Thorncough

Her talons shivered as she lulled the Mirror toward her, tucking his head into the warm crook of her coiled tail. Despite this Mirror being particularly small, Thorncough felt small and insignificant compared to him--she had a delicate, almost porcelain frame. Beautiful as she was, it made it difficult for her to tolerate the cool nights of the desert outskirts, the cold rays of moonlight highlighting the light-reactive scales across her body. In spite of this, she perished her thoughts, continuing to examine the dragon. Necropolis was his name--he had several reflective burn scars patching across his body. She could see an image of a scrawny, apathetic sook in each scar, had the light rained down just right.

Somehow, the scars were the only way she could've possibly seen this dragon. The rest of his scales were a matte black with ripples and velvety white feathers parting some of his body, making him look like he was part of the sand. And the open wounds? Shade. Infected boils of a black, pine-tar like subtance surrounding each of the split-open blilsters across his battered body. The wounds seemed to be bruised--could it have been that those bruises tore open? She fidgeted with an iron needle, fine and precise like a horse's hair, and looked over at Remington with a perplexed grimace, her wingbeats tearing through the night sky like the trickling of a particularly loud brook.

Without any grace in her step, the blue pearlcatcher stirred up a cyclone of dust around her as she planted her talons onto the desert floor, leaving raked markings in what would've otherwise been beautifully undisturbed sand. Lukewarm snow?

Her tail flicked. "Anything?" she trilled, her once-beautiful orange mane and beak soaked in clotted blood. The stench hit Thorncough like a sledgehammer.

She shook her head irritably. "No." She tilted her head back, staring in what seemed to be endless pink portals of herself when she eyed the dragon's scars. "Honestly one of the weirdest cases I've seen. Where'd you find him? He certainly wasn't anywhere near Famine Caravan."

Remington's eyes pierced the night as she stared coldly at Thorncough. There was a gap of silence that left a feeling of uneasiness in her belly. Remington gave a wide grin, closing her eyes and tilting her head.

Numbskull.

"Did you go to Radio City? Or somewhere in the Light territories?"

"Mmmmm . . . ehhh . . ." Remington shook her claws like she was trying to train her thought process.

"Right," Thorncough responded with a flick of her tail. "Bloody brilliant. For what reason?"

"Evidence," she grinned.

"Evidence . . ." echoed Thorncough. "Mmm, yes. Evidence. Do you see the problem at talon?"

Remington lazily scathed the sand, ankle-deep in tepid shimmers. The smell. The smell was horrible. Thorncough could guess that Remington had been hunting.
"I was airborne the whole time." She cleared her throat. "Most of the time." Her feathers bloomed outwards in putrid flames as she craned her neck to lap the clots away, her tongue sounding rough and sandy. Thorncough had wondered if her tongue would draw more blood rather than clean her bathed mane.

Thorncough had now become hesitant as she lowered the needle down to the Mirror's throat.
"I'm not concerned about you scent-trailing other territories. We're always on the move--If there's a bounty hunter, we just kill 'em."

"I haven't eaten in a few daylights," Remington replied wryly. Her voice was raspy, smooth, and parched, and seemed to have very little emotion seeping through the cracks of her tungsten demeanor.

"No. You cross-transmitted an unknown illness." Her tail constricted the Mirror's neck. "This could be incredibly dangerous."

Remington shook her head. "Not an illness." She grabbed Thorn's paw and guided it toward the Mirror's boney mask.
"What?"

Remington shook her mane, parting it into crusty matted chunks of rusted flesh.
"The wounds aren't fresh--they are black and dry. They just never healed," she observed.

"Could that mayhaps be the result of a burn?"

The pearlcatcher shrugged with a "eigho" noise, as if she were lazily trying to say "I don't know".

Suddenly, the scrawny black dragon shivered profusely betwixt the dragonesses' talons. With jolts of sudden terror, both of them sprang into the air, stirring up copious amounts of sand into the green night sky. Where Thorncough landed gracefully, Remington stayed airborne, flapping vigorously like an iron-deficient swallow fledgling. The body seized before them with visible purple sparks thundercracking around the spasms.

"Monster!" hissed Remington through clamped teeth. "Vile beast!"

Thorncough stood, her back taut like a fawn nearing the jaws of a cougar. She herself shared this boney mask--it was a common feature around the Radio City-Famine Caravan region. A common practice, but why it was was beyond her. Magic users like herself were not to expose their faces to the sun or the pale light of moon, for doing so was punishable by death.

She slunk over, her neck slack as she gave the body a generous whiff, catching a smell of exhaust and incense. The Mirror turned his head to meet eyes with her, but nay was to be seen through the black holes of the pumice and porcelain.
"You are an immigrant from west, no? Your life is in our talons. Speak to us." She glanced over at Remington, who glided back alongside her--two elegant queen-like dragons, one fragile and the other built for war.

The outsider gazed off in silence, before lifting his paws over his face with a deep feline-like whine.