them! Do it now!" 
Mylinoe didn't move. And then she pivoted, dead flowers shaking from her wings like rain as she drove the enchanted knife straight into the animus's heart.
The jungle had protected her, true to its word. And she knew that the flowers would never speak to her again. They'd given it up, the part of them that could whisper in her ear. They'd given up their lives to save her from that curse. She didn't know whether or not to be relieved. Blood dripped onto the floor as she pulled the knife from the animus's lifeless body. She stared down at her talons, covered in scales of deep red. And then she pressed the knife into his neck, cutting through bone with that magical knife. His head fell away from his body. 
Just to be sure, she told herself. 
Purple swirled through Mylinoe's new scales as she stood with her sisters and watched the workshop burn. She still held the enchanted knife in her talons, blood drying on the blade. And then she turned and led her sisters back to the palace. 
The servants were in an uproar. The knife had just come shooting through the darkness, they said. Dead the day before her sixtieth hatching-day, the Queen hadn't even had the time to scream. They fell silent at the sight of Mylinoe, marching up the path with a bloody knife in her talon and her mother's cloak wrapped around her scales. 
It was assumed instantly that she'd been the one to kill her mother, and although she didn't confirm it, she did nothing to shut down the rumours that spread like wildfire through the Rain Kingdom. Her sisters knew the truth, or part of it at least. But no one seemed to want to listen to them, to Mylinoe's amusement. 
Later that evening, the eight of them stood alone in the throne room. The empty throne glared from the dais behind them, as if daring one of them to take it. 
"I am the oldest," her red-eyed sister said. "Since none of us killed our mother, I should be Queen."
"I am the most beautiful," said the one with violet eyes. "I should be the one to rule." She wasn't beautiful anymore, not even pretty, but old habits are hard to break.
"No," said Mylinoe. "All of you might have had an equal claim to the throne, but only Heirs may take it, and you are no longer Princesses."
Her sisters cried in outrage, but Mylinoe held firm. 
"You are ugly," she told them. "Your scales are clear like glass and your bodies are twisted. Your eyes are too big and your wings are too small."
She paused. Smirked a bit. "None of these would matter, were it not for the fact that I can see right through you, and I can see that you have no hearts at all. It doesn't matter if you are beautiful or not. You are monsters all the same." She did not smile, but her scales glowed purple with pride as she spoke the final line of the taunts they'd given her for years.
"And you are not fit to be Princesses." 
A different dragon might have killed Mylinoe's sisters then, or sent them down to work in the kitchens as she'd been forced to. But she decided that for them, the worst punishment would be to live long, full lives stripped of their beauty. No longer royalty, she cast them out of the palace to find work as any other citizen of the Rain Kingdom might. 
She did not beat them, did not treat them as dirt. Instead, she simply turned away. Maybe her choice wasn't the right one. Had the jungle spoken to her at that moment, it surely would've called for blood.
Mylinoe was tired of being told what to do. She'd made her choice, and she stuck to it. 
And maybe it was a flaw in the enchantments, or maybe it was intentional, but every RainWing hatched after that day had scales of all the colours in the rainbow. And as for the third curse, well, that one held true. Never again would Mylinoe be able to lie so flawlessly, nor would any other RainWing. Not when their scales changed colour, writing their emotions across them in great splashes. 
One might assume Mylinoe a terrible Queen, for while her sisters had been attending meetings on diplomacy and trade she'd been peeling fruits and scrubbing floors. But she remembered the simple lessons the flowers had given her since the day she'd hatched. Look, listen. 
Her first decree, only hours after she was made Queen, was to ban the use of animus magic anywhere in the Kingdom of Rain.
And that is the story of how the RainWings got their colours - and their Queen. 
Mylinoe only asked two things of all her subjects. Their loyalty and their honesty. As it was, no one ever called her beautiful. 
Her rainbow scales didn't fit right and her eyes were an eerie, colourless gray. Her limbs were twisted and her wings would never let her fly. 
She ruled with compassion in one talon and wisdom in the other. 
She was brave and strong. 
And as the Watcher had predicted all those years ago, she was the greatest Queen the RainWings had ever had, before or since.
==Stories From The Kingdom Of The Sky ==
===Black Cliffs, White Wings===
Horror, some romance, and tragedy. Some death and gore - nothing worse than in canon. Incomplete, about 2700 words so far. Most of the relationships shown here are unhealthy, kids. 
It was common knowledge in the village of Redwinter that one did not walk alone by the Black Cliffs after dark.
Well, it had been common knowledge back when Redwinter existed. Now all that's left after the town on the Wingtip Peninsula blew into the sea are the stone ruins of a few houses. 
If you were to stand on the edge of the cliff and look down, you would see the waves crashing against the shards of rock. You would see ice breaking in the water, it's almost as cold as the Ice Kingdom here. If you were lucky you would see the beach down the coast, not made of sand but sharp black pebbles. Most of the time the view is shrouded in fog. Don't get too preoccupied with looking though. And don't get too close to the edge. They like to push dragons off. 
