Haze
(#4377178)
Level 10 Skydancer
Click or tap to view this dragon in Predict Morphology.
Energy: 50/50
This dragon’s natural inborn element is Ice.
Male Skydancer
This dragon is hibernating.
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Personal Style
Apparel
Skin
Scene
Measurements
Length
3.95 m
Wingspan
5.78 m
Weight
550.93 kg
Genetics
Black
Leopard
Leopard
Steel
Trail
Trail
Aqua
Firefly
Firefly
Hatchday
Breed
Eye Type
Level 10 Skydancer
EXP: 667 / 27676
STR
8
AGI
7
DEF
7
QCK
6
INT
5
VIT
7
MND
5
Lineage
Biography
Keeper of the Grey / He Who Walks Alone
Written by @Disillusionist
Edits by After
Written by @Disillusionist
Edits by After
Awake, that’s all you are. Not alive, not really. You are aware, and though it doesn’t hit quite the right chord for what you are right now, you will have to settle for that.
Awake, for you are not sleeping; and aware, for all your senses are stirring, feeding bit after bit of this world into your perceptions. All except one.
Sound—that’s what others would call it, if they stepped into the Grey. But there are no others. There’s only you, walking along the shadowed streets, your ears straining for something they do not understand.
Understanding comes to you, slow but sure. Maybe the days whispered it to you as they passed. (Perhaps that’s how experience happens: Each day whispering what you’ve done, right or wrong, before it gathers its wings about itself and fades into tomorrow’s uncertainty.)
This is what they tell you: There is another world beyond this one.
This silent world, this grayness... the gray... the Grey. It hangs over the other world like a silver veil, and you are trapped behind it. You are like a moth crawling across that surface. Glimpsing deeper light and shadows just beyond, and just as irresistibly drawn to them. The veil is diaphanous, seemingly fragile, yet it never breaks, no matter how hard you beat your wings.
Those who dwell in that other city have their tools, their toys. You see evidence of their activity every day: The Grey is always a whirlwind of movement, utensils chopping, swords slicing, pages turning in unseen hands. But you never see the beings who craft those objects; the Grey might as well be populated by silent, civilized ghosts. You imagine it layered over that bustling city: yourself the only spectator behind a sorcerous silver curtain, looking at a colorless version of a world you’re not allowed to touch.
You remember the last time the world told you “Not allowed!” The time you reached out, and you dared to touch...
It was a tankard sitting on a shelf. You looked back, and there was a table, knives and forks in motion above it in some strange, disorganized dance. Tankards, too, rising and falling, as though rocking on a phantom sea.
The tankard, sitting on the shelf. It looked lonely. A part of you cried out to it. It was the wild, irrational hope that if you made contact with an object from the other world, then you would break through the silvery veil, and at last—
Cutlery falling to the floor, plates smashing, tankards rolling away. Benches tumbling backwards as if fainting, and a door suddenly gaping wide. And then stillness. No more motion. Just you, standing ever so still at the side of the room, a tankard from a foreign reality clasped between your claws.
“You do not belong,” the silence accused you. No sound at all, but the broken crockery on the floor spoke of the violence with which you had been rejected. You replaced the tankard on the shelf—where it belonged. You did not try to reach beyond the veil again.
Does the world beyond have a name? You try to give that other city one, many times—but something deep inside you rejects the appellations you come up with. Perhaps it’s not so much your personal preferences as it is the heart of the city, speaking to you in the subliminal way that only the oldest places can.
You listen now. It does not seem to be telling you, “Speak. Name.” Instead its phantom fingers press upon you, gently lifting your chin and easing your eyelids open. “Look,” the gesture tells you, and so you look around.
There are words carved into surfaces hither and yon; there are names. Some you once thought to be mere ornamentation, just curlicues and arabesques and filigrees. Angles. Dots. Patterns. There is meaning in those alien scripts, but it is not yours to know.
Even so, other words leap out at you. Tavern—a place for food and drink. Inn—a place for the body to rest. Marketplace. Forge. Couriers’ office.
And sprinkled among the myriad words, you see a name, repeating. Seven letters coming together, in syllables that whisper of desert sands.
Byzmara, the city tells you. The name clicks in your heart like a key fitting into a lock. Byzmara... Byzmara...
The last word is yours, spoken to the silver air. You hear nothing—but if you could, you imagine it would be like the wind stroking the tops of river reeds... then gliding away, still whispering, unseen, to swirl its fingers through the desert dunes.
There is wind, of a sort. It sculpts the clouds above you into terraces and towers that spear down towards the ground. You look up, and the darkness in those phantom streets shifts, shivering beneath the touch of the wind. Such small motions, but they make the cloud city look more alive than yours ever is.
