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on the meeting of dragons
I always feel kind of awkward posting writing I've done for cathartic purposes bawww But this journal needs to be broken in with something so why not... weird rambly pre-cavalreaper fic. I GUESS???? Sorry if it doesn't make any sense ahaha
Trufax the hardest part about this was coming up with ways in which trolls show their age lskjdf
In the sweeps before you met her, there were nights when you woke up and just breathed. And that was good enough. The steady rise and fall of your chest was a tempo counting moments towards the end, the coming apart of the world. Or your world anyway. These were the days when you were selfish, when your world was the only world you cared about. These were the days you dreamed about things you forgot as soon as you woke. Peace on Alternia and good will towards trolls. They were always terrible dreams because when you opened your eyes, you were taken away and shown a place where none of that seemed possible.
You lie feverish against the flogging pole as an overseer whom you have forgotten the name of lays new scars across your back, your shoulders, your hips. You have to do better, he says between whip cracks. You can be shown no mercy on the fields, and you have promise in you. It is praise you do not want, especially the way he snaps each word like it hurts him to say it. But you breathe and everything is okay again.
The first thing the dragon taught you when you found her was that you are delicate and mortal. She set her great claws against you, pushed you down. She gave you impressions, images, moments, the way a body crunches and folds under pressure. The snap of bone, the taste of marrow and raw meat until you licked the roof of your mouth and bit your tongue because you thought maybe you might be a dragon too. One held secret behind your rib cage. Maybe you don’t exist at all, you thought. Maybe everything is a shell waiting to break and uncover another shell. Forever and ever amen.
She shows you how you will age and how you will rot away in the ground and she will live on and on and on. Not forever, but close enough by your count. You are brief, she says with the cracks that old skin forms and the thinning, brownish black your hair will become if you ever see twenty-five. You are brief. You nod, and she presses the breath out of you before you can make it okay. You learn her blood is teal, that her partner was teal and red, and that there was a man before either of them who was just red.
He was important, but she can’t say why. Something about ideas. Idealism. A good world for good people. Your wrists burn though, fire hot, metal tang on the inside of your nose, in your throat, until you’re fit to scream. For a moment you believe you are sleeping and the time has finally come for your branding, but the dragon lets you up, finally, and you are you again. A small, brief, fever warm, lowblooded boy. You are barely a perigee past six and you stare up at the long, long curve of her neck, watch the great shift of muscles under her deep white scales, and you think, perhaps, you will never grow up. She looks at you again and you can hear her partner’s old laugh, the sweet and unfettered one from her wiggler days, and you know that she would like that. If you stayed young at heart even though you will age away in an eye blink. You still breathe, but it is not enough anymore.
She calls you Dragon Child, and refuses to let you ride her when she flies. She says someday the sky will be yours and she will not take that first breath of free air from you. When you sit next to her and hear see smell taste all her stories though, underneath it all is the sense of weightlessness. The wind against your skin and the clouds and the moonslight so close you could touch it if you cared to. But you do not care to anymore. It is false. You learn to hate that fact, resent it. The falseness in things crawls around in your bones.
You do not lie against the flogging pole anymore. You grip it between your hands and shout insults over your shoulder until morning comes and the overseer has to give up on breaking you or be burned in the sun. They leave you tied and for a moment you wonder if you will die. She wasn’t kidding about brief. Ha ha.
She comes to you though, spreads her wings and keeps you safe in the shade. She scolds you, calls you child, wiggler, fool. You can only laugh and promise not to do it again before the pain finally takes you someplace dark and drifting and strange. You stop wondering if you will die. The overseers are terrified when they come to you at dusk, so they let you go and work you till your open wounds ache. You do not breathe the same way anymore because nothing is okay and, most importantly, most defiantly, you do not die. You are the child of dragons and you are young in your soul and someday the sky and the world will be yours. You know this as much as you know you will need to learn to fight if you will ever achieve any of it.
She sings lullabies in birdsong and blood against the tongue. You are mortal, you are brief, but you are not weak, and when, at the turning of the sweep, the leader of the cavalreapers comes through the farm, you are the first and only to offer yourself to her.
