Kryos stirred. He had never expected to wake from this sleep. It should have been his last.
He opened his large fluid eyes, eyes that gleamed liquid silver like mercury, and glanced about his cave. This should have been his crypt, his final resting place. He was the last of his kind – the last crystalline dragon. He had purposefully chosen that special dormancy common to all dragons, the one that dragons used to prepare themselves to mate, as he had settled into place here. With that particular type of sleep, the only thing that could rouse him to wakefulness was another of his kind, a female who was also ripe for mating. There had been no such female. He should have slept forever. Why then, had he awakened?
He raised his large head and sniffed at the air. It was there, the scent of female, young, but mature and fertile. How could that be? There was something odd about her aroma, however, something not quite right. The odour was strong but heavily tainted in a way that Kryos would almost describe as incomplete. She was crystalline dragon alright, but not pure, which meant that he still was the last pureblood of his kind. The remainder of her smell was not that of any other dragon that he could identify, either.
Fully alert now, Kryos pushed himself into a sitting position. His cavern was very cramped. He had not chosen it on the basis that it would serve any purpose other than being the place where he would die. That death would not have come until after many more centuries had passed and even the near ageless quality of a dragon would have succumbed to the rigors of time.
Pinpricks of sunlight wormed their way in through small holes in the rock, and glinted off of his scales. Each scale acted like a tiny prism, capturing the light and releasing it again, divided into its spectrum of colours. The effect lit Kryos up with a myriad of tiny rainbows that reflected onto the rock walls surrounding him.
He sighed, wondering if wherever she was, the female had scented him as well. She would not have been able to find him. He had almost completely sealed the entrance into his niche, not wanting anything non-dragon to disturb his rest. The gap that he had left would not allow for anything the size of a human to pass. In fact, it was so small that Kryos would have to change to the most diminutive of his three forms in order to escape his enclosure.
He sniffed at the hole into the outer world, not wanting to transform and flit away if there were any dangers lurking beyond. He was most vulnerable in his smallest form, and could not afford to take any chances. Trying to detect the smell of danger past her scent was almost impossible, however. His body tensed as he breathed deeply, driven by the urge to find her and mate with her, a compulsion generated by the type of sleep that he had chosen. He had created this desire in the process, and now he was possessed by it.
Unable to resist that draw, Kryos leaned back and initiated the change. He hated transforming. It was a very uncomfortable process, one where he had to use his innate magic to compact his essence, his own matter, and force it into a shape that it did not prefer. At least this particular transformation only required him to shrink his form, and not alter it in any other way. Not so for his third form, which he avoided using if at all possible.
Kryos fell onto the rock floor as the metamorphosis took a hold of his very being. He writhed from the pain, feeling as though he were being twisted inside out. As he shrank, the world seemed to grow and by the time the change was complete, when he lay there stunned and aching, he was only a fragment of the dragon that he used to be - he was not even the size of a small house cat. From a distance, he looked like a giant crystalline butterfly, but from up close, one could make out his slight reptilian form, including his long snout and limpid eyes, his elongated neck and tail, and his tiny clawed limbs.
It was several minutes before he had returned enough to his senses to scramble up off of the floor. The wind was blowing through the crevices in the rock, carrying that alluring scent to him, without any effort on his part. Kryos tested his wings, fluttering them eagerly and darting about the cavern until he was sure that he could attain and maintain the speed that he would need to help him avoid any predators. Once he was sure that he was ready, he crawled over the series of rocks barricading his intended crypt, and out into the light of day.