It is that promise that beckons you upward. You arch your wings and let yourself fall into the embrace of the sky. You are halfway there when the horizon catches your eye. The rigidity of it commands attention better than a warlord’s banner ever could. And it instills the same fear.
You drop back to the ground, and your view is safely obscured by the walls again. You are glad of that. You do not want to have to face the emptiness of the desert in all its vacuous enormity.
Above you, the cloud city dissipates. There are still times when you wish you’d allowed it to swallow you whole. The yearning is strong, but the fear is stronger, and it whispers, “You wouldn’t want to confront the emptiness that awaits beyond these walls.”
There are other things to fear in the Grey. You have never thought of this world as a refuge, but still, you have hoped...
From this plane, you see the true form of demons: beings so vile that the very earth shudders beneath the burden of their presence. The great gates open as silently as curtains part, admitting the mercantile hordes from far-away lands. You do not see those ordinary folk, here in the Grey. Instead you see the beings that don’t belong anywhere else.
One of them sweeps forth: a slender body moving upon trillions of legs that ripple like silk, her head perched on top like some hideous flower. Ink-black tendrils writhe around it in an ever-shifting cloud, and from within that darkness, malevolent eyes blaze.
You know that those outside the Grey, such as this one, cannot see you. But then, why take the risk? You step back, and back, and back, and for once you are glad that everything here is just shadows upon shadows, black and white just as you are. The Grey folds around you like a flower, concealing you in its heart, even as vile spirits tread the streets of the city just outside.
Stillness. Night. The deepest darkening that the world endures, beneath the turning of the firmament. To you, the sky is an endless expanse of grayness. It looks like rolling hills today, all soft edges and shadows. Something nudges at your mind, telling you that this picture looks wrong. It seems to you that when you look up, you should see light looking down, but you do not know why this should be so. The Grey is all you know. It has always been the only thing you have ever known.
It has always been...
In the night, your mind is soaring. It spreads its own wings, and what’s that flaring to life beneath them? Such brilliance! Colors! Glorious reds and greens and golds. Even the darkest night is no deterrent to color; if anything, it throws it into sharper relief. Shadows rich with blues and purples, stained-glass lanterns scattering shards of rainbow light—
You awaken, dizzy with an emotion you can’t quite place. Your mind flutters back to rejoin this reality, and along the way scraps of the dreams it had slip from its fingers. They roll away into the darkness, into the shadows... such wretched shadows, cursed with nothing but monotony. Just blacks and grays and whites, as far as the eye dares see.
You sit there for a long time. Alone. Always. Your face is wet, your heart aches within you, and the worst part is that you don’t know why.
Once again, the clouds roll overhead. You sprawl atop a sloping roof to see them better, all the while wondering at the shapes they make. They seem to be suffering some great inner turmoil: ballooning, compressing, and twisting wildly in the air, seemingly fighting to escape a crushing hand. I know, you think to tell them. I know, I know...
That’s when something makes you sit up and take notice: The idea that comes to mind is “light”, even though it doesn’t sound right—it’s too soft for the intense illumination that flares to life inside the clouds, so brilliant it leaves spots of deeper darkness dancing beneath your eyelids. One flash comes, and then another, brilliant prongs plunging through the sky.
Beneath you, faint shapes skitter away, phantom beings from the world outside racing under cover. A cloak fluttering in the breeze, and a hat darting past—perhaps atop its owner’s head, or maybe snatched away by the wind. A coin purse bursts, and silver-bright disks scatter across the ground. They come to an exhausted halt; briefly the light illuminates them.
Light... Lightning... Lightening...
Rain washes the world clean. The streets are empty save for a few stubborn outliers, people in the other world striding stoically along. You dance past unseen, unheard. You would embrace the rain if you could; you’ll have to settle for feeling it run down your fingers. Still, that is enough. Maybe this is what it means to be alive.
Even after the storm moves on, the light on your face remains. That smile. Until the rain dries, taking the sheen of something new with it, and the gloom descends again.
You go near the walls... the word to use here is not “sometimes” but “inevitably”. No matter how deep into the city you go, eventually the walls rise up to stop you where you stand... to trap you where you stand.
There are breaches in those barriers, gates and doors and tunnels. There is only one you consider the great gate, the true gate, for at its feet, the desert road sprawls.
It winds among the dunes like a lazy serpent. The dunes themselves are gently rounded and not particularly tall; nevertheless, you find them as intimidating as the highest peaks. Something within you stirs, a primal instinct perhaps, that tells you they are not safe to tread upon. This is different from the fear that threatens you with the emptiness outside—this fear is sharper and more urgent, and it hisses to you, “If you want to continue living, you’ll do exactly as I say.”
So you don’t tread upon the dunes. That does not stop you, however, from stepping beyond the walls.
It starts out slow, your journey—if you can even call it that. The word “journey” implies a destination, but frankly you have none.
