Her howling shriek echoed around the room, rattling the windows, the walls, and making the jars of paint dance on their shelves.

She paused, watching the jars. One or two fell to the floor, breaking open with a shattering splatter and spilling their insides in glorious trails of color. But it wasn’t enough!

She threw her head back, filled her lungs, and screeched at the shelf once more, putting the full force of her voice and magic behind the atrocious noise.

The shelving rocked backward with the force of her command. And then, slowly, rocked forwards again, dumping the entire contents of paint into the ground at her feet in a great deluge of moist colors and broken glass. She nosed over the bleeding jars of pigment – broken, broken, all these pinks and yellows and – ah, there we are.

The green had survived the fall. It was strong and resilient, refusing to shatter despite the odds. She picked it out of the mess, ignoring the sticky wetness seeping under her claws, and set it aside, nestling the little vivid jar safely in the coils of her long tail before turning back to the carnage.

Shifting broken souls aside, she found another treasure. Red, red, glorious red. So like blood, but better, for it did not brown over time. Not quite unbroken – the metal lid had a dent in it – but that was life, she decided, sometimes you dented even when you did not break. She nestled the strong, enduring red against the defiant green, and decided to give one last look, just in case…

Oh, dear…it really did seem that all the other jars had broken. What a shame – red and green were fine, but they got along better when they had a third party – an intermediary to keep them from arguing. She stirred the mess with her claws, ignoring the sharp edges that dug at her scales, and found- ah-ha! Wait….

What was this jar? She’d never seen anything like it before. Was it blue? But when she tilted it that way, it looked green. Paint that changed colors?


She rubbed a bit of paint off her nose as she turned the jar this way and that, and then noticed something carved in the glass. She squinted, holding up the jar so that the wet paint dripped down her arms as she read,

“A gift from a fan. I will visit, if you approve.”

She blinked at the message. As intrigued as she was, there was no way for her to send an answer – etchings on a glass did not exactly have a return address.

Still, she nestled the little jar with the others and stood, shaking herself to fling off any clinging splatters of excess color. She did have painting to do. And the jar hadn’t broken. Perhaps if she used it, whoever had left the message would know…

…and would come to see the finished piece. She’d have to do something extra good to impress them. It wasn’t every day she got to meet someone who had a proper appreciation of her artistic genius.