Over The Years

Dragontouched

| Yifan/Yixing | NC17 | 5.1k 

Summary:

A wish granting, human hating dragon meets the one human who doesn't want what he thinks he does.

Written for Yifantasy 2015

It was a diamond shaped thing, smooth and a dark forest green in a certain light and black in others. It had an iridescent sheen when Yixing turned it in his hands. Yixing weighed the thing in his hand. It was heavy for something so small.

Yixing had never seen anything like it before and he had lived in the forest all his life. Studying the thing more closely, he realized that it resembled the scales on the arapaima he had seen in the rivers.

But how could an arapaima's scale come so far inland?

Yixing shrugged and slipped the scale into his pocket, picking up the water buckets he had put down before to study the scale and going on his way, thinking that he would bring the scale down to the marketplace and maybe ask some of the fishermen.

Yifan settled on his great pile of treasure with a contented sigh. His great tail coiled loosely around the pile and he lazily observed that one of his scales had fallen off.

Must be some fluke. He decided, not too concerned as after all, he had hidden away from humans for centuries. There was no way anyone would be able to find him. He was sure of that.

By the time Yixing had returned home, he had already forgotten the scale in his pocket. Tiredly, he stretched out across the bed and cried out when something in his pocket stabbed him.

Swearing, Yixing pulled the scale out of his pocket and examined it. It had wickedly sharp edges, something he had not noticed before. He sighed and stretched out again across the bed again, holding the scale up to his eye. In the dim light of his oil lamp, Yixing was surer than ever that it was not an arapaima's scale. No arapaima had scales this colour. An alligator gar perhaps. But the scales of the alligator gar were not this bright of a green.

Wincing at the pain shooting up his back, Yixing sat up and studied the scale again. It glimmered slightly in the flickering light, seeming to glow with its own light. Intrigued, Yixing pulled open his bedside drawer and rummaged for the book on forest creatures that his father had started. It was an old book, with pages that were yellowed around the edges but Yixing loved it more than anything else in the world because it was his father's work.

Gingerly, he turned the pages to the section his father had labelled as reptiles. Lifelike drawings of monitors, iguanas and crocodiles jumped out at him along with detailed descriptions on what their feeding habits were like, the patterns and colours of the reptile.

Yixing turned the pages until his eyes were tired but could find no mention of any reptiles with iridescent black-green scales. Swallowing his disappointment, he turned to the last pages of the book that his father had illustrated.

Fantastical Beasts

The title jumped out at him. Yixing blinked. There were only a few pages left. Carefully, he turned them. He gasped. The creatures that stared at him out of the page were incredibly lifelike with an unearthly beauty. There were a few he recognized as he had caught glimpses of them as a child when his father pointed them out. The unicorn he once saw grazing in the shadows of the forest, the alicorn that had flown over his head and the phoenix that he never saw but always heard.

Yixing caught his breath when he turned the last page. There was a drawing of a handsome young man standing next to a fearsome beast with a scaled body, leathery wings half roused and a serpentine tail coiling at the man's feet.