Or perhaps you do, if a nebulous idea can be rightly called a “destination”: I am looking for something different. Something that’s beyond black and gray and white. Something that says I am not alone.
When the city behind you is eclipsed by the dark gray dunes, the sense of emptiness creeps tightly over your skin. It was better within the walls, where you dodged the phantoms and the things they held; out here there is nothing.
But still you press on. Faster and faster now. Faster. Till you are flat-out running, following the winding road.
The dunes loom on either side. Rising and falling, endless. There are stones along the sides of the road, but you do not look at them; you see only the dunes. Their presence alone is a threat to you, a reminder that all you need is an accident for you to disappear completely.
You come to an exhausted halt, and so does the road. For always, inevitably, there is a wall.
It rises up even higher than the barriers around the city: nothing but wild crags of dark, weathered rock, as fierce and forbidding as a thunderstorm. Still they slip from your notice, for all your attention is on the doors. They stand together, embedded in the rock, beneath their archway of dark gray stone.
You see no handles, no hinges. The crack between them is barely visible, nothing but a suggestion of a line, really. In your exhaustion, you fancy you glimpse, dimly—
A memory of a dream, of flying. All around you, there was brilliance. It was... No, it wasn’t gray! It couldn’t have been... They were... There was light, and there were shadows too, but...
Grayness. The Grey. All you remember is gray. All you remember is...
Hours later, you slump, defeated, at the foot of the impregnable doors. Your claws are sore and chipped from scrabbling at them; they remain unmarked. You have bruises from where you hurled yourself against them, willing them to open. Your head spins with exhaustion. You have nothing left to give.
Above you, the sky darkens. You could fly up, you suppose... but the clouds seem to press down, almost forbidding you. And even more than that, there’s the possibility—
That you will look beyond the horizon and see nothing there but gray.
Again, the fear whispers to you: “You would not want to confront that emptiness.” It is titanic in the truest sense, able to swallow even stars. You know that should you dare to meet it, it will devour you in an eye-blink: not your body, but your mind. It will crush you with the dreadful certainty that there’s no one here but you, and you will be reduced to a literal shade of yourself: just a colorless scrap of nothing moldering against the city walls.
The city gates gape ahead of you, as though welcoming with open arms. You look at them, and you shudder. There’s no warmth in that embrace. Pulling you in or letting you go—why should the welcome matter, when there are higher walls beyond?
You find yourself a place to rest, and there you close your eyes.
In the days to come, you sometimes find yourself trudging outside, on your long and lonely pilgrimage to the great, locked doors. You go past the ominous dunes, following the curves of the winding road. There are a few instances when you dare tread upon the sand, but always the warning of “Not allowed!” roars within you, and you find yourself stumbling back onto the road.
The doors never open. They did not open yesterday, nor the day before that... Why should they open now? Why should they open tomorrow? Indeed, why should they open at all?
Sometimes you sit before them, doing nothing; other times you try to force them apart. Nothing ever changes. Everything stays the same.
You return to the city, where you glide among the shadows and trail after the beings, both visible and unseen, making their way along the streets. There is always something to see here, within the city walls, and you take some comfort in that.
But at times when you bed down for the night, restlessness stirs within you. The doors loom large in your unquiet mind, whispering, “Why don’t you try again?”
On the days you stay within the city, you find people to shadow. You trail after them, peering over what you fancy to be their shoulders, looking at the things they see or do. You see them write down their innermost dreams, their grudges or goals or desires; you see how they craft all manner of objects...or destroy them. Counting jewels, wrapping gifts, playing instruments or trimming dew-covered grass... If you close your eyes for a moment, you swear you can almost feel them. You think that if you open your eyes quickly enough, you’ll see them... but you never do.
There are other things you see: You steer clear of the demons; they do not see you, and this is one thing you’re glad of never changing. There are spirits besides, things of swirling water and smokeless fire, of earth and vapor and pure will—they do not give you the sickening feeling the demons do, and so when you find one, you trail it for a time. They never see you either. At times you wonder how they could not.
Now, atop a minaret, you study them: dots of strangeness making their way within the city walls. A column of water flowing down an alleyway. A mass of bright sparks swirling beneath an arch. A shape, cut from deepest night, gliding from door to door. Sometimes they stay in the city, and sometimes they disappear.
You give them names, but they never feel right. Like the city rejecting the names you first tried to give it, something within you pushes back. Perhaps someday you’ll hit upon a right name, by luck or design, and the truth of it will make your soul sing.
Perhaps someday. The words come from all around you, or maybe from deep inside; you don’t know which. Perhaps someday...
And at last, someday comes.
It comes, like all other somedays do, beneath the guise of yet another ordinary day. The memory of it is startlingly clear, etched upon the glass of your mind. Gray walls and gray towers rising towards a gray, gray sky; a light gray drizzle falling onto dark gray stone. You look ahead, expecting to see more grayness... but instead, there’s a tattered shape cut of deepest night.
