Fff- I don't know. Here, have this... thing about Kisara that wouldn't leave me alone even after I'd only had five hours of sleep in the last 48... I think it's Mizushipping, if that's the name and if this qualifies. Timeline's like 'woaaah' so throw this in the AU pile, I guess.
Unbeta'd.
She is sure she hatched from an egg. A stumbling, mindless lizard who at some point traded claws for hands, scales for soft palms and a soft voice. No fangs either; she doesn't know what she traded them for. Regardless, one day there comes into being a very pale lizard, who walks upright and covered with hair like bleached bones, who looks at herself and doesn't know where to go. She picks a direction and walks.
Most humans she meets avoid her. They must be able to see that she's not human like them. Sometimes they throw stones and she misses scales she has to have had. Sometimes other ones give her bread and one day an old man gives her his cloak. Those days, she retreats to the shadows and watches, unblinking. Bread makes her feel sick and the cloak is torn by the next stone anyway.
She's still a lizard but a little older now, soft palms traded for callouses and scarred knuckles, though her voice continues to try and hide itself. She tries to cross a river one day, but is swept out by the undertow. She thinks she might drown, until a strong hand yanks her out of the water and carries her home on his back. They are tomb builders who haven't been paid their due and therefore have become tomb robbers, and this is her first 'home'. Maybe they are lizards too - she's heard their village's name spoken in the same tone as when they talk about her.
The leader of the village braids her hair and her near infant son takes her hand and presses it to his mother's huge stomach. Something kicks and she asks about the egg inside her and if she can keep the shell when it hatches. The red robed woman simply laughs like a hyena, like the near-tame puppies who hang around the back door for scraps of meat while the adults watch from the dunes, and sends her off to play with the children.
They're just humans too, she realizes one day. It's a little disappointing. They try to name her 'Cotton-bud', 'Salt', 'Plover', all sorts of names and she rejects them all. One day she hears about the name 'Kisara'. It's a word one of their craftsmen heard from a foreigner in the far away city and a few of them are drunkenly puzzling out what it means. A basket, reeds, two arms and a mouth are what the hieroglyphs have to offer, but ultimately they decide the word is meaningless to them. It's perfect for a lizard.
That night she sees a white serpent winding its way through the streets while she's stargazing. It ignores her completely, as predators do when they aren't hunting, crawling to the tops of the cliffs surrounding their homes and casting red eyes out into the sand.
Kisara leaves. A few nights later she catches ash and blood on the wind. It could be coming from anywhere, so she ignores it.
She grows in the sand and hides in the shadows, until she's not a lizard she's ever encountered before. Lightning cracks under her tongue and catches in her throat and when she jumps she never wants to land. She's so scarred she might as well have scales again. She misses fangs. One day she passes out under a tree, and wakes up almost a hundred paces away, the land covered in melted globs of sand and a horrible bruise on her arm. It looks like a hand print. There's a pair of sandals next to her, far too large to fit her but better than nothing, so she slips them on and keeps walking. Who they belonged to before doesn't cross her mind.
The town the men from the village mentioned is larger than anything she's ever seen, a grand structure at the very edge of it. She's never seen anything like it in her life, so for the first time in a long while she's caught completely off guard by the first stone, and the next, and then she can only lie on the ground and pretend to be dead, like she's done so many times before. But they don't stop.
Kisara wonders if she might actually die here, until outraged shouts and hooves on unruly bodies have the crowd fleeing. Men clad in gold and elegant robes loom over her, as far as she can tell. The world grows dark.
She wakes up in a cell. It's not small, but it's still cold even on the bed and there's no sun for her to bask in. Priests wander in and out, though only one in particular stands out, the one who's voice she recognizes as the first to break through the mob. He asks about her power, her extraordinary ka. She doesn't know these words, so she tells him the truth. She is a lizard.
He bites the inside of his cheek and asks her about the 'White Dragon'. She asks why a lizard would know anything about any dragons. He says an exiled man found her in the desert and she turned into it, and he was so scared he ran all the way back to town and vowed to be a good person from then on.
He didn't ask a question so she doesn't say anything. He stares at her for a very long time. She's no stranger to these kinds of stares, so maybe he doesn't expect her to not blink for so long and when he does, he looks angry.
There's another man who comes in from time to time to observer her, but he's no priest even if the others name him so and bow to him. He's some kind of snake, she decides. Not a serpent who guards and protects but one who desperately searches for someone weaker than him to bite. A pathetic creature, really.
They take her to a different room one day, one filled with traps and monsters and two angry men with clubs, who'll kill her when they catch her. Or so the wizened old creature next to the young man says before she's distracted by dodging arrows and blades, leaping through the air like she's never done before.
Though she's so sure she'll not land this time, she does and her foot slips off the edge. Darkness below her and she knows she'll land again, wherever it stops. The world spins and fades, the last thing she sees being the young man reaching for her with horror in his eyes.
She catches words like 'diabound' and 'millennium' in the days to follow once she is returned to her cell, whispered by increasingly agitated priests, including Set, the young man. Words that mean nothing to a lizard. She also catches words like 'destiny' and 'pharaoh', which should also mean nothing, but when the old serpent whispers them to Set it fills her with something she despises. Like when the vultures would circle her overheard, that cold weight in her guts.
Perhaps she is not a lizard. But then, what is she? Set called her a 'dragon'. What do dragons do? she asks one of the younger priests. The priest doesn't seem to know much beyond that they can fly, are impossibly strong and protective of what's theirs.
Not a dragon yet then. No wings. Not all that strong. But she wants to hiss whenever the old man draws close to Set and when she first sees the burns on his cheek from under their linen, the ones that had to be caused by her somehow because she doesn't remember fire being part of the trap room.
Kisara beckons Set over one day, the burns not quite healed, and when he's close enough to the bars she leans through and licks his chin in apology. He springs back like she's finally sprouted her wings and his face is red.
"Why did you do that?"
She shrugs - she's seen other lizards do it to things they deem interesting and she's seen humans do something similar to those they find continually interesting, but she doesn't think he'll get it if she explains it that way. He leaves and she doesn't see him for a while after that. Only the old serpent comes to see her and frankly she could do without.
When Set finally (finally) comes back, the palace is rumbling and the air is choking with smoke. He breaks open the door to her cell and grabs her arm, leading her out of the palace and into the courtyard where the old serpent wheezes and hisses, something huge and dark screaming in the far away distance. The sky is on fire, or maybe that's just the town.
"Did I do this?"
"No, never. You're light, you're nothing but pure light, you could never drag such darkness here."
Set pushes her behind him and tells her to run. But she won't. He's a human, facing the serpent who did. He doesn't have lightning in his mouth or scales on his back.
She does. Her fangs cut her lip as she leaps in front of him and prays to land, for once.
The serpent's attack is pain unimaginable and the world turns black, Set's screams ringing in her ears. But she's not scared. The last time this happened, she became a dragon. She will this time too, and she'll become a dragon again and again to save him.
And if she is light, like Set says, then she will always chase the darkness away.