If the fog is so thick you can't see the crashing waves below, back up. Turn around and go back the way you came. Do not fly, you will fly out to sea. If fog obscures the ground below, do not keep walking. You will walk off the edge, no matter which direction you were going. Sit down and grasp the ground firmly with your talons. 
If you listen, you can still hear dragonets screaming. 
This is not the site of a happy ending. 
There was a time, long ago, when the waters by the cliffs ate dragonets. Chewed them up and spat them out, frozen cold, wings white, lungs still filled with air. There was a time when the mist grew tendrils that chilled and pulled. Fog-spirits, they called them. Sea-wraiths. 
There was a time when a town stood on this spot, proudly boasting the title of the most northern town in the Sky Kingdom. It's gone now, ripped apart by the ocean in a rage. 
Sometimes, if you walk on the beach after a storm, you'll find perfect little bones, washed up amidst the stones. Be careful. They're sharp.
This wasn't always a ghost town. Step away from the cliffs, little one, and let me tell you how this came to be.
As far as dragonethoods went, Haze's was fairly good. He'd spent most of it running through the wood to the South of Redwinter, wild with his friends. They stayed away from the cliffs to the North, or at least most of them did. Late at night, Haze would sneak out to stand by the edge, staring into the gloom below. The fog would swirl around his talons, a friendly sort of touch. He spoke to it, often, the rambling words of a dragonet with no one else to talk to. Sometimes, he thought he could hear answers floating back to him on the wind. The fog swirled and undulated. It was like an echo, snatching breath from his lips only to return it, slightly changed. Thick billows of mist, taunting, twirling. They were harmless. They were deadly. They were the soft touch of an old friend, who you know is dead beyond the shadow of a doubt, and you lean into it anyways. Haze was afraid of them. 
His fear could never stop him from staring into them, and wondering what would happen if he jumped.
It was on one such cold night that the mists first spoke to him. "Do you love us?" They had voices like the crashing waves. They had voices like shards of rock scraping together. The sound of them was like the sound of the sea on a cold winter's morning, when glittering shards washed up on the beach, and you couldn't tell which were ice and which were broken glass, crushed in rage. 
"Yes." The word forced its way out of him, and he tried to catch it in his talons but it was already gone, spiralling out over the waves. A soft, hushed laugh answered him, the laugh of one who knows a secret that they just might choose to share. It was a pleased laugh. It warmed his cold claws and tail. Deep inside him, his heart chilled, like a veil of mist wafting through his body.
"Do you love us more than anything?" 
"Yes."
He felt it shift, felt that cold wind brush him again. And then his mind was his own, and he was left to wonder why he hadn't noticed it leaving. The mist dissipated with the watery light of dawn, and Haze stood alone on the cliff, stiff and sore and chilled to the bone, wondering how many hours he'd been there. He could only barely remember the conversation - if he could even call it that. He loved the fog. 
Didn't he?
After that day, Haze snuck out more and more often to stand by the cliffs. He gave them his problems. He gave them his worries. He bundled up painful feelings in his talons and threw them into the fog, leaving behind a blessed, mist-chilled numbness. 
And every time, the asking price was the same.
"Do you love us?"
"Yes."
"Are you ours?"
"I am yours."
"What would you do for us?"
"Anything. Anything at all."
Until Haze was five, he was certain that the mists would never hurt him. They might lure other dragonets to a terrible death, but not him. He was special. He was untouchable. He was theirs. He’d given them his soul, his love, his eternal devotion. And in return, they took his pain from him and gave him the attention he so desperately craved. They kept him safe, as long as he fed them his pain. He hadn’t realized what they could do. Not really.
He stepped up to the cliffs later than usual that night, gasping for breath. Much later. He'd hoped they wouldn't notice, but he'd again underestimated them.
"You are late." The mists hissed their displeasure, the sound of it weighing him down like an icy stone.
"Yes." He knew not to lie to them, because they could see the truth.
"Why?"
"I'm sorry. I-it won't happen again."
"That does not answer our question, little one."
"I was with my sister." He’d been playing with her in the sunlit trees, and it had been dark by the time his parents had called them home. He’d fallen into bed curled around her, his duty to the sea momentarily forgotten, only to wake up in the night in a cold sweat, pulled from sleep by nightmares of drowning in ashes, and rush to the cliffs in horror.
"Do you love her?"
"Yes."
"More than us?"
He hesitated, and for them it was answer enough. The mists pulled back as if scalded, then circled around violently. And suddenly, Haze was terrified. His heart beat a frantic drum inside his chest, wild and slick and dreadfully alive.
“You love us,” the mists scolded. “How dare you break our hearts?”
And although he knelt on the cliffs pleading forgiveness until his knees bled, the mists did not speak to him again. 
Haze was still kneeling there as the dawn broke cold and clear. The air was crystal edged and bitter. It cut into the corners of his mouth. Dimly, he was aware of a dragon screaming. And then his mother was upon him, sobbing, screeching. She dragged him away from the edge and inside to a blazing hearth, where he sat numb and cold and stared at his sister's sea-drenched body. The house was filled with relatives all talking at once, all telling the same story. A mother waking to an empty nest. A dragonet found drowned. Her brother, crouched on the cliffs, his mouth bleeding from the words he choked to say. And always, the same question.
