"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
It is filled with adventure and promise. Danger and intrigue. He has been taught from the first that he was something to be feared and to not feel fear. He was the predator. It was the lessons his mother showed him when she helped him pull the poison from between his frozen scales. The lessons taught from his father when the fox fire illuminated his face in the dark. It was the lessons he learned in his young heart.
But he is not yet a predator.
He is just a boy.
Just a boy with a hunger for more in his chest and a desire to learn everything that he is and can be. A boy who leaves home to wander, to roam, to seek out the things that his parents do not immediately show him.
It takes him to the forest today and he shifts partially to leave dragon wings folded over his thin back. They are scaled but premature—not yet the behemoth things that they will one day be.
(Who is he to be? Who is he?)
He feels something race in his veins like adrenaline when he hears a branch snap and his head jerks to the side, both curiosity and fear lighting up within his breast. Another part of him shifts, upright scales racing down his back—fluttering slightly in protest. “Who’s there?” he demands, but even he knows that his voice does not sound imposing or frightful at all. It sounds like a boy. Just a boy.
The snow below him grows shallower as he drifts south, and by the time he hovers above the Forest there is nothing but fallen leaves to litter the spaces between the dark trunks. Malik lands in a spray of red and orange leaves, shifting from a long-crested eagle to a young black stallion with the ease of much practice, and slowing from a gallop to a steady walk.
Some feathers still remain around his neck and chest, blending with the dark wings that tuck tightly to his sides. They hide most of his glowing markings, leaving only the stripes along his legs to glow on the cloudy autumn day. He picks his way through the woods, making his way out of the more well-travelled areas. Despite his clear adolescence, the boy with mismatched eyes moves confidently between the dark trunks.
He’s hunting, says the way his eyes dart ahead, the tension in his stride. He can’t take a fully grown dragon on his own, but the one he’d seen from overhead had looked small. Young maybe, perhaps small enough that Malik could capture it. Or at least keep it still long enough to take a trophy from its body.
He sees movement ahead, a pair of dark wings, and shifts to a leopard in the space between heartbeats. Forgetting his shorter stride, he breaks a twig, and the noise alerts his prey.
The dragon-winged colt - not a dragon after all - calls out ‘Who’s there?’ and Malik knows he’s lost the element of surprise.
“It was me,” he says, transitioning back to a horse from the feline he’d been for so short a time. “I saw your wings from overhead. Thought you were a dragon.”
The black wings are impressive, but the lanky young horse is clearly disappointed to have found a boy instead of a fire-breathing monster. Could he just take those wings, he wonders? Or would the fairies sense the foul play, and send him after a true dragon instead? Disappointed, Malik looks over his shoulder, knowing he’s running short on daylight and time for a continued hunt.
When he sees no one, he looks back down at the colt. “You haven’t seen any real dragons around here, have you?”
He is just a boy and he doesn’t know whether to be intimidated, or afraid, or enthralled when the feline turned stallion breaks through. His eyes are reptilian, although whether dragon or snake it is hard to tell, and his scaled body takes a step back, uncertainty painted in all of his youthful lines. He could shift, he knows, and he could find that fire that lives deep within his chest, but it doesn’t come to him.
That dragon, that thing locked deep within him, remains stilled.
Instead he watches with his wide eyes and tucks his wings in close as though the leathery appendages will be able to save him at all. He watches instead and maybe it’s pride or foolishness that has him replying,
“I am a dragon.”
Or maybe it’s just that desperate need to be that which his father and mother made. The poisonous thing of their creation—crafted from the both of them. As if to prove his point, as if worried that this stranger would deem him a liar, he shifts. He becomes that ice-covered dragon, although he is still small and he is still immature. He lashes his tail behind him, dust pluming and branches cracking, and he opens his mouth in a snarl but it is not nearly as loud or as booming as the sound that his father can make.
Disappointed, he shifts back into the young boy of brown and sapphire and looks.
From a colt with reptilian wings to an icy monster, Malik’s bicolored eyes open wide at the transition. He’d not been expecting the change, that much is clear in his easy-to-read expression. Equally obvious is his delight, both at the shift and at the impressive roar that follows.
Malik does press his ears flat to avoid some of the volume, but he’s grinning despite it, glee in both of his mismatched eyes. “That’s perfect.” He says, taking a step closer to the dragon that is once more a young stallion.
Shifters get a choice, he reminds himself.
“Would you be willing to part with a dragon scale?” He asks, and cannot keep from wondering if dragon blood would taste as acidic as wyvern had. Malik remembers the way his mouth had ached for days afterward, how he’d lamented his lack of healing. Perhaps this way is better, even if it takes longer.
Malik glances to the northeast, where the Mountain rises far above the black treed horizon. Shaking his head at thoughts of shifting, the black creature turns his attention back to where the other stood, his expression pensive.
“It is for a quest,” he adds as an afterthought, lest his request seem especially strange.
Suspicion flares to life in Aldous’ eyes as they narrow on the boy before him (a man, perhaps) and he takes an instinctive step backward. Ridged scales ripple down his spine and arch as if in response, as if he could fight off someone more experienced, more skilled than he. (Would the strength of the dragon protect him, he wonders. Would it be better to turn into that serpent and try to slither away instead?)
But there is enough curiosity to keep him still, to keep eyes narrowed but on Malik.
“Why would you quest for my scales?” he asks, his voice a little quieter. There is something like disquiet in his belly at the idea of parting with a piece of him and his lips peel back against sharpened teeth, as though he might have to fight off the other—but there is enough of his mother in him that he stops. Instead youthful cunning gleams in his eyes and he pauses thoughtfully, tilting his head to the side.
He exhales before he takes a step forward. “Actually,” he feels the poison simmer in his veins, making its way through him and beginning to bubble beneath his frozen scales. “You’re welcome to try,” he says with a soft smile, tilting his head up and exposing the ones that run down his throat.
There burns within him a desire to retake the space that the dragon-shifter puts between them, to answer the silent threat of scales with a flash of white teeth. Malik had come here to hunt, after all, and there is no fear in his bicolored gaze when he meets the dragon’s narrowed eyes. No fear, but caution does linger in those bright eyes, not as sour as the dragon’s suspicion, but plenty strong enough to keep him from moving closer.
“It’s not for scales. It’s for shifting.” he answers, reading the danger in the brief flash of teeth. “I’ve got to fetch pieces of shifters.” Now his eyes do narrow, but in concentration. He does want to become a dragon, and one made of ice seems an especially ambitious goal. But this colt is young, and surely even as a dragon nearly-grown Malik should be able to beat him. It is not like this dragon is a member of the pack, after all. And Malik, thinking his parents the best warriors of the world, is certain that the boy’s training can’t have been better than his own.
And yet…
He is still a dragon, and the nearest Malik can come is an especially large and fire-streaked lizard.
As he considers this, the dragon-horse seems to have been thinking as well, for his shining teeth are revealed again, this time in a soft smile. Preparing for a fight, Malik is clearly taken aback by this change, and now it is his turn for his scowl to deepen.
“Just...Just like that?” He asks, the doubt in his voice revealing his uncertainty at the other’s sudden amicability. “Is there some sort of catch?” Stepping closer might make him an easier target for fire, Malik thinks, or perhaps the slashing claws of a quickly shifted wing.
Malik
