“He’s so weird!..”
“Shh, don’t come closer!”
“I think he heard us!”
“Run!”

It’s not his fault.
It’s not his fault, and yet he’s met with stares, whispers and sometimes outright hostility wherever he goes.

Beastclan Bаstard.
Mutated Monster.
Serthis Spawn.
And he thought that the experiments were the worst part.

Stolen, taken apart and merged back, perverted into something uncanny, indraconic. He can’t even speak the language anymore, only some coatl words are still pronounceable, and those are not enough to express the way he feels, the way he hurts.

I used to be one of you.

The Tail Head hisses softly, sweet venom of her words pouring into his ears.
“We don’t need them. Bite them, tassste them, feed our venom down their torn throatsss!”

He wanted to be a healer once. He doesn’t want to kill.

His fangs are dripping painful death now. He hides his unnatural body under long vestments, herbs hidden in the pockets to chase the sickly smell of mutation away. It doesn’t help as much as he would like it to.

“Ugh, freak…”

Ifrit lowers his head trying to escape the attention, as usual –

“Hey, that’s really rude, you know. I think he looks pretty interesting, actually! Hey! Hey, wait! Cool tail, is it really alive?!”

Ifrit stares up.

And up. And up.

A huge ridgeback grins down at him. Well, not huge for a ridgeback, actually, he’s tall only in comparison with a wildclaw, but he’s very… sturdily… built.

“Fatsssssso”, snickers The Tail Head.

Ugh, is that blood on him? No, wait, it smells of strawberry – but where would anyone get enough jam to cover a whole adult ridgie? And are those… soap bubbles?

“Can you talk? Oh, pity – but you can understand me, right? Hey, maybe we should think of some sign language to communicate – here, let me borrow you for a sec, you have a minute, right? I mean, I’d like you to meet my friend Nysslyn, she’s lovely and she knows quite a few languages because I’m sure your tail just spoke Serthis, it should take no more than a couple of hours to get to our lair, but you can stay a few days, surely, if you don’t want to go back right after…”

Ifrit doesn’t understand what’s happening, but in an hour he finds himself on a road to somewhere with PlayWithMe (come on, no way it’s a real name!) at his side telling him some outrageous and totally unbelievable story including a potash peach pie, some wildclaw with an unhealthy obsession with spiders (or the other way round, it gets really confusing at some point) and three piles of clay.

Just. What.

Nysslyn is indeed very lovely and does speak Serthis.

The Tail Head bites him when he says that he’s decided to stay.
He bites her back.

No one freaks out or even really cares apart from asking whether they will be fine.

There indeed is a wildclaw covered in spiders. And a baby skeleton. She’s very friendly and very dead.

Another ridgeback runs out of the lair and jumps into the nearby stream. His clothes are on fire and he’s laughing.
“I told you it would do that, Brycey! I sooooo told ya!”
No one cares about that either.

“This place is insssane”, The Tail Head sounds incredulous and even a bit scared.

Ifrit loves it so much he breaks down and cries when no one is looking.
(No one. Is. Looking.)