Broken peices

The scraping sound of my claw on the stone floor echoed in the vast emptiness of our cavern, a sound so stark and lonely it made my scales prickle. Home. It was a word that used to conjure images of warmth, of shared meals, of a mother’s soft scales against my own. Now, it was just a place. A place filled with shadows and the clinking of empty bottles. Mother was gone again, her scent of stale smoke and regret clinging to the air like a shroud. Father, a hulking silhouette hunched over a flickering hearth, offered no comfort, only the usual grunt that meant he hadn’t even registered my presence.

I tried to make myself smaller, to fold into myself until I was nothing but a whisper of a dragonet. It was a skill I’d honed, a survival instinct born from the constant ache in my chest, the gnawing fear that something inside me was fundamentally wrong. School was the only sanctuary, a place where my powers, at least, seemed to make sense, where the whispers were of admiration, not pity or something far worse.

But even there, the cracks were starting to show. The admiring glances had begun to curdle, replaced by something colder, sharper. I felt it in the way their eyes lingered, in the way conversations hushed when I passed. They saw the effortless glide of my wings, the spark of elemental magic that danced at my fingertips, the innate understanding of ancient runes that baffled even the elder dragons. They saw perfection, and perfection, it seemed, bred a different kind of hunger. A hunger for my downfall.