Hello, not really updating my Supernatural fic in favor of this. If you have any good show suggestions can you comment? I need more content to watch. Comments, likes and follows are appreciated. I need a beta for this story as well as the supernatural story because my other beta quit midway.
Thanks,
Seoul81
Quick, great, gasping breaths are made. Pupils dilated from adrenaline, and fingers morphing into and out of clawed tips. Merlin clamps his sweat laden hands in tight fists and his eyes show the faintest hint of fire within them. There's a faint hint of Gaius' hand nudging him towards the edge of the sea cliff, a strong anchor against the salt laden sea winds rising against the face of the cliff.
It's Merlin's first shift. He's terrified.
As if exasperated with Merlin's hesitance, Gaius gives him a shove forward off the ledge of the cliff, causing the young teen to squawk and stumble off the ledge.
He falls.
A dragon rises.
It roars, proclaiming it's dominance, it's mastery of the skies. Rises slowly into the air again, after a quick diving splash into the waves and crashes out of the water in a sparkling smatter of sea water. The remaining water shakes off in the quick wingbeats skimming the surface of the water, a whip of water shaken from the tail blending in with the waves formed in the wake of the young dragon's flight. A tiny tongue of flame sprouts from the drake's mouth, and it chokes on the wisps of smoke blown back into it's throat. Gaius stands on the cliff, faintly amused at the disgruntled expression on the young wyrm's scaled form before taking a running leap from the sea cliff to dive towards the sea.
Gaius, with his milky-gray scales and age dulled eyes and scarred wings observes the dragon his nephew has become. Merlin is a beautiful specimen, all shimmering scales and vast wings that seem to swallow the sky from above. At 15 metres in length from muzzle to fin-crested tale, Merlin's relatively a midget for his breed, but it allows him to swiftly navigate the narrow spaces between columns of salt-worn limestone. However short he may be in terms of height and length, his wingspan is absolutely massive, about 45 metres from wingtip to wingtip, definitive of his family, and able to lift his slightly buffer draconian form without trouble.
It's wonderful, sea-winds caressing over the vein laced skin of his wings. Salt shaking off in great, shimmering sheets as Merlin takes great wingbeats to climb the wind currents above the ocean surface.
Sky-skimmer they call his breed. Wings that could veritably block the sun from an entire field, and shimmering blue scales to mimic their much-beloved atmosphere. A snake-like head wreathed in great blue frills and laden with two upwards twisting horns above a heavily plated forehead that tapers into a fleshy beak-laden point. Their arms were just developed enough to hold the weight of a sinuous body leaning forward, and with haunches muscled heavily enough to launch 10 metres into the air. A bit like cats if Merlin had to be honest-skittish and playful when friendly and standoffish when pissed. Stray-cat dragons, they had been nicknamed, and aptly named for their pack-like family tendencies.
They had once been numerous, as his uncle Gaius loved to tell, enough clans to blot the view of the sky from an entire kingdom in a flurry of wings, horns and tails. They used to be grudging burden-beasts for the sake of transporting fair and mead for festivity practises. They used to hold shows of spectacular aerial acrobatics for the kingdom they had trespassed on, used to bend their heads and allow children to scamper all over their serpentine bodies, accepting of the occasional foot on a particularly tender patch of skin and the hands that skimmed over the great sails of their wings.
For the braver of heart, a ride across the kingdom in seconds while lying flat behind the two tendril horns of their draconian heads. It left both temporary rider and dragon breathless, one from exhilaration and the other in exhaustion from the sincere effort to beat others in the time record held to ferry a human to and from kingdom to kingdom.
That had been years ago, when Merlin's growth-rate still matched that of a human child's. Clothed in rough hemp, he had watched as both species laughed and played from his place in Hunith's human lap. He distinctly remembers the small jam pastry he had sneaked from the vendor and the way his mother had scolded him in front of the amused village vendor. He had partially shifted that day-cheeks becoming slightly scaled in the form of a blush and already lightly pointed ears flicking in a display of dexterity and curving ever-so slightly to become fin-like. The vendor had laughed, promising another pastry if he fetched a few apples for the next recipe.