What have you done?
He'd made a bargain, hadn't he? His soul for the relief of his pain. His undivided attention and love in return for theirs. And by neglecting them, they'd caused him as much pain as they were able. His heart ached. He watched, dry-eyed as the frost melted off his sister's wings, turning them from white to red. When it was proposed none too gently that Haze ought to stay with his uncle to the south, he didn't object.
In fact, he didn't say anything at all. The words had bled out of him on the cliff top. Because of his refusal to speak, his uncle kept him out of school, instead trying to teach him at home. After all, he was only supposed to stay for a few weeks. But his mother didn't ask for him back, and Haze himself had no wish to return. As it was, he passed years in silence, watching the world outside through the window of his uncle's cottage. 
When it rained, he curled up in his blankets with his talons pressed over his ears. When he saw fog, he moved his lips as if to speak to it, but no sound came out. 
This could be the end of the story, a dragon wasted away in a hut by the mountains. A cold quiet life, a silent death. But oh, I promised destruction, didn't I? A town in ruins, a peninsula crushed by the sea. And as Haze was yet to learn, one can never truly break a bargain made beside the sea.
. . . 
His name was Acorn. It was a good name, a name that had nothing to do with the sea. Every week, he flew down to the market with his brother. Every week, he stopped to drink at the stream that flowed behind the cottage. Haze watched him carefully, because there was nothing that Haze didn't do carefully these days. Acorn didn't look like the dragons of Redwinter, who were thin and mist-chilled. Acorn looked like he had grown up out of the earth, all strong limbs and shining red scales. Haze felt like a shadow, watching him. The days passed slowly. Winters came and went, spring blossoms pushed their way up through dark earth. Three years after the worst day of his life, Haze watched as Acorn and his brother stopped by the stream, as Acorn picked one of the first crocuses of spring and tucked it behind his horns. Oh, thought Haze. He likes flowers.
Everything moved differently, in Haze’s mind. Time flowed in slow, glittering circles, the days and weeks alluring but too bright to touch. Haze held his life like it was the sun, and he had been burned deep enough that the nerves were damaged. When he ate there were always sharp little bones in his food, no matter how much he tried to pick them out. His scales dried out because he wasn’t drinking. He wasn’t drinking because the water from the clear stream tasted like salt. In his dreams he walked to the cliffs. 
“I love you,“ he said, over and over, and these times, it was enough. In sleep he was always restless, waking up to a nest strewn broken across the floor. He loved the sea-wraiths more than anything else, because he had nothing else to love. He was a dragonet, and he was cold, and he needed to earn something, anything. 
He stopped sleeping. 
One day (week, month?), Haze was lying on the floor below the window, when he decided to do something. He did not know what it would be. The thought filled him with no excitement, only the knowledge that his boredom had reached the point where it would be more painful if he didn’t do anything. He went outside. The sun was as sharp as shattered glass. He went back inside. The next day it was cloudy, and therefore worse. 
There were daffodils now, and tulips, and dandelions. Haze went out in the very early morning, in the shade of the woods, and watched them bloom. He picked a tulip. The stem was warm and firm in his cold talons. He looked down at the now blossom-less plant and felt bad, but only for a second. 
The feel of new grass beneath Haze’s talons was too foreign, so he went back inside. He brought the tulip but couldn’t share it with the water so he put it in a dry container and watched it die. 
The next time he took many, and looped their stems together. It had been a long time since he’d done something like this, but he had been young in woods like these once. He made a flower crown of red and yellow. The stream was too fast to see a reflection, but Haze knew that it was too bright for him. He was scared of going blind, so he left on the flat rock where Acorn and his brother stopped to drink. He told himself that it was hardly even a gift. He told himself that it could be for either of the dragons that drank at the stream, even though he only bothered to remember one of their names. To show how impartial he was to Acorn’s reaction, Haze told the wraiths in his mind that he wasn’t going to stick around to see it, and went inside. 
Haze fell asleep by the window waiting. 
In all of his dreams, he was bleeding. When he woke up, the crown was gone. 
. . .
And so the silent giving continued. In the spring, Haze left soft pink flowers and pieces of shattered pottery that he’d found in the woods. The ceramic was glazed white with a bright yellow and orange design. Haze rubbed all the pieces he found mechanically on rough stones until they were perfect circles of all different sizes. He spent more time outside. When his uncle flew back from work as a guard at the palace, he remarked that the cottage smelled better, and thanked Haze for the jars and bundles of flowers that he left scattered around. Haze did not feel proud exactly, nor good, but as the spring turned to summer he felt a bit warmer.
He found that he died less in his mind if his claws were busy. 
In the summer, his uncle brought him paper and greasy ink. The ink was blue and Haze dumped it into the stream and watched it lengthen impossibly, like taffy in the current, before it oozed and spiraled out of sight. He lit a stick on fire with his breath and blew it out. The charcoal was dark and streaky, uneven as he drew. Haze drew talons and fangs. They didn’t trail off into light strokes once the main detail was done, but ended with thick smears of charcoal, like they’d been ripped from something that bled as dark as the sea. 
