Demixia

I know every inch of this place, night and day. I know where to find the hatchlings, hiding from things only they can see; where to find their mothers, coughing and wheezing like the plagued dragons they are. It's pathetic, really. They get up in the mornings, feathers flaking off and twisting in the air, and haul themselves off to find food for children that'll be dead or sold within days of being born. I'm not sure which end result is better. The others don't tend the cages in the back of the hatchling shop. They don't know what their children go through.

Sometimes, in the early mornings, I'll walk by the exit to our lair and find Spectre wandering, eyes closed, lips parted with the mumblings of the asleep. Strange words fall from her tongue, tales of waltzing and lost children. One could swear that a shadow drapes itself over her eyes. There is no shadow, of course- she stands in daylight- but I still wonder.

My children are dead and gone, all three. Disease took them. I can't help but wonder if the Coatl I courted killed them; he is bright and colorful, but I can't help but doubt him. Does he hide pale feathers under paint, fight to hold back his wheezing when I'm around? Who is he?

Our leader stalks the lair with a wild look in his eyes, cards playing in his claws as if they had a life of their own. There's something both beautiful and horrible about his madness. He told me once that the walls are covered in eyes that watch us, judge us, devour us when we die. He says that's where our bodies go, to feed the eyes. I could swear the walls blinked when I looked at them after he spoke to me, but his words were merely the fears of a lost soul. None of it is real. I wish I could get him to believe that.

Most of the children don't respond to my touch. I prod them with a claw, run my tail over their face; they do not move, and hardly even blink. They simply sink deeper into their nest with a sigh. Only one ever saw me, spoke to me, and the look in his eyes haunts me still. He called me a monster. He begged me to leave. How could a hatchling hate a stranger that much? What did he see in me?

There's a hollow in the lair that I've made my nest, a bowl of brambles covered in borrowed feathers. When I lie down at night, I could swear the quills twitch and sigh. They whisper to me sometimes, tell me of darkness and the night, of the reaper that took their owners. I settle onto them and whisper back, and they fall silent as the night draws over the lair.

I know this place. I'm too lost to leave it.