Firescale Legend

Firescale Legend
you think you know them....
...their broken hearts
reclusive lives
shattered hearts
firesouls...
fire scales
__TOC__
====tick tock====
Tick tock says the clock.
I stare, my head against the cold, cold, cold wall, my gaze fixed on the grandfather clock.
Seven ticks and tocks before the eight chime of the day. Seven ticks and tocks before I get my fill. I stand wearily, knowing, and I trudge over to the slot in the sealed cave entrance. I stop a few feet away from it, still counting. Four, three, two... The clock chimes.
A clutter, a bang, and the prey rolls down before my feet, a sloppy mess. Now they stopped giving me platters. Every unexpected moment, they make a minute change - which these days, I hardly recognize the first time around until I'm plagued with a memory of what things were like before the change, and then I knew. Now I noticed it. I will probably forget it. Besides, the platter was in no use. It would be in a charred heap by the time I was finished with it.
Maybe it was the hope that they were still treating me like another dragon that I indulged. But I knew it now like the moment I was shackled and locked in here. I have no freedom. I am not a dragon. I am a waste of space. I am here to die. And yet they feed me everyday, eighth chime.
I slump down next to my dinner, my shackles clanging against the cold, hard ground. I bend down my head and take a cold bite. The food must've been out for a few chimes already. I place a talon to a piece of hawk and watch it slowly blacken and I pulled away. Crisp. Hot. Chewy. Still nothing like the taste of the warm blood I had years ago.
After licking the last morsel, I hobble back to my sleeping corner, and resume my original position, head back against the wall, across from the clock. Firescales cannot write, so I can't keep a diary. I wish I could keep a recollection of my time in here, so the next prisoner knows what to expect, to not endure the pain of building hope only for it to all topple over in one heartbeat.
But scrolls turn to ash with a stroke of my claws, and the quill lasts even shorter. The ink sizzles with a poke. My diary is in my mind, the place I cannot burn. So I write another entry.
Day 997
A new change today. My food isn't on a platter anymore. One by one, everything that makes me dragon is stripped away. Sometimes I remember the smell of sweet roses, then the putrid scent of the burning from an innocent touch. Now I can't burn things anymore. My mother begged to let me live; she tried to prove I was innocent, she would teach me not to hurt. She was wrong, wrong, wrong. 
Now all I smell is the smoke from the candelabra I light each day. All I see are jagged cave walls and varying niches, the black talonprints of mine which overlap so much the cave floor looks dead night black. All I feel is desperation for... 
I close my eyes and think.
Love. Hope. Death. Dreams. Normality. 
Only monsters lack these. 
Which means I am not dragon. 
I am monster. 
Leashed, kept away, meant to be f o r g o t t e n. 
This night, sleep doesn't come to me. At all. So I lie, conscious, carried by the tick tocks of the taunting clock.
====memories====
There is nothing I hate more than memories. Not the queen who ordered me to be locked in here, not the general who turned the keys, not the parents who drained a heart full of love in one second.
Because those are moments and moments happen once. Memories are circles, spinning around my head, never letting go. They keep a beat with the ticks and tocks, and are fueled by my last embers of hope. They are the one thing I cannot reduce to ashes.
I don't like things I can't burn.
This one came in sometime during the second chime of the cycle. A heartbeat, pulsing nearby. Blood walls crumbling under the pressure, turning gray before they die. Two flashes of darkness. A loving, yet wary face mirroring my own which I had yet to see. An adoring arm reaching forward, then...
I sit up forward, my shackles clanging against the floor. In a moment, I am up and before I knew it, the clanging is all I can hear, but way worse. I don't know what I'm saying, only that it is loud and terrible, like dragons voices when they touch me. In a moment, the cave wall bangs open and a furious dragon is standing, his head nearly touching a stalactite. I feel an urge to impale it through that gaudy head.
"Tanager," I whisper.
"That's General to you," The dragon leers, keys in his talons. I fix my gaze on them, desperate and furious. "What was all that drama about, huh? Fifty days of silence and now you choose to throw a fit? You're not getting out of here with that attitude, you know that?"
"Sixty-nine days," I say, surprising myself.
"What?" Tanager's eyes narrow.
"It's been sixty-nine days since my last tantrum."
Tanager snarls. "You know what insolence costs you."
And I did know. Even if they couldn't hurt me, they could scare me. They could make me see things that would stay in my core memories forever. They could plant phantoms in my head and drive me insane.
But it would be so easy to touch him, to reduce him to a pile of ashes. The thought proves me to be just the monster the queen imagined but touching one more SkyWing would result in punishing me in the worst way possible. A way my darned scales couldn't protect against.
Animus magic.
I'm not the only spared abomination. Often I can hear screams loud enough to enter my cave, and I wonder what in the three moons they're forcing the animus to do. The screams are unexpected, silent most days, begging to be heard on others.
Unexpected: that is what this kingdom is under Queen Merlot's rule.
Like the changes in the way they treat me and the screams they force out of the animus occasionally.
Tanager's eyes reflect me, and I see my form. Dark red, almost mahogany scales, smeared with mud. My blue eyes, which used to look alarming against my dark scales, look dull and hopeless now. My form is skinny and ragged, and the way I hold myself...
...shows fear. Tanager's snout curved into a wicked smile; victorious. He pulls out a scroll and a quill, and I see jagged black points on the parchment. "Day 998, behavior is poor. This.... will be her...last tantrum." He reads out loud.
Last?
Last?
"Oh - don't worry!" Tanager chuckles, noticing my expression. "It's not over for you yet. Just...change of plans..." He tucks his scroll away and leans over to tighten my fireproof shackles, carefully avoiding my scales and I stand still, the risk fresh in my head. With a last sneer, Tanager shuts the cave door closed, a click confirming the lock.
I turn and slump against the door. They had a different plan for me, possibly to let me free. How could I ruin it? How could I destroy it?
But no.
No matter what, they would never release me. I am a monster, an abomination, and I do not deserve freedom.
This time, I let the chilling memory come to me. A fine sunny day, dragonets playing in the sunshine. A shrill, piercing cry broke through the air and I turned. A copper dragonet flails his wings as he's about to fall off a cliff. That's Eagle. He's the runt of the generation, just learning how to fly. Without thinking, I fly over, grasp his talon and pull him to safety. Instead, he starts screaming louder and his talon disintegrates to ash and he backs away and falls right over. They found him, broken bones, pluming smoke where his claw should've been. No one saw what I exactly did, and they assumed I pushed him off. My parents gave up on me then, accepting I was the monster the queen claimed I was. A few minutes later, the guards stormed over with a liquid made by the imprisoned animus which bewitched me to follow the guards to my prison cave with a touch to my scale. The last thing I remembered was Queen Merlot's wicked smile as I was locked inside, terror flaring my every nerve. But the magic had played its part.
Now I sit here, 998 days in. No guarantee in ever leaving.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Category:Fanfictions
Category:Fanfictions (Incomplete)
Category:Fanfictions (Semi-Canon)