Her smile is thin, cruel, another smile that thinks it can break you. You nearly laugh into her face because you know. You know the coming of the end of her world is here. You imagine maybe she knows it too when she looks into your eyes again and she takes a sudden, startled step back.
Trufax the hardest part about this was coming up with ways in which trolls show their age lskjdf
In the sweeps before you met her, there were nights when you woke up and just breathed. And that was good enough. The steady rise and fall of your chest was a tempo counting moments towards the end, the coming apart of the world. Or your world anyway. These were the days when you were selfish, when your world was the only world you cared about. These were the days you dreamed about things you forgot as soon as you woke. Peace on Alternia and good will towards trolls. They were always terrible dreams because when you opened your eyes, you were taken away and shown a place where none of that seemed possible.
You lie feverish against the flogging pole as an overseer whom you have forgotten the name of lays new scars across your back, your shoulders, your hips. You have to do better, he says between whip cracks. You can be shown no mercy on the fields, and you have promise in you. It is praise you do not want, especially the way he snaps each word like it hurts him to say it. But you breathe and everything is okay again.
The first thing the dragon taught you when you found her was that you are delicate and mortal. She set her great claws against you, pushed you down. She gave you impressions, images, moments, the way a body crunches and folds under pressure. The snap of bone, the taste of marrow and raw meat until you licked the roof of your mouth and bit your tongue because you thought maybe you might be a dragon too. One held secret behind your rib cage. Maybe you don’t exist at all, you thought. Maybe everything is a shell waiting to break and uncover another shell. Forever and ever amen.
She shows you how you will age and how you will rot away in the ground and she will live on and on and on. Not forever, but close enough by your count. You are brief, she says with the cracks that old skin forms and the thinning, brownish black your hair will become if you ever see twenty-five. You are brief. You nod, and she presses the breath out of you before you can make it okay. You learn her blood is teal, that her partner was teal and red, and that there was a man before either of them who was just red.
He was important, but she can’t say why. Something about ideas. Idealism. A good world for good people. Your wrists burn though, fire hot, metal tang on the inside of your nose, in your throat, until you’re fit to scream. For a moment you believe you are sleeping and the time has finally come for your branding, but the dragon lets you up, finally, and you are you again. A small, brief, fever warm, lowblooded boy. You are barely a perigee past six and you stare up at the long, long curve of her neck, watch the great shift of muscles under her deep white scales, and you think, perhaps, you will never grow up. She looks at you again and you can hear her partner’s old laugh, the sweet and unfettered one from her wiggler days, and you know that she would like that. If you stayed young at heart even though you will age away in an eye blink. You still breathe, but it is not enough anymore.
She calls you Dragon Child, and refuses to let you ride her when she flies. She says someday the sky will be yours and she will not take that first breath of free air from you. When you sit next to her and hear see smell taste all her stories though, underneath it all is the sense of weightlessness. The wind against your skin and the clouds and the moonslight so close you could touch it if you cared to. But you do not care to anymore. It is false. You learn to hate that fact, resent it. The falseness in things crawls around in your bones.
You do not lie against the flogging pole anymore. You grip it between your hands and shout insults over your shoulder until morning comes and the overseer has to give up on breaking you or be burned in the sun. They leave you tied and for a moment you wonder if you will die. She wasn’t kidding about brief. Ha ha.
She comes to you though, spreads her wings and keeps you safe in the shade. She scolds you, calls you child, wiggler, fool. You can only laugh and promise not to do it again before the pain finally takes you someplace dark and drifting and strange. You stop wondering if you will die. The overseers are terrified when they come to you at dusk, so they let you go and work you till your open wounds ache. You do not breathe the same way anymore because nothing is okay and, most importantly, most defiantly, you do not die. You are the child of dragons and you are young in your soul and someday the sky and the world will be yours. You know this as much as you know you will need to learn to fight if you will ever achieve any of it.
She sings lullabies in birdsong and blood against the tongue. You are mortal, you are brief, but you are not weak, and when, at the turning of the sweep, the leader of the cavalreapers comes through the farm, you are the first and only to offer yourself to her.
Her smile is thin, cruel, another smile that thinks it can break you. You nearly laugh into her face because you know. You know the coming of the end of her world is here. You imagine maybe she knows it too when she looks into your eyes again and she takes a sudden, startled step back.