Her Scales

Her scales had come off. Peeled away from her flesh and sloughed off overnight. Now they were heaped on the ground like rotting leaves, sickly strips forever stained white-of-fear. We had slathered aloe over every remaining bit of her, but even its sticky malfeasance couldn't cover up so much pus and rot.

Ironwood stalked the foliage around her - or what was left of her, anyhow - muttering some nonsense about bitterroot and cat's claw. Sometimes, I heard him arguing with himself. Acacia leaves. Small doses of nightshade. Maybe the scales were the problem? Yes, they were definitely the problem. Now that they're off, she'll start getting better.

I couldn't blame him for grasping at anything, anything, to explain what had happened. But it left him useless, prowling in circles that got wider every hour, desperately grasping for anything he'd missed. Leaving me, poor me, to pick insects out of the folds of her skin.

Her... flesh, I shudder to say, was pink like the inside of a guava; a realisation that, when I had it, forced me to give up fruit. Her limbs no longer moved, save for a faint twitching of the talons when something irritated them. Her wings were long gone - amputated by the healers, the very same healers who could no longer stand the smell of her.

Moons, the smell. Sharp and stabbing, practically a physical thing that reared up and snapped at the two of us. Warning us to stay away. Truth be told, I didn't blame Ironwood for keeping his distance.

That's how we had ended up out here in the first place; he was determined to prove himself, and my sense of smell was severely dulled. Besides, I'd felt sorry for her. She'd been a grand affair in her prime - tall and handsome, with a boisterous laugh and a smile that felt like a bit of the sun.

Her teeth had been the first to go; from the state of her, the healers had concluded before they'd sent us out here, her eyes would be next. As I massaged her face, I realized they'd been right. I hoped she couldn't see out of them anymore - they were barely solid, rheumy and creamy like the innards of a rotten banana. Dissolving, like the rest of her.

"Do you know how butterflies are born?" she'd asked me, once, before the rot had taken her tongue and her cheeks. Coughed, splattering her still-beautiful scales with blood like stagnant water. Rasped, with what remained of her smile.

"They start out as caterpillars." A breath. Her voice drawled, slow and lazy, as if she was speaking to me from underwater - as if she was already half-dead. "They weave themselves a beautiful cocoon, around and around themselves, and when they're finished, they climb in," a cough, shattered and tragic, "and digest themselves from the inside out."

She laughed, then; awful, gurgling. It dissolved into her hacking away, splattering the healing den with more wine-dark spittle.

"You'll be alright." I offered, patting at her neck. Making sure not to stray too close to her wings, distended things driven into her back like broken branches. It was an empty platitude. Even back then, back when it was only her wings and mouth rotting and not her entire body, we'd known there was little we could do.

She did not respond, rictus grin frozen in place. "They don't understand what's happening. They live their lives as caterpillars - eat, drink, mate... never knowing that, once they've sealed their fates into a tiny chrysalis, they will have another life..."

Jade stood off to one side, somber and stoic. A marriage of convenience, she'd said over and over, but she had the good sense to at least pretend to care about her wife.

"Has she eaten?" she asked nonchalantly.

"Not since her teeth fell out." I reminded her. Curt and quiet. Even before the sickness had set in, she'd chipped away at her wife's smile, chipped and chipped over days and months and years with iron glares and veiled threats, so that near the end she was a flickering shadow, a spent candle, barely even there.

Perhaps Jade was here from some misplaced sense of duty. Perhaps she was simply here to see her poor wife suffer. Perhaps that rotting mouth and those broken-branch limbs were some extant decay, physical manifestations of her abuse.

"Butterflies are beautiful," her wife had continued, eyes glazed, lower lip trembling. "Wouldn't you like to be one, too?"

Her voice got louder near the end there - too loud, as Jade immediately fixed her with a curdling look.

"It'll be alright." I repeated again. Tried, with my eyes, to indicate that Jade should leave, that the splotches of angry red roving her body weren't helping. Once her wife started shivering, someone led her out.

Poor thing, I remember thinking, as white spread across her scales like mold over fruit. As she stopped trembling and started weeping. Poor thing.

As if I understood. As if any of us could make it better.

She kept coughing, into the night, as daintily as she could manage. Jade would have approved. Even the blood that spilled from her lips was quiet and distinguished, blooming across her talons like flowers on a bed of moss.

"I should've tried lavender and oleander." Ironwood said by way of a eulogy. "I just waited too long, a-and-"

"And nothing." I said, with far more conviction than I felt. "There was nothing you, or any of us, could have done. It was quick and most likely painless."

We stayed there awhile, pensive. Afforded what remained of the dragon we'd once known some dignity. Death wasn't something we balked from often - it was our vocation, after all. Yet with a passing so horrific...

"How could it even have happened?" asked Ironwood, so softly that I had to ask him to repeat himself twice before I understood. "Bones don't just... dissolve ."

And yet they had. Overnight, her ribcage had caved in, taking with it most of her facial structure. Her limbs had come apart from her torso, so now they were mounds of gore arranged in a five-pointed star. All semisolid, green and white and red, so much red . A sight so gruesome that, I think, neither of us had fully processed it yet.

Her face was gone. Gone. We hoped - hoped - that it had been the first to go, and that it had taken her brain out with it. If not...

"We're leaving." I said, once I'd finished emptying my stomach into a nearby fern. I didn't look at her - it.

Was it 'her', still? Or was it 'it'? I didn't know. It's not like she could take offense - it was only her body left, at this point, and it was no more than a distended mass.

I'd like to say it looked angelic, that I could make out that the gruesome heap had once been a full-formed being with thoughts, emotions, ambitions, fears. But I couldn't.

I hoped it would simply flow away. That, whatever it was now, it would dissolve into the rain and that I'd never have to think about it again.

We only found her notes in the aftermath. Scattered across the ruins of the house her and Jade had shared. Pinned beneath the rubble, fluttering in the acrid breeze like trapped moths. Some fully intact, with grand designs of monstrous wings and a dragon-sized chrysalis. One, punched through Jade's gullet.

It's time for me to leave this body.

The healers - or, rather, the remaining healer - decided to burn them. Along with Jade's body, and all the other bodies she - it - had claimed. To burn them during the day, as it preferred to hunt at night.

It would be a long trek, he reminded us. Ironwood, with his now-clouded eyes and newly shattered wings, snorted acerbically.

"Shut up," I told him.

But, the healer continued, relocation would be the safest alternative. Once we got out of its territory, it would leave us be.

He reminded us that we would get through this. Coughed gently into his talons. Stopped.

Stared in disbelief and horror at the red stains, dark and deadly, like nightshade and belladonna blooming across a bed of moss.