Haze drew flowers, and the stems ended the same way.
In the fall, he discovered that boiling dead leaves left the water stained brown. He didn’t touch it but dipped his brush in it and layered it to create different shades. He painted acorns of different sizes and shapes and left the drawings by the stream once a week. Sometimes he waited in the cottage for Acorn to come by, but he always ducked out of sight at the slightest hint of red wings. 
. . .
The first time they met Haze had been walking through the woods back to the stream. He hadn’t spoken a word in years, but he hummed now, often, and this was what he was doing as he picked his way over the ground. He was carrying a small ring of flowers, pink and blue and white, forget-me-nots plucked from the shady ground. Acorn was coming by today, Haze knew, and he was hurrying to get back to the cottage.
He reached the bridge, a few planks of wood he’d laid across the stream. He crossed carefully, as always, looking down to make sure his claws didn’t slip on the wood. When he looked up at the other end Acorn was standing in front of him. The posy of flowers slipped from Haze’s claws and fell into the river. 
Acorn reached down and pulled it out. He tucked it, dripping, behind his horns. Water ran down his snout into his smile. Haze felt uneasy for reasons he couldn’t place, delicate and unsure.
“Hello,” said Acorn. His voice sounded different up close. “I was wondering when we were going to meet.” 
==Stories From The Kingdom Of The Sea==
=== From Salt to Blood - Complete ===
Creation myth, small mention of blood and death. About 1000 words, complete. 
There was a time, long ago, when the sea was as violent and sharp as a tyrant's smile. When the ocean could kill more dragons in an hour than a year of bloody warfare. But of course, there wasn't a lot of warfare back then. They were all one, back then, or was the ocean many? It didn't really matter. The MudWings would claim that they'd been shaped from earth and fire, sculpted out of warm clay by a divine talon. The SandWings think that they'd fallen from the sky amid pieces of the clouds, and crashed into a barren world, and made it their own. But the SeaWings alone know the truth. There's an old Aquatic proverb, from a time when dragons had not yet the lungs to speak. The dragon is the sea and the salt is the blood. It had made sense, back then, when words had been nothing but sparks of sunlight reflecting of the waves. When the lie had not yet been invented, and the truths were all one. Now it is a saying parents quote to their dragonets. Don't leave the sea, they say. Remember your loyalty. 
The truth is, the dragons were the sea. They had been bigger, then, and fewer too. They had lain in the frigid depths of a world newly formed and dreamed themselves wings and horns and spines. All life came from the sea, and to the sea all life will one day return. It is the way of things. She takes it all back, eventually.
So why, you might ask, did the dragons leave the sea? Why did they grow legs and take the steps onto sandy beaches and rocky coves? This is the point where the tale splits. It fractures off into different paths, shimmering like a spiderweb in the pale morning dew. The main paths say that the other tribes were rebellious. They argued and dissented and kicked up such a fuss that a brilliant and courageous member of the royal family took it upon himself to toss them up out of the sea and onto the land to die. Which, being stubborn and rebellious, they decided not to do.
The second, less widely known version of the tale features a prince so brave and handsome that it was impossible to be in his presence without feeling hopelessly inadequate. He found that some SeaWings were not shaped right, that their gills were too small and the webbing between their claws too weak. They died faster than the others and swam slower. The prince, noble as he was, could not stand to see his subjects suffer so. And so he gathered them up and guided them through the perilous waters to land, where he hoped that the soft green hills would be easier on their frail bodies. Away from the sea, not all survived, but the prince stayed with them until they'd split off into six groups. These six groups became the first members of the other six tribes, and they took to the mud and sand and sky, and within time they forgot their roots in the deep. 
The prince went home after years had passed on the dry land, and the constant exposure to air had dried his scales and made him, somehow, more handsome in a scarred and rugged way. He'd asked for nothing from the tribes he left on the land, not even thanks, although they gave that in abundance. He was good and selfless like that. 
When he arrived at the palace gates, he was received warmly by his family, all but one. His youngest sister watched her mother embrace her long lost brother, and was overcome with jealousy. When he turned to her, to wrap her in his wings, for he'd missed all his siblings desperately while on his journey, she slipped a fine small knife between his ribs. And so the best prince the sea had ever had went back to the waves that had birthed him quietly, without the slightest noise as he sank to the sand at her feet. 
The queen was furious at this, and ordered her daughter sentenced to death, at which the vicious and brutal princess turned, blood still swirling in the waters around her, and challenged her mother for the throne. She was the youngest of her family, but she fought with such power and ferocity that her mother stood no chance, and even her sisters were afraid to challenge her next. The queen's body sank along with that of her beloved son. 
The kingdom mourned for a year and a day, while waiting for the mad queen to wage war on the land dragons that her brother had tried so hard to protect. But the grace period never ended. The queen ruled over her people like they were toys, like they were nothing to her. She was so young, and they were so many. 
