starless and bible black

Sundown dazzling day
Gold through my eyes
But my eyes turned within
Only see

Old friend charity
Cruel twisted smile
And the smile signals emptiness
For me

Ice blue silver sky
Fades into grey
To a grey hope that all yearns
To be

He comes into the cave at sundown. Strolls straight and proud, awkwardness buried. He walks like no other visitor to this place ever has. And some gaits are heard, others seen, but the sinisternity boils all the same.

This man does not have that. Why is he not scared? He wears the emblem of the kingdom; he cannot be a king, but he must be a prince.

Why must he be a prince?

"You're a human," the dragon groans.

"Is that a bad thing?" the prince asks, brightly.

"I'm not sure. It's never been a good thing before."

"Come now," says the prince, still shining. "Surely there must be something you like about us."

Surely. But dragons aren't meant to be tamed, certainly not in that way.

Us. Who is us? So you count yourself among the thousands. A man of the people, as they say. But you're not like all the rest. So why...?

"I have...stories." A petty distraction, but an available one.

"Oh? Is that what you hoard, then? That's not the usual."

Now the dragon snorts, warm breath wafting up towards rolling eyes that close sideways - but only the right, because the left is split perennially, perpetually open by a jagged scar running down its middle. "I don't hoard them. I write them."

There are claws, prehensile things, buried somewhere below the scales and the wings. Black speckled with blue and green, some bits of orange, craggly especially where clustered around pockets of gold.

It is not a housepet's idyll, cuddly and noble-clean. If there were hair, it would be unruly, only barely tameable by the raw semblance of a ponytail collecting the strands out of the way, out of sight, but not out of mind.

That is how the dragon lives. Known of, and not quite feared, but very, very far from beloved. Does it matter? It's not for anyone's consumption - human or otherwise.

"And do you write them about humans?" So maybe that's going to be called into question, sooner or later. That's annoying.

"What, are you jonesing? Clown."

The prince, or really maybe more the jester, shrugs off the casual, barbless insult. Maybe he's used to being ridiculed. Maybe the scaly fellow here is treating him with more respect - more humanity, even, ha - than any of his court ever do.

"How did you get that?"

Suddenly his tone has shaded gentle, cautious. The boister is faded, tucked, away.

"From another human," says the dragon, without lifting its head. And ah. Of course. Now it all makes sense.

"I'd promise you that your fears of my doing much of the same are unfounded, but that's neither my place nor my truest opinion."

In other words, he thinks it's not assuming that he's doing, to render the monster before him into a creature that can even bear fear, let alone be plagued by it, but he limits himself from reaching all the way to presumption that he is above harming another being.

Just like the other man. And then again, not.

The dragon rears.

The prince - the man, or perhaps the boy - has gray hair. A sign of age undue, messy to contradict over a face awash in youth. Eyes gold, warm. The sun has not shone in this cave for a great many years. The dragon writes without seeing; maybe without ever having seen.

The question is not "why are you here" or even something so seemingly essential in its simplicity as "who are you". Instead, the question is rasped (not barked, not snarled, not breathed): "What do you want?"

"Your name," answers the prince, lightly but not at all casually. "Or haven't you got one?"

Ah. So he knows. The dragon is not an it, but a he. "I am called Minoth," he says. Called by who? Rather, by whom? "And what about you?"

"Addam." And who calls you that, my prince? Who loves you, when you're at home?

"So you've got my name now, Addam. What next?"

Oh, he's coy. "You won't tell me one of your stories?"

Jackass. Minoth lifts his wing. "Sit here." And the story he tells is not from memory, is not from careful long-learned rote, but is entirely new, spun off the sickle-wheels of his mind. Addam falls asleep, by its conclusion, and so does Minoth. It is the first time in all those years that he has been relaxed enough to let it happen.

When Addam wakes in the middle of the starless night, all he sees is the dragon's wing wrapped to gently rest over his head. Stories are scrawled on it, thousands of tales unpenned, all those that comprise a treasure stocked up safe inside an encyclopedic mind.

"Minoth."

He's sitting by the left eye, and so though it can't open, something about it blinks. "Can't sleep, Prince?"

"I'm wondering how many stories you have, all told. How long have you been writing?"

Somewhere behind them, further into the deepest dark of the cave, an armored tail shuffles over the ground. It's thinking, counting, studying up a response. Oh, there was a quick, natural, snappy one to hand, but sometimes the more important questions require weightier deliberation. Gratifying, isn't it? All this, bound in to you. The speed is awe-inspiring. The process makes you hold your breath.

In fact, what comes next reflects this pause. "Could be a decade, could be a century, could be a millennium." Unspoken, the tag: why?

"Have I ever read one, do you think?"

The tail slaps down, decisive. "No." You, out in the world, never have. That man tried to take them away, for his edification if not for his profit. But I do not give of this bisected heart for reasons so pithy as those.

Is that a bad thing? It's never been a good thing before.

"Will I?" Will they?

Suddenly, the curtain shuts, wing shuttered down to cover and to caress.

"I don't know yet. Let me keep reading to you for a while longer, eh?"

Surely there must be something he likes about the humans. Eventually, anyway.

I want to link B's monster AU series as well, but a series doesn't fit into the standard mechanism, and if you want to be picky I wasn't technically inspired so much as recognizant of the fact that these also existed when I first struck upon dragon-flavor Minoth...yada yada yada. Read his fics. :D