Afflicted

"It.. calls."

An error, they called him. A mistake, they would say. He's damaged, broken, Afflicted. From the moment the Fae opened his red eyes he was persecuted. "Erase him." They ordered. "Destroy them all." They announced. The Fae did not understand. With his siblings he ran, using his small size to aid him in hiding within the nesting grounds.

He had just been born yet he was slated to die? For errors, defects, differences he had no control over?

The small child's body twitched and glitched as he hid from his persecutors. His siblings wailed, frightened by their coming doom, but not him. His own patterns and colors changed, the silvery shapes flitting around him as he ran for it. Hunting dragons saw the group of children, but somehow, somehow he escaped. In the fading distance he could hear his sister scream, but as his eyes took on a glow he knew, somehow, it was too late.

The small Fae was a ghost in the night. His body was broken, acting unlike his kin and fazing from reality. No other dragons seemed to notice the small spec as he flew, but while they paid him no mind the child could hear a voice, a sound. Something was speaking to him.

Wherever he went dragons were wary of the creature. He couldn't speak in anything but a cryptic tongue and his form shook as though his very cells were unstable. "Its diseased." They would say. "He's afflicted with something."

"It's shade-touched."

Shooed and chased away from any temporary resting spot the Fae never knew a home for more than a few weeks. His body grew but mind did not, and the strange sound that seemed to call only grew louder and louder. Was he.. heading toward the source?

Weeks passed, months even, and his tattered wings struggled to keep him aloft. The noise turned to words, but they were muddled, a white noise constantly playing in his ears. The sound was tiring, and the exhausted Fae crashed to the ground as he tried to make sense of it.

The darkness of a den shrouded his black scales and he lay motionless for an unknown amount of time. Did days pass? The white noise evolved even further until he had a physical friend he could see trail across his ruby eyes. Words, symbols? He could make no sense of the enigmatic shapes, and any concentration on them was broken by a brown dragon that blunder by. She was rooting through the ground and barely noticed his thin mangled shape in the shadows. Their eyes met, and the female flew away in a hurry.

The child had not the strength to run. The sound was deafening, had the other dragon spoke? If they chased him out now exhaustion would surely kill him.

- - - - -

"Whatever is wrong is part of him. Its within it's biology, his very being. We can manage the discomfort but its not something we can cure."

Memories of his first moments resurfaced. He was not normal. Entering the world had not been the egg shattering gasp of a normal hatchling but of static slowly fading into a clear image. He was.. unusual. The Fae opened its mouth before its eyes, taking in a sharp breath as he failed to speak and noticed the pain within his form.

Haunt