She never took a mate. She had one of her sisters killed but left the others as they were. She talked to dragons that weren't there. She was paranoid, she was delusional, she never started a war although her subjects always feared one. In the end, she held on to her throne for sixty years before one of her nieces took it. It was almost like she let it go. 
There is another story here, as I'm sure you can tell. But the queen was too scared to tell it, and there was no one who would listen. So the prince lived on as a fallen hero, and none contradicted the story. What was there to contradict? Who was left to know what had really happened between the queen and her late brother? 
After all, the prince had been perfect, right? Everybody loved him. 
=== Pearls and Diamonds ===
Romance. A few deaths, mentions of war, some politics. Incomplete, about 2300 words so far.
It was the custom, in those waters, to wear silver to a funeral. Silver was the colour of the moons reflecting off the sea, the colour of life and love. The dead were wrapped in shrouds of kelp trailing silver ribbons, and mourners rang silver bells as they sent their loved ones to rest in the sea. 
There wasn’t going to be a funeral, so Nessa wore silver to the hanging instead.
She watched them haul her father up to the hastily constructed wooden platform. His green scales were pale and cracked at the edges. A rough hood covered his head. Nessa longed to cry, but the tears were locked up deep inside her, somewhere tight and constricted as the rope that now looped around her father's neck. The silver bangles around her wrists and ankles had been a calculated choice, made out of grief and love, and the tiny scrap of pride within her that refused to die. In the morning, they'd been a bit like armour. Now in the harsh light of day Nessa met the Governor's gaze with nerves of steel, and wondered if this was what chains felt like.She'd draped a veil across the lower part of her snout, the pale fabric hung with silver coins. They would jingle together if she moved, but she hadn't for the past thirty minutes. She felt like one of the statues standing guard at the gates of the Underwater Palace, frozen in time, trapped in the moment she'd been carved out of. A shiver crawled up her spine, but didn't make it past her shoulders.
Nessa heard voices behind her but the words were unintelligible. She wanted to set something on fire and watch them all go up in flames. Standing on the raised platform, the Governor was reading the long list of crimes her father had been accused of. It started with the innocuous and ended with the ringing proclamation of high treason to the crown. Beside Nessa, her mother was shaking like a leaf in the wind. Her little sister Kelp was pressed into her mother's side, the dragonet's sobs the only sound in the still air after the list had been read out. The crowd, both noble and commoners, pressed forward in eager anticipation. The executioner's dark blue talons closed around the lever that would drop the wooden trapdoor and send Nessa's father swinging. The rope, she knew, was not long enough to break his neck. This would not be a pleasant death. 
Nessa's mother choked on a sob and hid her eyes, stepping back from the railing, pulling Kelp with her. So Nessa stepped forwards. (Since when did she have to be the strong one in this family?) She met her father's eyes with no hope, only a grim sort of acknowledgement and love. Her heart ached, but she never stopped watching. Not as the lever was pulled, not as her father's wings strained desperately against their bindings. Not as his gills flared hopelessly or his limbs thrashed. Not until the very end. 
The crowd cheered around her. Her mother clutched Kelp hard, both of them sobbing in earnest now. Nessa made no sound. Tears welled in her eyes, but she blinked them away before they had the chance to spill down her cheeks.
"Godspeed, Papa," she mouthed. "May you find your peace in the deep. May your waters be clear and your soul free." 
She did not meet anyone's eyes as she grasped her mother with one talon and her sister with the other, dragging them back the way they'd came, back to the sea. The crowd parted for them like they were poisonous, deadly to the touch. Nessa glanced back and found the young Queen watching her with a gaze that promised death. Her gray eyes were shadowed with grief and madness. They met Nessa's, and she found that they were colder than the deepest depths of the ocean and twice as frightening. Nessa shuddered and turned away as politely as she knew how. She did not look back again. 
For the next four years, whenever she dreamed of that day, it was those eerie, pain-stricken eyes that haunted her the most, and the way they'd latched on to the silver across Nessa's snout.
___________
The library in the Underwater Palace was always cold, and slightly damp, the scrolls sticking together, the old words blurring and running. Even the ancient historians and librarians preferred the library above water, as it was much easier to keep scrolls dry when one only had to worry about water coming in from one direction. Pools along the floor were filled with bioluminescent algae, casting a dim and eerie light along the rows of warped shelves. If she was being honest (which she rarely was), Queen Axalomeh would have preferred to spend her time in the dungeon. But there were guards posted by even the lowest security cells, and by the doors of the royal bedroom, and in the gardens and the many sitting rooms. She supposed that she could go down to the kitchens and or stables and find a dark corner to hide in. But her presence there seemed to disturb the workers a considerable amount. 