It had been a fond day that ended in a terrible stomach ache for him, something about not enough meat in his diet that day and too much sugar seemed to be the general consensus while he flew, safely tucked within a pouch strung across his mother's chest, slowly rocked to sleep by the great inhales and exhales necessary for flight.
Kit, they had called him, with great amusement and a clawed hand gently rubbing across his head while they blew raspberries on his stomach. His cousins and aunts and uncles and extended family taking turns cuddling him each time they settled down for a short rest.
It had changed, oh it had so quickly changed. The middle-eastern practice of binding drakes as simple burden animals to face the blazing desert winds in favor of short-lived camels spread across Europe, and soon enough, every noble family seemed to hold the delicate neck of a dragon in human form bound with a collar.
The sky-skimmers had been the first to wage war and fall.
They had been close with humans at the time-disbelieving of the rumors of servantry at the time. It had been shocking how crafty humans could be, waiting for one of Merlin's cousins to lower their head to snap a thick leather collar on the neck and for other humans to come rushing out with stakes to forcibly nail their wings to the ground.
All for the sake of money.
They had lost three of Merlin's cousins, and an uncle that had always enjoyed Merlin's small hands cleaning out the muck in between the rough armour plates on his draconian form's chest.
Was it worth it? The minor noble title and tiny amount of extra money in exchange for the loss of several lifetimes of wonderful dragon shows and friendly companionship?
Evidently.
An eternally young maiden, a forever young, strong man to aide with labor, and busy boys to mind chores around the household for ages. Sky shows were commanded out of the slaves with whips and knives instead of free will. Without life, both parties knew that of course. A simple flip of the body in midair, and the almost desperate tugging on chains from their neck to join the sky once again. A need for pleasures of the flesh? It was the fastest way to break a serpentine spirit.
They had tried to fight the oncoming tide of popularity of drakon slaves, but by the time their clan had banded together in an unanimous decision to war against the humans, too many of their fighters, the youngest of the generation, had disappeared.
Then came Uther's purges.
Any being remotely related to magic, slaughtered with a vicious zeal. The great dragon, Kilgharrah, missing after a last attempt to placate the mad king's reign. Fear and unrest killing the old and young.
So they had hid.
Under the guise of human skin, pointed ears clipped painfully or covered by long hair. Remote caves untouched by civilization for miles around. Nomadic camps that were neither home or shelter. The times when they were able to spread their wings were few and far between.
They had dropped like flies at that point. Sad. Desolate. Grounded. The will to live slowly sapped out by sorcery enhanced collars and the solemn thought that they would never be free again.
After the sky-skimmers, the goliaths had been the next to fall-huge, quarrelous, taciturn and generally bad tempered, they had been the quickest to come to the aide of the sky-skimmers. As a species, they had been solitary things, too quick to anger and fits of destructive emotion, but dumbly loyal to those they trusted. To think that their species had been simple sheep-stealers in older days, content to laze in their hoard for years before searching for a potential meal.
It had been a bloodbath.
Human settlements were crushed under massive padded feet, thick scales invulnerable to spears, arrows and swords, and the capability to breath massive columns of flames longer than entire fields-they were absolute terrors on the battlefield. Entire cities in the middle east and areas holding even the slightest mention of draconian slaves were brutally demolitioned in a shower of smouldering sparks and the slick sound of a cudgel-like tail lined with gruesome spikes crushing the chests of humans. If the sky-skimmer's resistance had distinct notes of served justice, pervaded honor, stealth trickery and sabotage against humans, the goliath's attacks had been indiscriminate to the general populace. Man, woman. Boy, girl.
Every single life had been ended in a shower of rubble, screams, and cries for help quickly smothered by the smell of the burned flesh of relatives. What did it matter to the goliaths if their victims had been younglings? The little spawns humans would grow to become their hated parents soon enough.
But humanity, aptly compared to cockroaches, seemed to procreate faster than rabbits at times. Somewhat like the games the great land-wyrms of the plains of lands south enjoyed playing. Smacking meerkats they had called it- attack one runty little rodent and the litany of crys would be enough to ring in the ears for days.
