Pestifer

UPDATE: And now he's grown antlers, just like Tangleflower and Smolderhide...

(Isn't he a wonderfully horrible little airborne disease of a dragon?! :D)

This Fae's egg was mysteriously deposited in the nest of an unlikely and passing pairing between Mirror and Spiral. The resulting offspring is clearly not their own, and no one's quite sure what to make of him.

Pestifer was pushed to the fringes of the lair as a hatchling, and at the fringes he remains.
Even the other Faes find him "disturbingly" uncommunicative, and only the lair's healer, the Imperial called Trance, dares to spend much time near him. Pestifer seems strangely unconcerned to have been rejected by his lair-mates; he goes about the business of surviving, paying little mind to how unnerved other dragons are by the sight of him.

Trance is both horrified and fascinated by the ghastly Pestifer. The giant Imperial male is making a study of this tiny Fae, instructing him, and seeing to it that he isn't picked off by encroaching hostile creatures or mishap. Trance had thought to feed him as well, but it doesn't appear that he needs to. Pestifer is subsisting quite well on stray lair-vermin, and is thriving where he'd been expected to swiftly fade and die.

It's really not helping Pestifer's image that his favored foods are mosquitoes, leeches, and ticks shed by his fellow dragons. It gives Ambrym the creeping shudders to watch him eat.



(Gross-out warning. Please have a reasonably strong stomach, or else stop reading here. Thanks!)











DESCRIPTION (You were warned.):



Pestifer is an eerily Plague-like dragon to find in the Wind flight.

His hide is a grisly, rashy red, bumpy in some places, unpleasantly damp in others. Crystallizing, swollen black lumps are clustered thickly on his body, and are scattered across his wings as well. Minuscule creeping black vermin reside on Pestifer's body, these can be seen to move about upon him. Occasionally he snacks on them.

His wings and crests appear soft, mushy and pustulent, the tips of his wings are blackened and dead-looking. Both wings and crests are functional but weirdly slimy. They leave streaks of yellowish ooze behind on whatever they brush up against.

Pestifer feels feverish to the touch, assuming anyone dares to try to touch him, but he doesn't seem weak or behave as though he is ill. To some dragons, the fact that he thrives while looking as he does is the most unsettling thing about him.