So here she was, hiding between stacks of mouldering wood and paper in the cold, heavy air. It had been a terrible idea to design a library in an otherwise underwater palace. Even with the complex engineering put in place to prevent water from creeping up the sloping passageways, it somehow managed to make its way in. She knew that when the library had first been constructed, the wood floors had been polished to a gleaming sheen, lanterns hanging at regular intervals to give the space a golden glow. Axalomeh wasn't sure when they'd stopped using lanterns in the Underwater Palace, only that it had been long before she was hatched. She hated almost every part of the rotting old space, except for the air. Magic had been used to fill this sealed room with air, the passages leading to it sloping steeply upwards, the sealed room preventing the air rising to the surface. Axalomeh breathed in deeply, knowing that the air in her lungs was the same air her ancestors had been breathing in this room for hundreds of years. The vines covering the walls filtered it, but since the library had been built, the air had never been cycled out. It would be too much work, and what was the point, for a room so rarely used. Since it had fallen into disrepair, all the scrolls of an important nature had been relocated to the library on the surface, a painstaking process. 
Now, Axalomeh stood in the ghostly, cavernous space, and imagined her mother beside her, lit by the fuzzy glow that surrounded old memories and separated the past from the present, breathing the same air.
She held her emotions in check as she walked slow laps, weaving through the mostly empty shelves, her talons trailing behind her. Chips of rotting wood flaked off, the shelves gouged deep from almost four years of this. Four years of walking through the darkness. She hated the library, hated the mould, hated the haunted and broken emptiness of it. She would know it in her sleep. Could navigate the warped floorboards blind, by smell and touch alone. 
Somewhere in the palace, a bell tolled the hour, the sound reverberating through watery halls until it reached her ears. She closed her eyes, counted eighteen bells, and opened them again. Then she straightened her back, shook out her wings and tail. Pulled her Queen face back on. Leaving behind the ghosts of her past, she made her way to the Great Hall for supper. 
Axalomeh presided over the meal with a stony face. She sat alone at the high end of the table, occasionally giving a brisk order. She didn't speak to the nobles clustered near her end of the table. They'd stopped trying to gain her favour three years before, after the usual period of mourning had ended and they'd discovered, some much more slowly than others, that her withdrawn attitude was not, in fact, a result of her grief over her mother, but just the facet of her personality she chose to show them. (They didn't know she had others. Over time, she'd forgotten about them too.) At her right hand sat General Abalone, one of the few people she'd ever been able to trust. He'd been her mother's general too, and she should've had him demoted years ago for the atrocity of his jokes alone. But he was a link to a part of her only the library knew of, and she'd clung to his tail when she was just a dragonet and her own father had been to busy to pay her any mind. She didn't know if she loved him. She wasn't made for things like love. 
On her left sat Governor Urchin. He looked like an urchin, she thought, and not the sea type. Despite being perfectly clean, he was pinched and sour looking, with eyes that greedily tracked any food that entered the room. Axalomeh had long suspected him of swiping the silverware to pawn, but he was excellent at terrifying the servants into good behaviour, so she let it slide. 
Today the servant serving Urchin, Abalone, and Axalomeh was a young dragoness the Queen was almost certain she'd never seen before. Despite this, her soft green face was familiar somehow. Axalomeh studied it with a bored, detached air as the dragoness came and went, serving the Queen with all the delicacy and grace she could muster. The meal continued without incident, but Axalomeh couldn't shake the creeping feeling that she knew the serving dragon from somewhere. It wasn't until the very end of the meal, when the servant fumbled with a platter and set Urchin's dessert down with a clatter and he grabbed her forearm threateningly that Axalomeh recognized her. She'd seen that terror-stricken face before, looking up at someone larger than her, filled with a helpless sort of fear. Lady Kelp? She had the same eyes as her mother, a clear, watery blue, stretched too wide, like she was always shocked.
But no, no Kelp wasn't a lady anymore, not if she was wearing the simple white choker and armbands that marked her as a member of the household staff. Unless... Fear shot through Axalomeh, the sort of fear she hadn't known for almost four years, watching her mother die. 
"Governor. Release her." Axalomeh barely recognized her own voice, brittle and raspy-sounding. Urchin complied, more slowly than she would've liked. Axalomeh snapped her talons in front of the servants face, drawing her attention. Faced directly by those pale blue eyes, Axalomeh was sure of it. the dragoness standing in front of her was the same one she'd seen four years before, at the execution of her mother's killer. 
Axalomeh turned the full force of her steely glare on Kelp. Eyes narrowed, mouth set in a thin, hard line. This was the face that had earned her the nickname of Granite Queen. The face that she had held all throughout a war they were slowly losing on the land and in the sea. Kelp quailed beneath it.
"Speak your name, servant." To her surprise, Axalomeh had to struggle to keep her voice steady. She tried not to speak much usually, hating how her voice betrayed her youth.
"Kelp," the dragoness whispered. "Daughter of Marin."
"Kelp," Axalomeh sneered, "Daughter of Aberdeen." Silence settled around the table. "Tell me, Kelp, why you are here polluting my dining hall with your presence and not still huddled under your mother's wings in that paltry home you call an estate?"
"My mother is dead," Kelp spat. 
"What a surprise," Axalomeh said, ice lining her words. "So is mine."
Kelp paled visibly. Her damp wings shook together. Their rustling was the only sound in the great hall.
"Get out of this hall. Get out of this palace. I do not care who assigned you here, you are never to serve me or anyone else within these walls again."