Where one human died, a hundred stood in their place. Each more extreme than the next.
The cruel, vile, disgusting humans had discovered that dracon skin was impenetrable but by enchanted blade forged in dragon fire or by claw and horn.
It was by sheer chance that one of the bones of a sky-skimmer, crudely strung to a simple spear, had pricked the hide of one of the humongous drakes.
The particular horn had come from a youngling, short and stubby, snapped off jaggedly with the dark brown of dried blood still evident on the base.
Most drakes as a whole did not die young. Occasionally, some silly hatchling would tumble and lose a spare scale, tooth, fin, or crest, but never a horn, especially from a sky-skimmer.
A dragon would die before their bones became brittle enough to snap.
Slit-eyes thinning to a needle after spying such a relic in the hands of a human, the goliath had let out a roar of anguish, tail wildly flailing about and showering it's scales in a mist of blood, streaming out billow after billow of blue flame about the swarm of panicking humans at it's feet.
Not a single human had escaped alive in the aftermath of the incident. The field the battle had taken in place in, scoured in flame time after time again until the smell of ashes, roasting human flesh, burning metal and leather had reached to towns hundreds of leagues away. The puny humans who had run were crushed in scale-crusted hands to a thin, bone and flesh paste that left a digestible sluice for the carrion crows, buzzards, and other scavengers already swarming the field of ashes that remained.
What remained of the field had nearly been turned into molten slag, the quiet burping of pockets of flame exposed to air interrupting the earth-shaking pants coming from the drake.
With the need for battle finally over for the time, the goliath sifted through the ashes of where the single jagged horn remained.
With a flame generating in its maw turning yellow-orange-blue-red, it blew a thin stream of flame on the horn, disintegrating the bones of a young dragon dead before its time into an ash of sparkling silver. The process of insuring the young drake's bones would not be misused again, the goliath let a thin stream of smoke trail from its nose, the distinct smell of grief detectable to all animal noses present.
Another rumbling sigh shaking the sky-tall beast, it cupped the ashes of the bone tenderly, muttering a last goodbye to the spirit of the young drake in a draconic tongue, it allowed the ashes to scatter around the cooling slag of the battlefield.
Even with the destruction of the knowledge of the uses of dragon bone kept beyond into the realm of death, the goliath still remained disheartened. The following clandestine meeting between the sky-skimmers and goliaths had been filled with much shock and grief, the call of bloodlust strong but squashed by the overwhelming tragedy that had become of their once proud race.
A single tongue of flame joined by others rose from the clearing of their meeting sight, bright against the bleak mountain nocturnal cold, forming a massive cloud of flame directed upwards at the night sky. The spectacular show of fire had lasted for a day and a night, fading as the last pouches of oil stored within their draconian heads had dried, their tongues and teeth tasted of soot and their jaws ached from the continuous stream of flame coming from their opened mouths.
One by one, the corpses of the dead drakes seemed to vaporise into a thin silver ash that blew across the winds in a shower of sunlight before any human could reach quick enough to grasp at a pouch of the strange, foreign substance.
They became the council. Flames that had lit the bodies of the fallen in flames. The voice of panicked reason in the time of their persecution.
The Valerian drakes followed, hunted for the steel-like feathers they possessed and the smooth fur that provided insulation for the extreme cold of the far north and south. The southernmost flocks of their kind quickly slaughtered in a haze of confusion and surprise. The northernmost tribes had quickly joined the council after learning of its existence.
Halerise wyrms had swiftly followed-the flightless wings and stubby legs of their kind making it crucial to disappear before anymore of their kind were lured out of the caves and wells they inhibited and massacred.
The Quendi, tiny dragons more of an annoyance and a penchant and aptitude for learning words joined after first catching word of the battles. The silvan, majestic hooved forest wyverns. The Yaw, heavily waddling creatures protected with a thick padding of fat. The Gerenuk. The Jarveys. Kentels. Lanterns. Dinn. Farore.
