A World of Adventure

The Sprite

Shade soared through the clouds. He wasn't just a grumpy old man, he was a dragon. Dragons were creatures that could live for hundreds of thousands of years. Grumpiness was a common trait among dragons, because they were so big that they couldn't use most things. Shade was young in dragon years, only fifty thousand years old, but that was still old enough to have watched the creatures develop from wild animals to what they currently were. Having such an insanely long lifespan did things to one's brain. Shade distanced himself from creatures, acting grumpy and generally aloof to get people to go away.

Ted, however, managed to get him to open up after finding him in the woods one day. That little ball of sunshine had endlessly pestered Shade and sometimes randomly passed out next to him until he finally showed something resembling kindness to him. That was about a month ago. Since then, Shade would always sit at a certain bench in town and wait for the red-eyed mouse to come. Right now, however, Shade was flying towards a strange presence. 

Dragons were the peacekeepers of the world, making sure that nothing malevolent threatened it and that nothing that was just plain weird messed around too much. Without them, insanity and chaos would consume the world. The creatures of the world could handle monsters, though. Dragons felt no need to interfere if dangerous monsters appeared, because that would just be babying the creatures and leaving them unprepared for a situation where the dragons did not interfere. 

Dragons were guardians, but they weren't over-protective. They were actually more weird than anything. Otherworldly threats would be swiftly taken care of, no matter the severity, but it would take mass destruction for a dragon to even bat an eye at a native monster, and even then, they would take literally centuries to actually decide to attack the monster. Back to Shade.

The cat flapped his wings and rose higher before doing a nosedive. Just as he was about to crash into the trees, he made a sharp turn up and resumed flying forwards, now even faster with the speed gained from the dive. He eventually slowed down and landed, having reached his target. It was a teal orb sitting on the grass. Shade picked it up and examined it as it seemingly quivered in his hand. A sharp pain and slight draining sensation coursed through his body as the orb shifted into a four-legged form and ran away. 

Shade chased the thing, fully intending to get rid of it. It seemed to have leeched some of his energy to create a form for itself. When he jumped on top of it, a strong gust of wind was emitted from the creature, sending Shade flying. He slammed into a tree and became buried in snow as the Sprite ran into the forest. She ran and ran, never looking back until she eventually reached the walls of the town. She jumped up on top of the wall, covering the rest of the distance by gusting herself when she couldn't jump high enough. The wall was covered in snow, which the little Sprite buried herself in. She still had that teal glow, but she resembled a scaly cat. She didn't have the wings or spines of the one she based her form on, but she had the twin tails, blindness and other traits. She would have to snatch some energy from someone who could actually see.

The Sprite wasn't evil. She was just lost and confused. She had been stripped of her powers and thrown onto a strange planet, and the first one to find her obviously had killing intent. She rested in the snow for a while before jumping down to the other side of the wall. All sorts of strange sounds and scents flooded her mind, and it was hard to take in all at once. She walked around for a bit, only to run into a four-legged animal. It was snarling at her, and its head seemed to be following her, so she drew a bit of energy from it over the course of a few seconds. The animal screeched and ran away, even though she didn't take enough at once to cause it pain.

All at once, the Sprite could see. The animal running away from her had light blue feathers, three long tails, eagle talons, wings covered in those same feathers, and a distinctly not-Shade's-element aura. She shifted her form to have those features. She couldn't change her feathers to a different color, as Sprites always had a set base element, and every part of their body had to be some shade of that element's symbolic color. The most she could do was make the feathers almost white. The features the Sprite had taken suited her element, Wind, and they did good to make her look less like the dragon that tried to kill her upon seeing her. 

The little Sprite looked around for a place to examine her appearance. Looking down at oneself only revealed so much.