Kelp trembled under the Queen's glare. "Please," she whispered. "I have nowhere else to go."
"There are plenty of places that would be eager to take a dragonet such as yourself. Perhaps one of the harvesting beds, hmm?"
It was difficult work, the keeping of the oyster beds, but Kelp and her family had been cut off from the crown for four years now, and they should know how to work as commoners. The Lady Marin had been allowed to keep her family home, but after the execution of her mate, Aberdeen, much of her wealth had been stripped from her along with her title. Now it seemed that the rough life of a commoner had finally killed her, as Axalomeh had hoped it would. 
Kelp was shivering so hard that it sent ripples through the puddles of water around her claws, and Axalomeh hated her for it. It was a dull and brittle sort of hate, the kind that pulsed cold and slow deep inside her. She was no longer worried that the dragonet was here for some sort of assassination attempt, and she was suddenly very tired. Axalomeh's mother had been hesitant and merciful. It had killed her, and Axalomeh had always been a fast learner. 
"It was in my first decree," said Axalomeh, "that no member of your wretched family would set foot in this place again." 
==Stories From The Kingdom Of Sand==
=== Six Witches and a Star ===
Adventure, incomplete, about 1700 words so far.
Meteors were supposed to be black, weren't they? After all, they were on fire as they fell from the sky. Osiria had seen four meteors hit the earth in the time that she'd been with the Coil, and perhaps more before, But the years before were blurred and shimmering, like the depths of a pond covered by a thin sheet of ice. 
She was pretty sure all the meteors she'd seen had been burned. 
"What is that?" Jay leaned over Osiria's shoulder to ask. The two of them stood by the edge of the crater, staring at the silvery lump within. The earth was charred and cracked, the sand scorched to glass. 
"I don't know," Osiria whispered back. The night was dark and silent, the sky murky. In the desert, rain was more valuable than diamonds and twice as rare, but tonight Osiria tasted it on her tongue, the heaviness of an advancing storm. The others crowded behind her and Jay, a scatter of familiar wings and talons. The ground was much too hot to walk on, so they stayed around the edges of the crater, shifting from foot to foot in an attempt to bear the heated ground. Their eyes were fixed on the centre of the crater, where a glowing silver figure lay partly obscured by veils of shifting steam. 
"Is that a dragon?" Sun's voice drifted across the crater.
"Can't be..." someone else murmured. "Nothing could stand the heat down there. Nothing alive, anyways..." 
Osiria shuffled forward as far as the heat would allow her to go and peered through the steam. "Hello," she whispered, her throat dry. "Is anyone down there?" 
Through the steam, a pair of golden eyes met her own. Osiria froze. Despite her steadily growing sense of unease and fear, her heartbeat remained steady. Witches always had steady heartbeats. A pale, shimmering claw reached up, as if to grasp the moons far above. Now all the witches were standing still, watching with starlight reflected in their eyes as the trembling silhouette of a dragon pulled themselves to a standing position. As one, the witches moved back from the edge of the crater, readying themselves into a fighting formation. They'd had decades to fight as a group, guarding each others backs and attacking as one unit. They were very, very good at it. Knives flicked out from sheaths as the witches readied themselves. The dragon in the crater advanced upon them slowly, their mouth open as if tasting the air. They had no distinct tribe or gender. Sparks jumped from their silver scales. Their eyes glowed like pools of molten gold. When they spoke, their voice was rough and harsh, nothing at all like the delicate chime Osiria thought it would be. She didn't recognize the language, but the the tone was unmistakable. The strange dragon was giving them a warning. The witches held formation. They hadn't gotten to be the most feared and respected dragons this side of the desert by backing away from a fight. 
The strange dragon stopped in front of them. Osiria could feel the heat wafting off their silver scales. They spoke again, their voice harsh and nervous. 
"I'm sorry," Osiria said. "I cannot understand you." 
Evidently this was clear to the new dragon as well. They held their talons up to show they were unarmed, then crept forwards. Jay and SongTail moved to block Wren. The leader of the Coil stood tall and proud, knowing that she didn't need their protection but valuing it all the same. The strange dragon reached across the space between them and pressed a paw to Jay's skull, right between her horns. Jay gasped, her weapon slipping from her grasp. Her eyes fluttered closed, but she didn't fall, rather stayed suspended in the space she was in, like a disused puppet hanging off a hook on the wall. 
Osiria lunged forward. Before she reached Jay, the dragon removed their paw from Jay's head. Jay's eyes fluttered open, she blinked once in confusion before striking, flipping the strange dragon to the ground. They hit the sand with no small amount of force. Wren levelled her spear at them. Behind her, Sun was preparing a binding hex. 
"Wait," the dragon whispered. Wren's spear pressed against their throat hard enough to draw blood. It ran red down their neck and onto the pale sand below. 
"Tell me what you did to Jay or I swear I'll kill you here and now," SongTail snarled. The dragon reared up, then fell prone as Sun's hex took effect, binding their limbs to the ground.
"I did not harm her," the dragon rasped. "I only copied her language so that I might understand you. She will be slightly disoriented, but there are no lasting effects."