Every drake, wyvern, wyrm, dragon, and more seemed to join the council at once in a tense, scared, rush-or so what Gaius had told Merlin of the older days.
Gaius himself had been on the council in his younger years, leaving after being convicted of having too much sympathy for human lives. Describing what had once been a joint effort to making their collective species survive having turned into a xenophobic community zealously guarding their belief of the cruelty of humans and organizing mass raids against villages.
He had taken Merlin with him as a young adolescent, a bastard of Hunith and some human dragonlord.
It had been quite the spectacle that day- finding out that one of the more experienced female dragons had taken to playing house with one of the dragonlords, some of the only humans that had earned the respect of a few of the drakes but still untried and untested by others. The clutch had been birthed strangely-a huge number of eggs being born in a period of of a year and strangely soft-shelled.
39 of them in total. The number of species current in their community.
Only the last egg had hatched. The rest rotting in a rapid manner previously unseen to dragon-kind before.
A bad omen, the other nesting mothers had muttered. One to doom them all.
The remaining offspring had been born in human form-small, human fist punching a spidery crack across the milky-blue swirls of the egg and bursting out to show tiny twitching spiked ears and the egg tooth used to pierce the shell nonexistent.
Several had voted to outright kill the strange being before falling quiet in the wake of the strange shimmering light emanating from the newborn.
The defining re-curve horns of the sky-skimmer species had flashed into existence utop the infant's head, tilting the babe's head facing towards the sky with a quiet thunk. A flash of gold had sparked and faded from its eyes, and a primitive cry for nourishment had sounded soon after.
The babe would possess magic.
The dragons had been familiar with the nomadic druids-had been cautious, but willing to band for a temporary alliance when trading materials. They had been known for fits of plant-natured magic-restoring the land in which great battles had been fought, or even changing the nature of the earth itself by using themselves as conductors for the Earth's innate power.
They had let the boy live, if only out of vague curiosity of what sort of being it would become as it grew. Would it inherit the famous sky-skimmer wings? Or become the strange, crippled creature that ultimately died before it's thirteenth with mutated wings and a stub of a tail, mentality caught in between humane and feral, treated as an fond annoyance by the rest of the clan before a goliath put the hideous thing out of its misery.
It was a rather unremarkable hundred years that the tiny hatchling, lived growing by leaps and bounds in the form of a horned human. Transforming from a toddling mess of babe leaking at both ends to a sprightly young adolescent on the verge of shifting with wings, raised in the hushed secrecy of the deep forest and cave channels on the northern white mountains.
Pathetic, they had called him as he toddled on unsure legs, trying to balance the weight of the horns atop his head-unable to shift like the other hatchlings, and altogether much too curious to handle.
"Why did they attack those humans?", the drake would ask, "they did nothing to us.", he would say.
"Who is my sire?", he'd constantly pester his mother for the tidbit of information, not realising the pinched expression while she pointed to the mound of earth next to their cottage.
"Why can't I shift?" he'd wonder while jumping off the cliffs that other dragonets glided off, landing in a heap in the sand below.
"Can you tell me a story?"
"Why don't we live with the others?"
"Can other dragonets turn their eyes gold like me?"
"What is my name?"
"Can I have a name?"
"You have a name right? Why don't I have one as well?"
Hunith, or rather Hunydd, seemed to have the patience of buddhist monk from the far reaches of trader's whispers, but eventually, even she grew tired of her spawns incessant chattering.
His tendency to spawn utter bullshit gave him the name of "Merdinus"-part of the meaning from the human language that Gauls had found out, meant excrement.
Try as she did, Hunydd attempted to change her son's name to some more polite form, but only succeeded in changing a single consonant sound- the "d" sound, to a "l" sound.
Merlinus.
Merlins
Merlin.
It took nary a day before the newly dubbed "Merlinus" shortened his name to "Merlin" because of his rapid-fire speech patterns.
Drakes in general, or more specifically the Sky-Skimmer breed had the tendency to claim names by earning them. Whether through battle or speed, the most shimmering scales and palest ivory horns all gained attention and their eventual name.
