Chapter 3 #2
His lungs screamed as they expanded and clenched. Removing his hand from its head, he braced both palms on either side of the cool rock. Something stroked his brain in that moment. Like odd fingers teasing the outskirts of his mind with something that he vaguely knew, but couldn’t picture.
Gulping deep breaths, his maw fell open before the man-thing’s face.
He allowed his tongue to taste its exhale.
That strange brain massage worked through his skull once more and hazed his vision for a brief moment.
Drool began to pool down his teeth again at the thought of engulfing the smell in the quickest sense.
The strange new scent filled the air, further driving his senses wild.
He had always kept a steady control on his prey drive, but for some reason this creature was testing almost every limit and control was close to slipping.
Before he knew what he was doing, his maw snapped forward around the throat of the being.
His tail had slithered around its waist and slowly began coiling and tightening.
The air thickened around them. Weighted by an overbearing sense of dread and strange desire to devour that massaged his mind in the best ways.
Thrasik hadn’t ever felt this desire so strongly before.
It was as though his inner workings were controlling his every move and he was slamming his fists against an impenetrable wall to take control back.
The being’s hands pawed at something on its chest, drawing his attention back for a split moment.
A strange but familiar smell wafted toward his snout.
He breathed in heavily and felt his jaw titillating against the inner turmoil of clamping or releasing.
The scent that danced along his receptors was familiar but…
old. How could this creature have possession of something familiar?
Unclenching his jaw in a moment of brief clarity, he noted the tiny pricks of blood starting to ooze from its neck.
His snout nosed the base of its throat, trying to smell through its hands. Frustration built in him as he desperately tried to catch scent. Tightening his tail, the being released the source of his confusion.
Resting in the crevice of its collarbone lay a thread with a scale on the end. His vision centered on the obsidian pendant. Nostril slits flaring, breathing in every morsel and fragment of decades old scent that he could, Thrasik slowly brimmed with anger.
“Why,” he tried to keep from lashing out without reason.
Gazing upward, he locked eyes with its distrustful pricked emerald orbs. Devouring all its features as the moonlight highlighted its long white eyelashes, splattered freckles, and lips parted in fear, he couldn’t help but admire its abnormal beauty again if even for a moment.
“Where did you find this?” The hiss left his lips before he could control it, a clawed finger tapping the scale at its throat. The creature’s eyes were doe-wide and stared at him with a twisted awe.
His tongue flicked across the smooth scale.
He swore for a moment it whimpered when his tongue slid around the swathe of its collarbone.
Tasting every memory and scent that ran through his own conscience, he tried connecting the scale to whatever gate it could unlock.
Tasting each individual shed that strengthened the scale to its core.
Each claw mark that etched a groove into it.
Realization struck as he reared back and dragged a claw along the base of his own neck, nicking a tender spot from where a scale had been stolen from him decades ago.
More frustrated that it was stolen without him knowing why, and even further angered that this being had it, he clenched his tail and wrapped his claws around its shoulders.
A broken cry spilled forth from it. His head tilted.
The cry almost sounded feminine now that he was close enough to evaluate.
“I know you speak.” Crooned from his tongue. “Tell me where you found this scale.”
“I don’t know!” The being was small in his hands, and its voice was saturated in panic
“Do you just pick up random items without knowing who they belong to? Tell me where you found it!” His lips sneered back, revealing blood smeared fangs. He could feel the hooded folds on his neck vibrating as they threatened to flex.
“I-I’ve had it for years. Since I was a girl!”
So, it was feminine. He puffed his scales at her stutters and reared back more when they turned into hiccups.
That information matches, unfortunately.
He woke up to pain and blood trickling from his throat decades ago.
Around the same time the elders were called by the man-thing’s leader to some ceremony.
He never found out who or what took his scale, and to his people scale removal is an act revered for bonding or burial.
A few of his other kin awoke in a similar state.
They were all of age where no new scale would grow where the stolen one was ripped.
Steadily they had all disappeared over the years.
He couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen one of his scale-ripped brethren.
Thrasik glared at the trembling creature in front of him. He loosened his tail and moved his hands back to the boulder, huffing in irritation.
Night birds sounded alarm off in the distance and a shadow blocked the moon light for a brief moment.
Without thinking, he forced his body fully against the man-thing and covered every visible part, tilting an eye to the sky and watching.
Massive wings sounded in the distance as he squished himself further against the boulder.
A growl built deep in his throat, lips snarling toward the sky.
The feminine being trembled harder and he felt moist drops hitting a random pattern along his chest. Surely it thought he was going to smother it to death, but that wasn’t his intention.
He wasn’t going to let some sky lizard steal his hard earned prey.
Especially when it has something so precious to him and would leave him with a life of unanswered questions.
“Tell me. What do they call you?” He wanted to try and connect, not realizing how gravidly cruel his question sounded as it slipped from his curled lips.