You know that form. You’ve seen it from the rooftops; it flutters first into one home, and then another. You stand your ground, expecting it to pass you like it always does—like they always do—but instead, it moves its head. And for the first time in forever, you feel something shiver within you.
It is the knowledge that something is looking at you, the knowledge that you are now seen.
You approach the figure, your heart beating hard. And now you see how beneath the dark tatters, there are flashes of...
(Color!—that’s the word you would use, if only you knew it. Soft blues shading into violets...
Color. You don’t know that word now. But you will, someday you will...)
He looks at you, that figure. You can make out his face beneath the hood. No—not a face. A mask of stark white bone.
For a moment, you tremble. Maybe you’ve made a dreadful mistake—
And then the figure removes his bone-white mask, and you see the warmest golden eyes.
Someday, maybe someday.
Maybe someday you’ll go beyond the weathered, mountainous walls.
Someday, maybe someday...
The doors will open at last.
Or maybe you won’t need to wait for someday. Maybe you’ll fly beyond.
Maybe, maybe, maybe...
Maybe this half-alive world will learn to change. Come alive, truly alive... Maybe it’ll find itself a new name, and even the dunes will sing.
Maybe the blackness, whiteness, and grayness will gain a life of their own. The life that comes with colors, the vibrancy, the light.
“There’s no one here but you”—your soul rejects it as it does an untrue name. For the loneliness has gone away, and now there’s something new. You want to see tomorrow. You know that change is true.
There is hope that the veil will be ripped asunder. That shadows at last will know the sun. For you see the light of it here and now, the warmth of it, in the stranger’s eyes.
No longer even a stranger. At last! no longer alone.
A resident of Byzmara, though not the typical sort one would expect. The Byzmara he resides in is more a ghostly shade over the original - colors washed out into lifeless black and white, never warmed by the sun. The desert city's buildings and streets are the same, and the odd, undetectable expansion of its bounds the same as well, yet its residents differ.
In this grey world, he is invisible, intangible, and largely undetectable to those on the outside. In reverse, normal dragons are not seen or felt from his side. However, the true forms of demons and spirits in Byzmara are revealed in the Grey, regardless of how they came to take dragon shape, though they're still as colorless as their surroundings.
---
resident in a grayscale sort of overlay world of Byzmara. no color except on himself and anyone actually in that world with him. can't easily interact with normal dragons in the "real" Byzmara; they don't show up in his overlay world and he's not visible to anyone on the outside. gray world also silent, no sound can be heard beyond what those IN the world make.
he can interact with tangible objects since their counterparts exist in his gray world, but as many dragons fear what they cannot see and he has no true physical presence in the real world, doing so has often soured his chances at possible communication in the past. the only apparent rule is that he can't touch/otherwise manipulate items that are in contact with an animal or equivalent entity (ie. a potted plant is fine, a cup in someone's hands is not).
gray world under constant cloud cover. there is a day/night cycle, though more of a light/dark cycle, and rains do happen on occasion. he loves the rain dearly, as it provides a more unique opportunity for his senses. thunderstorms with their rumbling overhead and flashes of forking lightning are treasured even more so, despite the danger they sometimes present.
is greatly curious about what the ordinary residents of Byzmara do, what they sound like, what their lives are like under the sun. spends his time wandering the city and trailing after those he can see, making observations and endeavoring to find answers to his questions when he's able.
believes himself to be some sort of guardian, but for what he doesn't know; it's just a feeling he has. he's been in that world for as long as he can remember, or so he believes, but he has no memory of youth. on top of that, despite what he does remember, he sometimes dreams of fantastical landscapes imbued with a vividness he lacks words to describe. memories of such dreams quickly fade upon wakening, but while they last, he's left sorrowful, mourning something he can't quite grasp.
he's explored outside the city every so often out of curiosity, notably venturing out along the only road a few times to see a lone archway bearing solid stone doors that have - to his knowledge - never opened. they bear no handles and give not even the slightest shift when pushed against. other than that, he's made a few forays into the dunes, but the desert sands are bleak and treading upon them unsettles him, so he largely keeps within Byzmara's walls.
Spiritrise visits him occasionally - not because his death draws near, but out of sympathy for one so alone.
---
Spiritrise was the first one other than himself to truly appear in the world, rather than just be a shade from outside like the reflections of Byzmara's non-dragon entities. at first, that's all Haze thought he was - a reflection in black robes, flying on pale silver wings, face hidden beneath a white mask. but the grays weren't quite right; his colors hadn't matched their surroundings.
the being lowers their hood and removes their pale bone mask, and when they open their eyes to meet Haze's own, he sees the sun.
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