An Unwelcome Visitor

Snow drifted down from the sky above in enormous flakes that landed on the sapphire dracus’s nose and made him sneeze. He gave himself an ornery shake and pulled his cloak closer around himself as he glared up at the near-black clouds rolling above his ravine. He hated this place, but it was the best shelter he could manage to find in the area. It was far enough out of the way that no one was going to stumble upon him by wandering into his territory, he could finally be alone. That was what he’d wanted for so long, after all.

He used to convince himself he needed to surround himself with people so he could be distracted from the traumas of his past, but that wasn’t the case. After the horrors of the poaching ring, he had tried to return to his barn, but his fight to rescue the primal crossbreed child had left his home destroyed beyond repair. That was a loss that had left a bitter taste in his mouth. 

Milarose snorted in disgust as he turned to walk stiffly back into the cave he had made his temporary home. He had gathered enough firewood for a small campfire, but the wood must not have been very good for such a purpose, as the fire died every time he stepped away from it for even a moment. 

He started to build the pile of wood up again and clacked two stones together until a spark landed among the twigs, lighting the kindling beneath them aflame. As the light from the growing fire built, Milarose caught movement out of the corner of his eye, farther in the darkness of the cave. His lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl as he saw more detail and saw the pale white skin of a humanoid arm in the flickering light. 

“Get out!” he snarled, lashing out at the arm. He felt his claws sink into something soft and fleshy, and the arm came away without any resistance, flying across the cave and flopping grotesquely on the floor near the entrance. 

Milarose stared at the arm for a long moment before looking back to where it had come from. He took a branch from the fire and held it toward the darker recesses of the cave, his skin crawling at what he found. 

A mound of what looked to be flesh of differing kinds lay propped against the back wall of the cave. Its bulbous form heaved up and down as if in labored breath, the limbs that stuck out at every angle from its body moving in strange and listless motions. There were humanoid arms with many-fingered hands, drakiri limbs that Milarose recognized as belonging to different breeds of his species, and even a few grotesquely mutilated faces peering out here and there. One in particular froze Milarose to the spot when he locked eyes with it. It was the face of a dracus that had haunted Milarose’s dreams for years.

“Is this not what you would see done to me if you’d had your way?” the face asked, its misshapen lips moving as if in speech, but not matching the words that escaped the bulbous mass. 

“I would have seen worse done to you,” Milarose spat, his tail lashing in agitation. “You destroyed me, and you reveled in what you had done. Death was too good a fate for you.” 

The mound of flesh shuddered as a sound like gravel being shaken in a glass jar filled the cave. “You think highly of yourself, as you always have. Undeserved self-aggrandizement.” 

“That’s a big word for someone with no brain,” Milarose hissed. “Then again you didn’t have one in life either.” 

The mound lunged forward with startling speed and Milarose let out a short, sharp yowl as it rammed into his chest. He felt an agonizing burn as the ice-cold flesh plastered itself to him and he gasped as a vision was forced into his mind of his body being ripped apart and joined into the horrific mass of other ill-fated drakiri, humans and elves that had already been assimilated. 

“You are nothing to the world at large,” the dracus’s face hissed in his ear as it slid across the mass to be close to him. Hands grabbed at Milarose’s mane, horns and ears as the mass dragged him deeper into itself. “If you looked farther than the end of your nose, you would see there are others who are more important. But you are too selfish, too self-absorbed, too–” 

Milarose drove the burning end of the branch into the mass and he felt it jerk back in pain before reeling away, screaming with the voices of hundreds of lost souls. The creature’s body flickered and undulated before falling apart into thousands of crab-like creatures, pale as a ghost and fleshy as they dragged themselves along the cave floor. 

As the last of the crabs fell away into the ravine to be carried away by the river below, Milarose gripped the edge of the cliff and parted his jaws in a defiant roar that left his body trembling from the force of it. 

“I need…no one,” he breathed before turning and walking stiffly back into his cave to sink to the floor and rest.