Darkness. It was closing in on him. It was everywhere. He could feel it pressing against his skin--pressure. Darkness. He couldn’t hear anything anymore. His ears popped, and there was silence. His lungs were on fire. He could feel the whip-like coil around her ankles, and he struggled against it as he was drawn down, down down into the depths. Water. Of course it would be water that did him in. Water. He couldn’t control it. Water was not fire, was not earth. He could not hold water in his grasp and command it to do as he wished--water had its own mind. And it was water that would see the end of him. The pressure was mounting, and he struggled against it. A blurb of distress left him, his limbs reaching down to claw at his ankles. Was it even still there? His head was spinning. Everything was growing dark. His mind was growing fuzzy. Water. Drowning. He was drowning, and this whole stupid mission would be for naught.
He paddled, but he couldn’t tell which way was up, which way was down. Which way air was. Bubbles. He could follow the bubbles. But he couldn’t make out the direction and he was drowning. His life was fading. His flame extinguished. He was drowning alone in the darkness.
A dull thud rattled his burning chest--the bottom. He'd hit the bottom? And then suddenly, sharply and violently he was yanked, a tightness around his throat and ankles that doubled him over and tied him up and he was suddenly in air again. He wheezed and gasped, each of his heads coughing and sputtering as he heaved the water out of his lungs. An anvil pressed down on his chest, almost. He felt heavy, his wings flapping uselessly, the skin along each of them pulled taut and tattered. His heads throbbed, none of them able to form a coherent thought besides 'breathe' as he panted in ragged, broken breaths.
That should have extinguished the dragonfire.
No...there was familiarity within that voice. It echoed and rattled around in his skull-- a memory he could not fully grasp, like mist slipping between his toes.
That monster.
It was this one, wasn't it?
It has to be.
Look at it struggle.
Use it for parts.
It? Parts? He wheezed again, trying to make sense of it but everything was spinning spinning spinning and the ache in his heads shot all the way down to his shoulders. He could make no sense of anything he was seeing, none of his brains managing to find any common ground. His feet scrabbled--what was he on? Metal? Stone? No, no no no he was falling again--
the water crept up to his necks, filled his mouths.
Dunk it again.
---------
How many days had it been? He couldn't recall. He couldn't recall much of anything. None of his heads could. It was blurry for them all, foggy and hazy. A whirring flash and blinding pain. Was it lightning? It may have been. The sky had been dark that day--what day? Hadn't it? ...Was that the sky or was it the ocean? It roared at him.
It ached. Everything ached. His heads were taied, forced down. Shattered shards of sun-bleached bone lay strewn about the area--vaguely, he recognized them as his own parts. Hah. His eyes felt dry. He couldn't blink. Why couldn't he blink? He couldn't close his eye. It was fuzzy. Dry. The chains that bound him clattered and scraped against the stone, weighing him down. Dragging away bits of fur and flesh along with them as they dug deeper and deeper into his person with each tiny movement.
Insects buzzed around his head and a faint squishing sound finally reached his ears as he tried to move. Plip-plip-plop. Droplets fell from his head, hitting the ground with a little splash. No.
They didn't burst like water. They writhed and wriggled.
Maggots. They were eating him. They were eating his face. He could feel them, crawling over the exposed nerves. It ached. Parts of his horn lay shattered before him and he can only think of letting it go.
Slip away. Drift away.
Monster. Monster. Monster. Jeering voices, the laughter of children.
Faint and vague, he could make it out--see the monster who torched the flower kingdom's prince. See the monster who toppled the monarchy. Monster.
Is that it? Is that the end?
Is this to be his legacy?
No.
Monster. Monster. Monster. Raucous laughter and beneath it, the sound of dripping. No. Tears. Not his. He cannot cry, he is physically incapable of it. But he can hear it. The tiny hitched hiccups that accompany tears.
Charon?
He lifted his head--one of them, anyway. The bone jaw scraped along the ground, heavy and hard, a streak of broken material left in its wake as it tried to swing around to look. Charon?
A gaggle of strangers, wonders from across the sea. They stare--they smelled of flowers and blood and he knew, he knew, he KNEW where he was. Sharp and sudden, clarity returned to him and he knew.
He had been flying, attempting to avoid the land of Flowers and Blood from where he'd originally been exiled-- and yet the storm that rocked the sky had got him, a streak of lightning accompanied by booming thunder that had wrapped itself around him and sent him plummeting towards the earth. He'd crashed, in strange territory, and a familiar face had found him.
Bronze. His voice was unmistakable--the voice of the accuser who fanned the flames of the accused.
'Look', he'd cried,'Look at what he's done! He burned them all, mothers and their children! Monster!'
