Dragon Breath [excerpt]

yeah the undertale food review is taking a little bit don’t sweat it ...

I’m gonna do a part two of taking one of my scrapped pieces and repurposing it. however, I mean it this time, because I don’t think I’ll use this one again?

The creature tackled him to the ground, and Ballard braced for teeth.

A scraggly voice called out, “Who do you—”

Ballard’s voice almost took over itself as he screamed, “∷ᒷ⍊ᒷᔑꖎ ||𝙹⚍∷ᓭᒷꖎ⎓!”

The harsh, garbled sound thunders through the room, almost as if it were a ruptured violin, and despite his rusty incantation, it worked. He opened his eyes to see a visage of a boy his age. And then it morphed—as if it was never there to begin with. Whatever had the figure of a human was gone, replaced by a creature. Clothes shredded and torn cover it head to toe. What wasn’t obstructed was almost entirely scales, purple as mulberries or blacker than midnight, and what might’ve been hands were claws, deep and long. It was entirely animalistic, no part of it to be made human.

All at once, the thing realized it was visible, and Ballard realized in a cold breath what it was, what the scales and pitch black eyes meant. It released his shoulders from his hands and stared at them as if never realizing they were staring at a monster themself.

Before Ballard could speak, it then covered itself as much as possible, almost phasing invisible again as it screamed “Don—”

A large flame erupted from its mouth and nearly hit the ceiling before it could finish the sentence. It ran from the room, moving from all fours to two legs somewhere off into another part of the house. And Ballard couldn’t think; he just muttered the words:

“It’s a dragonborn.”

The words stain the page, but Ballard can’t stop running over them as if to give himself some clarity. Dragonborns are dead, dead, dead. But if they were dead, what was living in his house? He’d been chasing through books for hours now, too afraid to go to the library and face this, forced to resort to his own. Unfortunately, what his mother had in spell books, she lacked in dragons.

Supposedly, from what he learned in school, dragons were fierce creatures from ages long before humans, capable of uprooting forests or burning them to nothing. They would go in between dormancy, leaving the world to its devices, then awaken only to cast it back to ash when the time came. They were hunted to extinction, the only record of them kept by the elves. And elves? Elves are gone.

Phased out of society all together, only existing in shells of existence. Stripped of their cognizance if they’re still alive. Many of them aren’t.

But dragons are not elves. They do not have epics dedicated to them, or what they were.

As he’s about to reach for another possible lead, the shelf to his right is swept clear through, almost as if a tail swung through it. The space stands empty, but the wind sails past him anyway. It clears through the doorway and slams it shut, leaving Ballard in the library.

If he can’t learn about dragonborns through books, he’ll have to do it himself.