CASIMIRA
dragon-shifting daughter of ashhal and ryatah
She did not expect the heat that flashed momentarily across her body when he says her name is pretty. In an alternate universe, where maybe her childhood was normal, or her dragon-form didn’t lead her into chaos and war and death, she is sure she would have handled a situation like this differently. She would have been emboldened by his compliment, she would have known that everything about her was pretty and she would have used it. She would have been a dangerous combination of her parents – reckless and beautiful, with an unbreakable heart. She would fall in love a hundred times, or maybe never at all and think nothing of it.
Instead she is splintering apart on the inside, and scrambling to pull herself together so that this boy can’t see it.
As if it matters; is if she’s ever going to see him again after today.
As if she’s not going to disappear back into the forest before she can do something irreparable.
As if he’s even going to care.
Unknowingly, her eyes follow the curve of his neck as it turns away from her, the way the muscles ripple and play beneath the apricot of his skin, and how the wind lifts at the violet of his mane. He looks back to her, and reflexively she looks away; a nervous flick of her crystal-blue eyes, as though it wasn’t incredibly obvious that she had been looking at him. But he answers her, and she follows the flow of the conversation, though she is hesitant to meet his gaze the way she had before. “Ischia. I’ve never been there,” her voice feels far away, almost detached, as though she isn’t the one speaking it. She wonders if he can hear the nervous way her heart pounds in her chest, and she still can’t figure out entirely why he’s affecting her this way.
She almost doesn’t realize that she’s not worried about her dragon-form anymore; that her pulse quickens for a different reason.
“I was born in Tephra, with my twin brother, but…” she trails off, not entirely sure how much she wanted to divulge. Thinking of Cassian made her chest feel heavy – though she would absolutely never tell her brother that – and thinking of Tephra made her think of the war. Scorched earth and smoke-filled skies, and her body colliding with the two dragon stallions from Loess. She hadn’t expected herself to be a fighter, but the predator locked inside of her had been begging to be cut loose.
Tephra made her think of bloodshed and chaos, of the panic of not knowing where her mother and brother were, of the adrenaline of being locked in battle until –
– until all she saw was the glimmer of constellations and angry blue eyes, and a fleeting memory of what the impact had felt like. She still isn’t entirely sure if her memory is accurate, if she had really been killed – shattered apart – by Starsin. She just knows that sometimes what startles her awake from her nightmares is a flash of dragonfire, and the feel of her own heart exploding.
“But I haven’t been back there in a long time,” is what she finally says, with another half-hearted smile. “I guess I’m a nomad, now.”