But oh, that was long ago. And yet there he was, and with Orthrus at his mercy.
He was in the crowd, powerful and strong, a smirk playing across his lips as he watched him suffer, watched the insects burrow into the holes in his skin and crawl under his fur.
But there were tears. Someone cried. A child--no older than Charon. She saw, and she cried, because it was not a monster she saw, but torture, and those complicit in it.
His lungs still burned, his chest still ached. Tightness pulled at the muscles of his limbs and the chains weighed him down but...he had to get home.
They'd tried to quench the flames within him, tried to stamp out the dragonfire but that would not happen. Never.
It began as a spark-- a dull flickering in the back of his throat. The simmering, boiling roil that was the heat within his blood. It steamed, tendrils coiling off of his body as the heat rose to the surface of his skin, veins of white-hot heat tracing beneath his fur and flickering to life between the patches of fur that remained on him. The lines of his muscles ached, he could feel his joints creaking as the flames within him roared to life--his flames stoked, heat rippling the air around him. The insects dropped from the heat, the maggots rolling off of his pinkened skin to curl into well-roasted balls on the earth, leaving only the raw, fleshy skin beneath that crackled and sizzled as he cauterized it himself--all of it.
Monster.
If that was what they wanted, that was what they'd get. His wings felt heavy. They needed lift. No, he needed new ones.
Wet, burning, the remnants of his wings sloughed off of his body like dead flesh, and greedy, hungry, smoke poured from him as the yellow-eyed head whipped around to devour them. Bone snapped as flesh tore and tendon and muscle slithered down his throat, heads tossed back. Muscle and bone tore, shredded away as blackened bone stretched free from his shoulderblades and ribs, veins and flesh following suit-- he could regenerate, but not without the fresh flesh of another.
Heat crackled beneath his skin, the bone of his heads beginning to crack and splinter, weakened by the abuse.
Inhale.
He drew in a breath, each head parting its jaws as sparks flickered from between their teeth. Shoulders drawn, new wings--fresh and untattered, thick and slick, glistening with blood that steamed in even the rapidly-building heat-- stretched above. The chains that held him glowered red, heated, softened-- S N A P.
A series of popping, crackles, the chains gave way as he rose and exhaled.
And with it, a torrential flood of magma spilled forth from every upper orifice-- his mouths spewing streams of it, streaks of magma bubbling over from his eyes and dripping from his noses to flood the ground beneath him. It rolled in a flood, spilling free from the confines that held him, scattering his jeerers and onlookers as they fled for their lives. The building crumbling around him, stone melting into the magma flow, wood reduced to ash. One head turned, bringing with it a splash of lava-- and still, the heat built up. Hotter and hotter and thinner and thinner, the magamaflow tapered off into thick, billowing smoke and then into a streak of what could only be considered 'plasma', streams of burning light that burned through even his own tongue and teeth and jaws, each head simply thrashing, shot towards the sky so hot the clouds were sliced through as if with a knife. And when he stopped, only rubble remained. Him, and the remnants of those that tried to extinguish him.
Monster.
Well, fine. He flapped, breathing the cooling coals beneath him back to life as his feet broke free from the cooling magmaflow, cracking the blackened surface. There he was-- Bronze, having stepped aside, fallen back with those that fled and yet he was not fast enough and the crumbling cavern had caught his back.
Monster.
May as well lean into it.
He had, after all, forgotten how good the taste of wolf-flesh was.
----------------------------
He stood over Bronze's grave. He could not bring himself to do it-- his stomach screamed in protest--when had he last eaten? And yet even then, with the one who had cursed him left prone before him, he could not. All but one head, who screeched in violent fury at the lack of cannibalism--turned away. Monster. That was what was buried there now.
He had other things to do--places to go. He had to leave this place. He experimentally tested a wing-- formed fully, the muscle new and untested. He would not be able to fly for long distance and so a trip over the ocean was out of the question--he would have to remain above land to allow for rest breaks. He had lost weight. He did not want to see himself, though he was parched. As much as the thought of water filled him with an ever-increasing sense of dread, he had to survive. He glanced up-- he could not blink. Right. It seemed the bone and flesh of one side had been torn away. The crackling of the bones of his head had finally ceased and now that everything had cooled down, he could examine the damage done to himself. Could, but wouldn't.
He simply wanted to leave as fast as he could.
With a few experimental flaps, he found that he was lighter than he expected despite the heavy sluggishness that had plagued him, and soon he was off.
He knew not where he would land-- only that he would land there eventually. As the volcanic hills came into view-- how long?-- it seemed as good a place as any to settle.
He landed, found a spot to settle within a small lava flow, and closed his eyes. Here he would stay, trying to recover from his....ordeal.