Scales and Ashes Glistening scales defying darkness in the dead of night. A proud grin and then silence. The cold whisper of the night breeze troubles a pond of moonlit water, a microscopic earthquake distorting and twisting the features of a torn face, still as the centennial unmovable rocks of the mountains. Sculpted features ceselled by struggles, time and raw experience. Two white, soiled hands grasping firmly a heavy sword half-buried in the dry earth. Both hands and sword soiled with dirt and dried, purple blood. The flat watery surface of the pond stricken by a sudden blow causing increasing whirlpools and tremors of disruption of focus and linear perception and grasp on reality that seemed nothing more than an objectification of her own psychological troubles, fears and scars from the past, and that night these issues would all come to an end. An end marked by fire. The city slowly, almost sleepily, drowning into its inevitable doom, after a century of sieges. Her noble companion groans in distress, looking puzzled at his master with amber eyes. Specks fallen from the sun, as she used to call them. The lowered muzzle of the creature leans in closer and she caresses it, but she does it to lessen her fears and doubts, more to reassure herself than the proud animal. The touch with those smooth, clean, whitewashed scales, mirroring the whiteness of heaven itself and the essence of the angelic wings, makes her feel unclean and guiltier than ever in her mission. But she smiles, sadly, gazing in the twin suns of those amber eyes. The dragon is a killer as much as she is, the fire raging out of his noble nostrils and terrific jaws. Noble and gracious as savage and primeval, a twisted fate for such a rare and mythical creature, til a few years ago believed by her very tribe to exist only in the legends of the world below. Those whirlpools of an impossible golden shade, mirroring her very soul. She shifts her gaze to her feet, and then lufts it gazing at the faint attempt of dawn fingering her way out of the pitch black mantle of night with bluish and scarlet fingers, painting the new day with an omen of tragedy. Licking the newly-born sky with the fresh blood of the stirring daylight.