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.

Poyo!

It didn't take us long to realize we were not alone on this night.

It started from the outskirts of our town, walking right up to our patrolmen and attacking them without any provocation at all. A slight sound of a gasp, and the guards were gone. The creature never even left them time to scream.

It made its way through our town, devouring children and adults alike. The more important the person, the stranger the creature became. Its costume would often change, taking on some of the looks of the figure it had eaten. New crews tried to keep up with the horror, but they wouldn't last two minutes after the beast got wind of them. The longest video footage seen on television was a mere three minutes long, after the crew's horrific deaths were edited away.

I lived near downtown, with my mother, my father, and my baby sister. According to the path the creature was taking, our house would be one of the last ones hit. There wouldn't be enough time to pack up and leave, try to get away from the city; with road construction going on right outside the house, and two apartment buildings being built on either side of us, we were kind of trapped here.

It took an hour, but the beast arrived at our front door. There was a knock, then another, then once again. Then silence. My mother peeked outside of the house and gasped in horror. She turned quickly from the window and rushed myself and my sister into my bedroom, while my father grabbed for his shotgun. Then my mother rushed downstairs to help my father.

She had left the door open, and I, stupid as I am, opened it to see my father be my hero. I watched as the door was pulled from its frame and outside, splitting in two as it went. I stared out the door and the blackness of night stared back. Silence.

Then a noise. The barely audible sound of something heavy beginning to lift its foot and step forward from out of that heartless night. From the darkness crept a pink blob, about four feet high, with two black eyes and a humungous mouth. It moved through the doorway and immediately eyed my father, and I sucked in my breath as I silently rooted him on.

I saw the pink creature open its mouth, its jaws unhinging without a hint of pain or discomfort. My father lifted his weapon and fired once... twice... there was no effect on the monster. My mother looked on in horror as the beast began to suck inwards with a horribly supernatural force, and my father was swept off his feet by a chair, being pulled from the den. He rode that chair into the beast's maw, stopped only by holding on to its lips, desperate for freedom.

But freedom would never come. The beast, with a seemingly never-ending lung capacity, increased its force of suction, and my father disappeared into its mouth, his body bent in half to fit. The last bit of my father I saw was his pained expression and his blood pouring from his mouth, before the thing closed its lips and swallowed.

My mother was next, rushing at the monster with a meat cleaver she had purchased the week before. It stuck into the creature above its eye, and was seen briefly before being sucked into its mass. My mother collapsed to her knees and uncontrollably as the monster again opened its deadly jaws and sucked her within. Then it turned its eyes on me.

My sister was crying as loudly as possible, no matter what I did to try to console her. It was just as well; I was only eight years old and had just seen my parents get devoured. The creature began to walk towards us, and I closed the door and took my screaming sister with me to the back of the room, as far away from it as I could get. The door creaked as the monster began to suck in air, and soon enough the door was ripped from its hinges, straight into the beast's mouth. I closed my eyes and prayed for an answer.

"Poyo!"

Something Waits

'It burns here.'

That was my first lucid thought, as I gazed over the field of green before me. Bright sky, green grass, fresh air... a paradise, right?

No.

"It burns here. It hurts to breathe, I can't keep my eyes open," I said to nobody in particular. "I feel... heavy. Like it would take all my might to lift my foot and take a single step, and I don't have any might left to do so."

There were no trees here, no foliage other than grass. There was a light breeze blowing, brushing lightly against my skin and making me wince slightly in pain; I wasn't used to wind. In the distance I could see a storm brewing, no doubt bringing stronger winds and piercing rain with it.

I wasn't in my home any more. The portal I had stumbled into had closed behind me and I exited through it, leaving me standing here, lost. No longer was I surrounded by fire and debris. No longer did the peaceful screams of various lost lives pierce the air around me. Gone were the joyous sounds of explosions, wrath, and chaos. Here, there was nothing to make a sound besides myself.

Silence is loud; the lonelier you are, the louder it is, and the more it hurts your ears. I dropped to one knee, not knowing whether to scream or cover my ears.

'It hurts, it hurts...'

"WHY DOES IT HURT?!"

My scream did nothing but turn down the volume on the silence while the echo still lingered in the air. As the echo disappeared there came a rumble from the distance. A gaze towards the sky showed the storm to have moved a bit closer.

I was on both knees now, clutching my stomach in pain. I knew not where the pain came from, only that it was there and it HURT. I felt like the grass beneath me was cutting into my body; like the flowers were delivering masses upon masses of paper cuts in a desperate bid to reunite with the sun in the sky above.

Back home, I knew nothing of this sensation of pain; back home, I could not be hurt. It came with the territory: those born of the land could not be hurt by its innumerable tortures. Those foreign to the plane spent their days screaming in agony as the rest of us looked on with joyful faces.

Another breeze caught me, this one stronger than the first. I curled into a fetal position and ended up on my left side on the ground, writhing in anguish until it passed. The effort to guard against the pain took its toll upon me, and my eyes closed in exhaustion.

Dreams...

My kind don't dream.

But still, here I was, returned to my home, but feeling the same anguish as the strangers around me. As if I was too a stranger in my own home. The tortures of the land lashed out and caught me, like whips, lashing me to the ground and inflicting horror upon horror on my body. Fire burned brightly above me; instead of casting its normal healing warmth over me, its flame charred and boiled my flesh. I made to scream for help, but a mysterious aura slipped into my throat as I opened my mouth, grabbed hold of my throat from within, and started squeezing, cutting off my supply of air. I wanted to die.

My kind don't die.

Even without air, I remained alive and lucid enough to experience the barbarity of the actions against me. Others of my kind had gathered around me, pointing and jeering. One, brandishing a knife, stepped forward and grabbed a hold of one of my ears. I felt the blade against my skin briefly as he who I thought was my friend quickly sliced through my skin, severing my ear from my head. He flung the cartilage into the air, what little blood contained within splattering around, some catching me in the forehead.

I managed to open my eyes to reality once more. My forehead still felt wet. I was on my back in that accursed field, staring at the purple sky above me.

Lightning flashed above me, and I felt more wetness against my flesh. Rain... it had finally begun raining. I wondered just how long I had been asleep.

'My kind don't sleep...'

The rain continued for hours, and I remained still for the entire time. My position prevented the flowers from cutting me, and I felt no pain. The rain eliminated the silence that had permeated the field around me. I don't know yet if I fell asleep again, but I no longer dreamt.

Perhaps the being responsible for my displacement considered me punished enough, for as the rain ended, lightning struck the ground at my feet and opened another portal, the other side showing my home. What I thought was my home.

I stood at the doorway to the portal, watching lonely souls being tortured, feeling the fires of Hell once more beckoning me with their friendly grace, but I could not step forward.

'I still can't...'