My Name is Beta

I grew up watching human movies. I guess that's why I look down on myself so much. Movies like Dragonheart and Reign of Fire portray dragons as massive, fierce, majestic, confident creatures, full of wisdom and fire and aggression, and here I am as this scrawny, weak freak of nature. Instead of having two wings like a normal dragon I have four, and instead of being brown or red or even blue, I'm black with white lines down my back, like some rodent. Others call me “Draco-skunk” and there's nothing I can do to stop the jeers.

I have friends. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a total outcast, just a partial one. But my friends are normal dragons; red, blue, green, brown. All solid colors, one set of wings, fire-breathing, single-tip tails, well-built and strong. Normal dragons. My mother and father were white and black, respectively, but I can't go to them because their clans tore them apart, limb from limb, soon after I was born. White dragons and black are mortal enemies, after all, and a union of the two, let alone offspring, is seen as an abomination in their eyes.

So why am I still alive? They hid me before confronting their clans' leaders. I was lucky enough to have been found and adopted by a clan of red dragons.

I go to university like a normal dragon. I stand a head taller than the rest of my class, but that in itself isn't strange. I rank in the taller side of the school, but I am by no means the tallest. I top out currently at just over eight feet tall, under the tallest dragon by about a foot and a half. It's a pity that the tallest dragon also happens to be the most popular, and my worst bully. The only reason I'm teased so much, I'm sure, is because just about everyone in the school caters to him like his groupies or something. Even the teachers poke fun at me. It's enough to drive me mad, but I dare not fight back. I might actually hurt someone.

See, unlike normal dragons, I breathe ice. I'm told that it's a rare trait found only in white dragons, so I guess I got it from my mother. I'm also told that the four wings I have, as well as the split-tip tail, are possibly an inherited trait from my father, as they're typical of some of the more powerful of the black dragons. But if I'm supposed to be a descendant of a powerful black dragon, why do I feel so weak?

The four wings help. I'm the fastest in my school by far, and the most balanced. I'm also in the running for Valedictorian. I have all the skills needed to join my school's Aerial Assault team, but there's no Frost Division, so despite being the fastest, I can't compete. All I can do is hone my skills in running away from Brad, the bully. I might fight back, one day, when I can control my blast better. I've been practicing in my backyard when my adopted parents aren't home, since they don't really condone my being an Ice-Breather. 

 

I owe them a lot, but most of the time they're clueless as to how a dragon works. I often wonder if they're cursed red dragons instead of natural reds; humans in dragon form, cursed by one of the last wizards before the human-dragon war wiped humans from the planet. They've been trying to get me to go to therapy to try to change my breath, but I was born naturally with Ice-Breath, and it can't be changed through therapy. Not to mention their collection of human movies pertaining to dragons is ungodly.

Every day after school, I come home to an empty house. My adopted parents are both Planet-Scours, roaming the planet in search of human survivors and catching/enslaving any that they find. I guess the job goes hand-in-hand with my suspicions that they're cursed, since their reasoning for joining the Scours could be to find a wizard that could change them back, or to find the wizard that changed them in the first place and seek their vengeance. I don't really look into that much.

I normally drop anything I'm carrying in my room, then head to the kitchen for a quick snack. The fridge is usually pretty stocked with anything a growing dragon might want, and my normal, after-school snack is a freshly picked baby rabbit, raw and un-skinned. My parents make sure to pick one up every day from the market before they leave for work, so that it's nice and cool when I get home from school, and only just suffocated from the lack of oxygen in the fridge. Every now and then I luck out and get one that's still alive, which means that my adopted parents must have been late getting out of the house. I enjoy the live ones the best, but my parents consider the practice of eating live prey to be inhumane.

We're dragons. We're carnivores, natural predators. The kings of the land. Live prey feeds our natural instincts. More reason to believe they're cursed.

After a snack, I retreat to the backyard for a couple hours for Ice-ball practice. I set up a target dummy in the backyard, stand about ten yards back, and fire at it using my Ice Breath. And I've gotten pretty damn accurate. The only reason I really practice anymore is because I'm still having trouble measuring the strength of my Breath. Fire too hard and the entire dummy turns into an ice cube, instead of just being covered in ice. Fire too soft and the ice hits the dummy, then rebounds like snow. Seventy-five percent of the time I get the strength correct, but if I was to get into a fight at school, a twenty-five percent margin of error that includes killing my opponent is far too high. 

 

Breath practice ends at six o'clock, at which point I put the ice-covered dummy away to defrost, and I head to my room to do my homework. An hour later my parents return from Scouring, they produce dinner (usually raw, but sometimes they forget themselves and cook the meat -.-), we eat, we have an hour of family time, and I go to bed.

I shower in the mornings. A natural waterfall can be found deep in the forest behind our house, and it's there that I bathe in water freed from melting, magical ice caps. The water is said to be deadly to nearly everyone, but it's perfect for me; I guess it comes from being an Ice-Breather.

Every six months I shed my topscales and end up being a couple centimeters taller. My clothing is made of a special magical substance that never wears out or is outgrown, so I maintain the same fashion that I've had since I was born. This is the way our society has always worked, and the clothes I wear have been the same since the beginning of my time; this is true for every dragon, everywhere. There's always a bit of a magical twist to our lives. It's believed to be residual magics left over from the final stand of wizards in the Grand War; they sacrificed themselves in a magnificent blast of power that all but ricocheted back into them and the rest of humanity when our dragonhides proved to be more resilient than they had imagined.

My own particular sense of fashion is human-based camouflage patterns in black, white, and blue. The magics in my clothing often shift from day to day in the color patterns so that I never wear the same camo pattern twice, but it never evolves past camouflage. As an infant, the magics read my mind and conformed to my intrinsic sense of fashion, as it does for everyone. And my fondness for camouflage at least makes me well liked with some of the girls at school, even if it makes me a bigger target for Brad.

My name is Beta, and I am an Ice-Breather.