Indeed, Jay appeared to be blinking away the after effects of the spell, bending down to retrieve her weapon and lowering it threateningly at the new dragon.
"Who are you?" she snarled. "From which kingdom do you hail?"
"I do not come from any of your kingdoms," they said, "And I have many names."
The witches nodded in agreement, for they themselves were known differently in many places. Wren stepped forwards and the witches parted for her easily. The charm disks strung from her horns clattered together as she moved. She drove her heavy staff into the ground and held up her talons to show that she was unarmed. Osiria, who had seen this farce before and knew that the staff was mostly for decoration anyway, bit her tongue to hold back a smirk. 
Wren clasped the stranger's front claws in greeting. "I am Birdie," She introduced herself. "And these are my sisters. We're travelling together across the great white stretch to Marris Outpost. Do you have a destination?"
"Of course," said the traveller. "I do not know where it is yet, though."
"If you would like," Wren said, who had not yet released the stranger's claws, "You may travel with us. We can provide food and shelter." 
"I need neither," said the stranger, "but I would value the company." 
And so they set off into the night, Wren leading. Behind them, thunder was starting to rumble. The wind, sharper and greener than the usual desert wind, howled at Osiria's back, sending a shiver of uneasiness down her spine. 
. . .
Marris Outpost was bare and dry in the way that most of the desert outposts were. At one time, during some long ago war, it had been crucial, and the marks of occupation were still there in the crumbling fortifications and the leaning watchtower at the gates. Now the blocky clay and straw buildings that used to hold dozens of soldiers had been converted into indoor markets, the few inhabitants of the outpost living in little huts clustered close by. It was a passing-through place, a water stop. The only dragons who lived at outposts like Merris were the ones would had no chance of making it anywhere else. Osiria hadn’t worried about much since coming to the Coil. The only fear she had was for the safety of her sisters, and together they were competent enough to take anything the desert threw at them. Osiria hadn’t been afraid, or frustrated, or jealous in many, many years. 
But something inside of her mind always twisted unpleasantly at outposts like Marris. She could not remember what, nor where, or even if anything had happened at all. She could not remember much of her life before Wren had found her and took her in. All she knew was that she walked into the town beside the stranger and her claws dug viciously into the ground.
“Are you all right, Osiria?” Her name sounded different on the stranger’s tongue. Rougher. Her name had always been melodic but she found that the way they said it turned it to chunks of gravel.
“I’m fine,” she said, quietly. She’d never brought up her uneasiness with Wren or any of her sisters. Their past lives weren’t the sort of topic they made conversation on.
“You need a name,” she said. 
The stranger accepted the subject change gracefully. “Why?” They asked. 
“Because nobody knows what to call you,” Osiria said. 
They tilted their head at her. “But if everyone else is called by name, then I will know that if no names are mentioned, it’s me.”
“That is a good point,” Osiria said. They were almost through the gates and she should have felt better but there was a heavy sickness in her mind. “What if we need to get your attention in a crowd, though?”
The stranger frowned, and then nodded. It had been no problem on their journey when it was only the seven of them. But Osiria was right and they knew it. “What name should I have?”
“Well,” said Osiria, “There’s no point in giving you a normal name, because you’ll stand out anyways. Choose what you like.”
“I choose Stranger,” said the stranger. Osiria rolled her eyes. 
“What if,” she countered, “one day, we know each other well enough that you’re not a stranger anymore? What then?”
Stranger shrugged. They didn’t look worried about the possibility, and so neither was Osiria. 
“Fine,” she said. They smiled at her too wide, as though they didn’t know how to do it right. It should have been unnerving, but Osiria only laughed. They’d passed through the gates and the back of her mind was dragging in the sand but she felt strangely giddy. It would get better, she knew. She’d been through this before and she had learned how to pick herself up quietly. She knew that these small, broken down places had a way of sticking to her talons like thick mud. She knew that, with time, she could shake them off. 
She smiled back at Stranger under the tattered and faded flags of a long dead army. They’d been travelling with the group for three weeks now. Eating nothing and occasionally engaging in light conversation with the members of the Coil. But it was here in the hot sun that Osiria realised the two of them were becoming friends.
The witches set up shop in the dusty and tattered market. They advertised themselves as fortune tellers and minor illusionists. Having brought nothing with them for their journey but three shared tents, the witches quickly repurposed the material. Patterns that had once been disjointed and strange came together as all three tents were snapped together along hidden seams. The resulting structure was larger than the huts outside, and split into four rooms. The three in front had one side open or thinly curtained, facing the street. The remaining room, at the back, was where the witches prepared their acts. In the evening they closed the front and turned the sides inwards, folding the canvas like paper until they had a comfortable area to sleep and eat.
==Stories From The Kingdom Of Mud==
==Stories From The Kingdom Of Night==
=== Moons of Fortune ===
==Stories From The Kingdom Of Ice==
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Category:Fanfictions
Category:Fanfictions (Incomplete)
Category:Content (Skydream7)
Category:Fanfictions (Semi-Canon)
Category:Genre (Short Story)
Category:Mature Content