Drakon notices the way that the flowers wilt but does not feel loss or sadness. He tilts his charred head to the side, inquisitive and curious, but feels it settle like truth. This was the way it was always meant to be. The flowers would curl under his presence. They would flatten beneath his hoof. He could move the earth beneath them, but he was not designed to bring spring to them. He could not make them bloom.
He was not made for the soft, sweet things.
He was not made for things like her.
But he remains because his heart is a starving thing and he must feed it. He presses new experiences into his flesh like a promise and soaks them up, even when they are ill-fitting. Even when he brings death to the things around it. His pupiless eyes remain open and unblinking, staring at her across the short expanse and barely looking away toward the plants that succumb to his heat, to the humidity he brings with him.
“Hello,” he repeats back in his boyish voice, a gentle rainfall to the thunder it would later become.
When she steps toward him, the stars in his mane rise up in response, floating in the air around him as though a summer evening had descended upon them. “Everyone asks that,” he muses, glancing down to his legs and that of himself that he can see—the skin crackling and peeling apart. “I wasn’t always this way,” he admits, but his memory of the time before is thin and cloudy. “But I don’t remember it.”
A pause and then a shrug, the motion childish on him.
“It doesn’t hurt though.”
A frown.
“At least I don’t think it does. What does hurt feel like?”
@[crania]