Merlin's name was most certainly...an oddity, earned by his non-stop chatter.
It was meant to be an insult, a taunt. Not a gift that should be eagerly embraced.
It's almost comical how the little dragon so eagerly says his name, referring to himself in third person and earning chuckles from the witty Wyverns before his refusal to change his speech patterns before their agitated them enough to snarl disparagingly at his chubby face and make a snide comment at Hunith before taking off in a flurry of curses.
Merlin doesn't understand. It is a name-one that he himself enjoys. Should he change his name for the sake of sounding more pleasing to other's ears? He disparages over the fact that none of the sturdier dragonets dare play-tousle with him after their mothers had warned them away, but Merlin consoles himself with the knowledge that he is more than useful to his family for cleaning the tiny cracks within scaly armor and shining dulled nails to a polished glow.
What his hands can do (with their prehensile thumbs) is amazing when all of his cousin's can not yet shift to a human form. The tiny bits of grass, bone and flowers turn into great wreaths to act as loot from the knights that he's chomped up in his great and powerful jaws, the rocks smashed to slivers as the shards of bone left after an intense flame leaves a king flailing in agony while slowly turning to an ash.
His rougher cousins don't understand the value of such things, content to wait until the next hunt has arrived and tear into the still squirming animal with hungry mouths or waddle in the great hot mud pits buried in the side of the mountain. They don't understand the joy of creation- the intuitive problem solving that didn't evolve smashing the offending object into smithereens or burnt to ashes when frustration set in.
Of course none of his relatives felt that the skill to set a small pile of kindling on fire impressive, but to Merlin, creating fire from striking flint against stone (as he had learned from sneaking into the human village at the foot of the mountains) had opened a whole realm foods differing from raw fish and game. His curiosity came in great leaps and bounds, the origin of his incessant questions that no drake had answers for and the catalyst for many a situation where Merlin had run for cover from an agitated wyvern snapping angrily at his bare heels.
He has multiple white scars lashing against his sunburnt skin, all from when a cousin or distantly related playmate had either run into him or lost patience at his nonstop chatter. Hunith had always exclaimed that he had been growing to look more and more like his father, but Merlin doubts that his father had looked anything like the strange being reflected at him from the mirror-like pools in the mountain meadows.
Wild scraggly hair surrounding a sunburnt face with eyes the color of burnished gold flashing above a slim nose. Two pointed ears covered in a layer of pale blue scales emerging from the tangled knot of his hair. A pair of ivory horns protruding from the upper reaches of his forehead, curving elegantly upwards just above the crown of his head.
He's dressed in the loose, flowing robes of the druid clan his family had traded from decades ago, cleverly charmed cloth held together by a ring of rune-engraved metal surrounding the hood of the robe. It's a color in between deep violet and pitch, blending in smoothly with the shaded overgrowth underneath the sun-swallowing boughs of trees in the upper reaches of the mountain range, and dark enough to blend in with the shadows when Merlin sneaks towards the human settlements when his insatiable curiosity piques.
"King Uther's been overthrown!"
Merlin is in the village of Ealdor when he pauses, long ears twitching beneath the cowl he wears over his head to hide his draconian features.
"The king is dead! Cenred of Essetir has taken over!"
The Mercian messenger takes a breath before bellowing into the middle of the village square that the prince and princess of the land were missing and were to be captured. A cacophony of voices sound up as village women patting their care worn hands against their work shifts take a break in loading crops into baskets to titter over the strange occurrence.
"The reward for their capturence is a noble title, twenty acres of land, and a ten years worth tithe of grain."
A great load of whispering breaks out as haggard men grumble greedily amongst themselves over the prospect of earning such a feast, broken yellowed teeth revealed in dirty smiles, children squirm in their mother's laps, the game of crude wooden carvings of knights and scrap-cloth dragons waved around in excitement. They giggle over the possibility of being addressed as "my lord", or "my lady", miming clumsy bows and courtesies before breaking into howling laughter as the old village hag declares she'll be the newest queen.
It's enough to make Merlin uneasy-the prospect of a new lord that wouldn't persecute his kind tempting, yet what rumors he had heard of Cenred ruthlessness are not pretty. He has to report this to the host.
