It feels like a mountain of ash, all burning and dark across his shoulders, as slowly it rains down, and his body lightens up, form tightening rather than expanding. His wings shrink to a much more manageable height and distance, just as his feet finally meet the grounds, legs steady enough to take the brunt of his landing. Dark green-black glimmers across his back in bony, smaller structures, and his amber eyes shine as bright as a lantern.
The woods is silent tonight. No scurrying animals or rushing rapids, just a near dead silence, and Obi winces past the quiet of the night, biting his lip as if to will away the uneasy sensation of being watched. He's not quite used to living out here, nor does he know of how the forest thrives and lives.
It's his new home, after his mother, after her death. It's hard always to be completely isolated from others, but even in the mountains where night was sometimes a sudden drop in temperature, he hadn't been lonely. His father had died at war, called away when Obi was barely three, and it was his mother, who rocked him when he cried and wiped away the tears from his eyes.
She'd sing him lullabies, and yet never did she have a word to say what being human would be like. He'd grown up wishing to live among the humans, to know if they are all like his mother was, but by the time he was old enough and willing enough to move, he realized his wings would be rather hard to hide.
How did his parents meet? A dragonling and a human? One that lived the happy medium of life between dragon and almost human, and a woman who knew of now fantasy growing up. Though Obi had never asked her whether humans knew of other creatures out there or if they were naïve and foolish.
It hadn't been something he thought about.
And suddenly the forest comes alive with singing, words muffled and unintelligible, but there. And it's feminine and pretty, almost as if it were an ongoing windchime, a burst of noise spread out far and wide. And when Obi looks around, blinking the night out of his eyes, some of the trees look like they are moving, like there is something to them other than bark and leaves. He stumbles out of a circle of them, and there is a beautiful tree with the reddest of leaves, all spread out in gorgeous branches.
The tree is alive and well, and not a baby tree, not one that hasn't known a full set of leaves before, and when he looks closer, the bark appears almost pale in a span about the full length of a woman. She's shorter than his mother and paler too. Skin practically white under the moonlight, though her song stops when she sees him looking, as if she can't sing any longer with the trees nearby.
Are all trees alive like this? And she blinks green eyes that would have blended in on any other tree nearby, but can't on her own. And she moves away from the tree, not by far, but definitely away. And as she moves away, Obi realizes that her hair is long and red, falling like apples down her back, finally burying herself beneath the red. It's only then that he realizes that she was naked. He'd been too stunned to pay much attention to all of that.
"Who are you?" And she looks towards his wings, and the question might as well be a what are you instead.
"I'm a dragonling." The words feels almost awkward, but it's the only one he knows, "And I'm part human."
"So, you look kind of like us then?" She asks; her voice is full as if it, too, were just like her branches.
"No, not for the human." Obi admits, sighing, "I look like my father." The dragons were much too strong, too broad, too large. His father looked like a teenager to them when he was fully transformed; he must have been easy to stomp out. None of that is worth telling this stranger that seems to be part of the tree.
"Not a young dragon then?" She asks, relaxing, and Obi startles. Her red hair is beautiful where it falls down all of her, a pretty shade. Like nothing he's ever seen before.
"Not a young dragon." He agrees, "I'm a different sort of creature, one that always looks to be part dragon and part human."
"You must not be from the woods then." She adds as she sits down, gracefully in front of her tree.
"I'm not." Obi shifts his weight to his opposite foot, and tries to be a little calmer, because it feels like an almost scary revelation that trees can also be alive in this way. "Who are you?"
And she almost laughs, shaking her head. "I'm a Dryad, a tree spirit."
"Are all trees women?" Obi asked as he finally sat down too, thinking of the women's voices that had grown somehow faint as they talked, as if giving them a much quieter moment to talk and be heard in.
"Yes." She shook her head, "But not all trees are Dryads."
"Some are normal then?" Obi asked, a little unsure of what all to really say.
"Yeah. If by normal, you mean not able to talk with you?" She's smiling, the whisper of a joke across her lips.
"I guess so." Obi pauses and realizes that names probably should have been shared way sooner, "I'm Obi."
"I'm Shirayuki." She smiled, looking up at her red leaves, and Obi wondered about these women, how they managed to be a part of the woods without losing their own kind.
"Beautiful name." Obi remarks.
"Thank you." She stood up, "I feel indecent around company. Torou's better at making it seem normal."
"You're not indecent. You can't help it." But he wishes he had a coat or something to make her feel a bit more comfortable around him, but he doesn't bring any along anywhere.
"Thank you." And when she leans against the tree, it's almost like she's sinking into it, and she's nearly invisible against it.
So, Obi shows off, maybe more than a Dryad might look to see, but he drops to his hands and knees and feels the transformation hit like lava leaking out of a volcano, until he is suddenly stretched taller and broader. A nearly midnight black dragon stretched out in the woods, filling the spaces between trees well. Still smaller than an adult dragon would be, but dragonlings never get as tall or as broad as the massive dragons that occupy towers and other places.
And he hears Shirayuki gasp, perhaps a little surprised that even his human likeness can melt away. He'll have to come back to this tree; she shouldn't be hard to spot, as all of the other trees are filled to the brim with bright green leaves, while her red ones stand out beautifully.
