Nyss

Relations

---

Mate: None
Close Friends: Eclipse, Elros
Enemies: None

---

Personality

---

Nyss is a peculiarly silent dragon, speaking only if spoken to. She's also very morbid, completely comfortable with death, and has the odd habit of following dragons around. The strange thing is that the dragons she follows die within a week.

---

Background

---

Memory is a strange thing in that it is biased and warped; it's impossible to get a neutral and accurate narration from someone who was at an event. It is even harder to get an accurate narration from yourself.

Nyss wasn't sure when it had started. Had she wheezed when playing? Had she fallen one too many times while chasing her friends? When had things started to go wrong? There was no clear date on the beginning of the end, only a date on when the bitter flavor of her own blood filled her mouth for the first time when she was on her knees, chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. Her parents didn't even try to help her, watched their child break down without lifting a claw. They didn't care for a child that was going to die from the beginning, didn't bother to try to find a solution.

So she left. What other choice had they given her? No one cared to help her, seemed to care at all. She was less than nothing to them. At least the dragons in her new clan struggled with her, ill in the same way. They worked together, spreading disease and pain as they went, destroying the clans that had left them behind. It was a happy life, despite its cruelties. She had a purpose again. She was needed, wanted, and when she fell she was helped back up. They did what they could with what little they had.

But there was only so much that a clan could do for the dying, and even less that they could do for the dead. Had she suffered? She had, but she was at the cusp now, backed by those she had loved in the land of the living and facing them in the land of the dead. She could see the other side, see friends and family welcoming her back with open wings, apologizing for leaving her so cruelly. She reached to join them with a smile, wiping away the trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth, feeling the fading drum of a heart that gave out long ago. It was a relief to stop fighting, let her mind fade to black amidst the sounds of her clan's death ritual. Nothingness was bliss.

But her eyes opened, clouded gaze meeting a mound of dirt growing above her. She could hear the huffing of her clan as they slowly filled a grave, some of them struggling to breathe. Her own mouth was filled with soil, dry and grainy, wrong. When breath returned to her, she heaved, reflexively clawed at the dirt above her, and heard her clanmates shriek in terror. She was not meant to be alive. She'd been dead a second ago; nevertheless, here she was, fighting her way out of an early grave. It was only moments before her clan reached down to her and pulled her out, but they were moments of terror and confusion. This was not the afterlife she'd caught a glimpse of. This was the living world, raw and agonizing. She crawled out of her grave like a newborn, wilted wings pressed tightly to her sides as her clanmates lifted her, carried her home, gently wiped the trickles of blood from her lips yet again. Breathing felt wrong, jagged, like needles dragging over her lungs. The sensation faded after a few days of struggling to breathe at all, but the pain never quite left her. The feeling of being on the rim of death hung over her, a funeral shroud that should have been, but wasn't. She couldn't die. Her ailments returned, grew, but she couldn't die.

When she began to change, become something she wasn't, the fear returned. Her vision sharpened first, a strange thing to a Coatl that couldn't see more than a meter or two in front of her. Her hearing followed; if it was within a half-kilometer or so, she could pick it up. It was overwhelming, hard to process. Focusing was impossible. Then, suddenly, she could move like she hadn't in years. Bone pain faded, and she was able to actually walk, to be productive. Her clan was as disturbed by it as she was, but accepting enough. She could work now, after all. She should have been dead, but she could work. She could forage, scavenge, fish. If it could be done, she did it.

The visions were what began to alarm her more than anything else. Her clanmates were followed by shadows that wrapped around them, reflected their symptoms. Elros was visited by a monstrosity that taunted him, and she could hear his silent tears, see him struggling to escape, anything. Sometimes, when a clan member collapsed, their shadow enveloped them and ebbed down their throat, choked the breath out of them. She saw a faint shadow around herself every now and then when the pain in her lungs acted up. Was this their disease she was seeing, some dark representation of it? So many questions, least of all how she was alive.

And then she noticed that she couldn't fly, couldn't even lift her wings. They might as well have been glued to her, because they refused to do much as twitch. Her greatest gift, in her eyes, was gone. Her clan comforted her, told her that it would be alright. She was alive. She was mostly healthy again. What was there to be upset about? Flight was nothing next to a life that should have been lost, to having an entire disease fade, but it was one too many oddities for Nyss. This was wrong.

She surprised herself when she returned to where she should have been buried, a shiver running down her spine at the site of her own grave, half-filled. The copper flavor of blood rose in her mouth at the sight of it. Was it a memory, or a relapse? She couldn't tell. It wasn't important. What mattered was understanding why she was alive, why she could move again, see and hear again. The matter was more complicated than it seemed, especially when she got to the heart of it.

The act of doing so was her destruction, an ending and a beginning. It became the reason her clan called her Reaper, the reason she followed the worst of the Afflicted until they died, watched their shadows bind to the dying glimmer of a soul until even that vanished into oblivion. She knew too much, and she never told her clanmates what she'd learned. She would never tell a soul, not even her own mate. What dragon but her could bear to know why she'd returned, a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth and a constant pain in her lungs the only remaining signs of her illness? No dragon wanted to know that the dead don't always stay dead. Some come back, and those few come back for a reason.

Who else is to end the lives of the dying?