Merlin darts away, feet dashing against the rocky foothills of the great mountain range, climbing the altitude rapidly as flat farmland gives way to crags of jagged rock. The sharp shards of stone that once cut the tender pads of his feet now are only tiny pricks tickling the arches of his feet. The path he takes winds harshly around the mountain, paths as sheer as a mountain goat's daily trek giving way to breath stopping drops.
He takes a moment to rest, having come to a small hanging ledge, a shallow pool surrounding the water hole carved from red-veined granite. He takes a quick second to plop down to sit and scoops a handful of the semi-stale water.
That's when he smells the putrid smell of a days-old carcass- or rather tastes the corpse.
Merlin spits out the mouthful of fetid, blood-stained water and leaps to his feet, mindful of the thin ledge slicked with water. He climbs the last stretch of granite above the overhang, following the red stained rock that gives away to the sparse knotted grass of the outer reaches of a mountain meadow.
It's a small, thing, nearly all brown in the face of an early winter, but a few stubborn wildflowers do remain. It's also splattered in a liberal covering of blood.
He can see it clearly now, the twisted corpse of a chestnut colored horse, an arrow still stuck in the back haunches of the poor beast with all the grass within a small circle around it's head nibbled to the roots.
It must have been a slow, painful death-agonizing pain mingling with slow starvation and dehydration causing the spit to froth, smear and crack around the horse's mouth.
There's a smear of blood on the flank, caused by a large hand, and a set of fingerprints on the shaft of the arrow sticking from the horse's' back, the blood soaked tip shifted slightly out of the wound and the agitated swirls in the horse's hair on it's back suggesting a desperate flight from somewhere or something.
Merlin circles around the cadavre, lifting up the dead horse's head to check into the glassy eyes, shoeing away the flies that cluster around the salt crusted corners of the eyes to peer at the milky pupils. It must of been a fine horse, the groove caused by a bit evident in the horse's mouth, and the lack of scarring evidence of a docile nature, and loyal steed for it to follow its master up part of the mountain. Judging by the crusted dry blood on the wider path up the mountain, it's about three to four days dead, and the broken front leg and the even stones wedged between the smooth, heavy leaden horseshoes suggest the owner of the dead steed being a person of upperclass.
There's a small trail of matted grass trailing off into the woods, and Merlin has half a mind to follow the trail (as there are only so many large predators in the mountains that would challenge a dragon for the right to a carcass that aren't human) but chooses to stop by the alpine stream nearby to wash out the sour taste of rotting blood from the horse.
It's a fine stream, one that feeds from glacial melt that's just starting to form nooks and crannies in the meadow landscape. Occasionally trout will run down and up the stream, making it a favorite of the dragonets to attempt to snatch up the young, fatty fish. Merlin has fond memories of the fish trap and shallow pool he had managed to construct, allowing him to catch a multitude of fish until the winter storms had blown away the fragile straw-based structure underneath the small waterfall in which he'd placed it.
The thought of roasted fish with crackling burnt skin, leaking with meat juices and hot enough to burn the tips of his fingers is enough to make his stomach grumble, and he fashions a crude hook from a small bit of grass, intent on snagging a string of fish to roast. He can always report to the dragon council slightly later-half a day won't hurt. The fact that none of the other dragons are looking for him is a bonus.
He's looking for a bendy stick of aspen or willow to turn into a fishing rod, and spots a few of the types of trees he's looking for when his foot hits something soft and squishy on his way to the tree line.
There's a groan and the shifting of the soft and squishy thing under his foot before Merlin has to leap back from the sudden lurch and dodge the quick draw of the blade.
He nearly bites through his bottom lip with the surprise that he feels, but he warrants the swipe of the blade-after all, he had just kicked on it's face.
The "Soft and squishy", has straw blond hair smeared with blood and dirt, dark eye circles, a slightly dulled suit of armor, and a Pendragon-red cloak. It also has rounded ears instead of pointed dracon-shift ears.
It's human.
Merlin shrieks.