Where Smoke Bleeds Gold

Chapter One - Just a Flicker

Tears bubbled my scales like a calm stream. Like all streams, it led to a small pool, just off the edge of a dark red cliff of scales. Blurry eyed just like one swimming in the pool, I could just make out the reflection of myself in the pool at my feet. It wasn't a big pool. A bug couldn't even drown in it. A fly was even helping themself to the salty water on the dusty floor. Hundreds of cracks in the wooden walls were how they had gotten in, but they would never find their way out. I blinked away tears as I looked away from my hideous swollen face and stared at the bug. Would it be a good meal for a snake? Some snakes ate insects, didn't they?
"Flare!" Her voice screamed out. Suddenly I jumped up. How had I forgotten her already? Her baked gold scales moved closer as she snarled.
"Are you even listening?" She hissed. Her voice was sounding hoarse. The sand in the dessert was surely aiding her sore throat as much as all the yelling she did toward me.
"Yes, mama," I whimpered, hoping she wouldn't hit me over a fly. "I know," stuttered.
"You know what?" She barked. "You know you weren't supposed to leave? You know that you did this to yourself? You know that everything would be-" She bit her lip to keep from cursing. "I shouldn't have to deal with this,"
That sediment always confused me. Wasn't it her responsibility to take care of her own draglings? You wouldn't realize she was even related to us at a first look. She had golden scales while me and my sister had dark red. She never talked about our father, so our best guess was it from him.
"Mom-" Flicker, my older sister, began.
"Don't call me that!" She roared. Her giant talons cut into the grooves of the faded wood floors. The fire from mother's firehorn was only growing as she continued to scream at us. Unlike ours where it only melted away.
"Just-" She hissed, her voice cracking from frustration. "Just stay in here, snakes," With that, she disappeared behind the curtain door to the hallway. I looked back down, shivers shaking my body as I tried not to hic as tears continued to wash away the dust on my snout. My firehorn was struggling, just a flicker. I should've been used to the shouting, but it still hurt my ears. Still broke something mechanical in my chest.  The machine was making a fast thumping noise in my ears like a cog had fallen off the mill slowly breaking the system.
"Why...?" I heard Flicker ask. My lungs wrapped around themselves. Making each breath harder to hold.
"Why would you do that?" She asked. I wrapped my broken tail around my legs, getting my scales wet in the puddle of tears as I held my swollen face. Did I have a black eye? But what did it matter? No one would see it anyway.
"Why couldn't you just stay inside like always when me and mom left?" She asked. I remember just what happened. Kindling, another dragling that would talk to me through the fabric windows invited me outside with him. I thought it would be fine for a moment, but his father found out about my sick trick and told my mother all about it.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't thi-"
"Sorry for what?" She sneered. I looked up to see her peering through the curtain door into the hallway. "Sorry that you didn't get away with breaking mom's number one rule? You know we both get in trouble, snake," She hissed.
She was beginning to sound like mom.
"You couldn't just forget about the rule your entire life is based on, could you?" She hissed, looking back at me. Her horns were round and blunt, like mothers. Mine were sharp and rigid, just making me more of an island to them.
"Oka-" I began, defeated.
"I don't see why you can't just stop," She continued, wanting to get her kicks in. "It feels like everyday you do something like this,"
No, usually I'm hiding under my bed, skipping breakfast to avoid mom, I thought, looking at the screened window. It did little to keep sand out of the house. My face was dry of tears, but I didn't feel any better.
"Can't you do something right for once?" She hissed, standing up. A headache was beginning to pound its way into my head as my eyes teared up again.
"I try," I said, voice cracking. And I do. Everyday.
"Then do something right for once, take your broken tail and useless snake brain somewhere else, all the way to Dire Tip if you need to!" She said, shoving me backward.
"Maybe I will," I hissed, regaining my balance, trying to get back at her. Unphased, she knocked me back down, spitting cusses like fire as her Firehorn regained self-esteem.
"Then go you serpent!" She hissed. Her talon landed on my tail. She pumped her arm down, cracking into my scales.
"Hey-gah!" I yelled, pulling my tail back. The three spikes at the end convulsed as the muscles couldn't manage to keep them still. Flicker noticed it. She forced herself to gag as if it was disgusting. I knew she forced it, she had to. She was always the one to comfort me about it. Why was she holding it against me now?
"Shut up!" Mom shrieked from down the stairs. My talons flew to my snout, holding a stupid whimper in.
"Go," Flicker mouthed once she managed to look me in the eye. I spread my wings quickly, standing up as fast as I could without dizzying myself from hunger.
I grabbed my bag off the scrap of thin blankets I called a bed and ripped through the fabric window before she could hit me again.
"Don't come back," She hissed as I spread my wings wide for the first time in years. The wind caught me unexpectedly, crashing me into the current.
Our house was on the outskirts of the Viper Nest, meaning the giant sandstone and bark wall was a mere wing lengths away. I crashed onto the wall, knocking the breath out of me before I could lean up to fly over it.
"Halt!" Someone called. I righted myself up and turned to the mangled guard running toward me. Behind him was a drunken guard, still holding a glass bottle of something. I stretched my wings out as the bright red guard continued running toward me. I pushed myself off the wall, flapping my wings violently as I heard what sounded like the guard scoff about how I was above his pay grade.
The sun beat down against my wings as I flew further and further into the desert. I drank in every grain of sand as I beat my wings. Kindling had shown me just how big the Viper nest was, explaining every little fact he learned at school about it. He said the world was a big place, bigger than I can ever imagine. He thought it was a little funny how I was almost matured, and I didn't even know the market was four houses down from my house. I laughed too. It was strange.
The world was big. I had been flying straight since the wall. I began when Sun was flying at his highest peak, and yet now, Moon was beginning to shine her sheltering rays to us and just barely had I noticed something on the edge of the horizon.
The sand here was muddy. Wings tired, I began walking just as Sun began dipping behind the horizon. The sand clumped between my claws as I walked on it. I looked up to the horizon. They were trees. So many trees. I saw one outside the fabric window in the alley behind the houses. Before it was cut down, Flicker would pick the fruits off the tree for us to eat after dinner.
I couldn't figure out why she had been so nasty to me today. Was I just being a dragling? I was, wasn't I? I sighed as the giant clusters of trees came closer and closer.
Forest. It was a forest. Flicker had told me about it one day, she was learning about geography in school and came home to tell me all about it. Or perhaps just the forest, now that I think about it. The giant shadows of the trees loomed over me as I tread lightly in the needles and dirt. Little patches of grass sprouted up like the dead grass in the streets.
Except this grass was cooler. Softer. More comforting. The night was so cold. The coldest I had ever felt. In the day the house was hot and dry, heat practically melting my scales. At night I was wrapped in thin blankets, pressed against Flicker to make room for each other in the only other bedroom. But here, it was strange. A good strange. I loved it. Just like laughing with Kindling.
It was new. It was exciting. It was freeing. A burst of energy pulsed through my veins as I looked around at the longing shadows of the forest. Creatures chittered beyond the shadows as I ran through the woods, scratching marks into the trees around me. I loved strange things. It made me want to smile at every strange thing I saw. To learn. To explore. Find as many strange things as I could.
Fatigue began to sink its fangs into me. I had spent so much time moving today, more than I ever thought I would have before. It pulled at my eyelids and it sung me to sleep with its sweet lullaby of shaking wings.
Beautiful Moon watched over me through the leaves as I curled up under a sappy pine. Just above a flicker, my Firehorn slowly extinguished as I fell unconscious for the night.