After your moment of weakness you swear to yourself that it will never happen again. But less than two weeks later your horns and wings decide to make their appearance.
If you thought scales erupting from your skin was bad, you really weren’t prepared for the rest. Your head throbbed and burned so badly that you couldn’t move without collapsing in pain.
For the first time in your transformation he didn’t listen when you told him to go away, to not touch you. Instead he cradled you in his arms as the fever burned through you, rocking you as you sobbed and writhed in pain from not just your head but your back as well. He promised that it would be over and you’d be well soon.
In the sea of pain you had one small hope, the way you’re back ached, you knew it would be only a matter of time before you had wings. And once you had wings you could finally escape the cave.
When the your horns and wings burst from your body and the pain had finally subsided you weakly pulled yourself from his arms and to your surprise he allowed it. In fact he seemed in much better spirits after seeing your new form.
He’d been leaving you alone for longer lately and in the time you did your best to work your new wings trying to get them strong enough that you could glide down like you’d seen him do a hundred times before.
When you finally gained enough confidence you stood at the sheer face of the cliff and your stomach twisted. This wasn’t the kind of thing you could fail and try again. You had a single shot.
Closing your eyes you took a few steps back and jumped off the cliff.
For a moment your body tumbled in the air and panic threatened to overwhelm and blind you. You had to grit your teeth and force your wings out, keep the taut, you felt the wind catch you as you glided down relief pouring through every nerve.
Your landing was a bit rough, a few added bruises but you were on the ground. You had escaped the cave. You’d survived. Peels of giddy laughter threatened to burst out of you and you barely managed to keep yourself contained.
In a small bag you pulled out one of the less expensive cloaks you stole, a deep green that would blend in well with the tree tops. A hood large enough to cover your new *features*.
It would be a few days walk to reach your village but you were more than willing to make the journey.
One of the first things you did was scuffing and dirtying the handful of gold coins you’d taken, the ones you had to sift through mountains of coins just for ones that were used in the country and past century.
It was almost painful watching the coins grow dull in your hands. You had to work to unclench your jaw when you handed over the coins for food as well, an angry possessive urge to take them back the minute they left your hands.
The more that time passed the more you found yourself thinking about the nest, and hoard you’d spent the last half year in. The food you’d bought never seemed to be enough to truly satisfy you, and your mind would wonder off to the food He always brought you. The small act of sharing a meal with someone wasn’t something you thought you’d miss.
Every night was worse, since your first initial escape glide you were plagued with dreams of flight. Not in this half shaped form, though, you were a full dragon, not some pedestrian beast with two legs. Flying in those dreams felt as natural and necessary as breathing. A unique joy that being human could never offer.
Worse of all, you were lonely. For months you’d wanted nothing but space and solitude. Exactly the life you’d had before everything happened. But now, you wanted to talk, to ask questions, to learn, from Him of all people. In the late nights while you sat alone on the road in the dark, some part of you would try and convince you to go back. To accept what you were now.
You’d told yourself that once you got to your real home that it would all abate. That the house with your chickens was the home that your body and mind cried out for.
The oddest part was the fact that He never showed up at all. You’d spent the first couple of days tense waiting for his large size to blot out the sun and scoop you up but He never did. It was like he hadn’t cared at all you’d left. Which had stung in an irrational way. He’d had done all of this to you and didn’t care when you left. It almost made everything seem cruel and pointless.
Your former home was, a mess, which you should have expected seeing as it had been abandoned for half a year. Your chickens were long gone by now and the sight of the empty coop now over grown in the grass made your eyes well up. The house, well, it was a hovel if you were completely honest, was in terrible condition. The small roof leak had turned into a third of the roof collapsing into a wet bug infested pile of debris on the floor. It was completely unlivable . Everything inside had been ruined from the elements.
But more than that everything was smaller than you remembered. Had you really been living in such a cramped poorly made house for so long?
You were sitting on your old bed, trying to accept what you needed to do next when a mob of thirty villagers stormed into your home. You stood happy to see them alive but the hope quickly died when they surged toward you chains in their hands.
Now being chained up, your mouth gaged and wings wrapped and immobile. Your former neighbors were collected together talking about the price they could get for dragon parts, your scales, wings, horns, even your organs could fetch thousands of gold pieces, all while you pleaded with them in the corner. You had to admit to yourself that you needed help. You needed to be saved.
He of course had known when you left the nest. He watched you bundle yourself up, kept pace behind you as you travel and retrieved the coins so you so casually threw away and kept his watchful eye as you traveled back to your village. 
He knew that you needed this, that he could offer the world but until you saw it as the only world you could have it was meaningless. He watched as the idiotic villagers made their own death by chaining you up, pleased for an excuse to burn the rest of the pathetic village down.
The group panicked as screams once again broke out against a backdrop of raging fire destroying what was left after the first fire not even a year ago. The roof of the building caught fire and the humans scattered meeting their death when they came outside. The smoke was too thick to see through but it didn’t burn your lungs as it once did. Even the heat of the fire felt like a pleasant warmth.
That’s how he found you, chained among flames that didn’t burn either of you. “My poor dear,” he said as he effortlessly broke the chains that held you captive. He didn’t say anything when you wrapped your arms around him, just pulled you tighter promising he’d never let you go again.
King Solaris was in a foul mood, today marked three years since his youngest daughter left to go study with the Northern Sea Witch and he missed her terribly. While three years is not much long to a fae, for a father it seemed an eternity. His court was as it always was, laughter and screams, dancing and bleeding, the same faces, the same smells and he was bored of it all.
“Father,” said his eldest son, watching his father’s tail lash back and forth as he sat on his throne, “might I suggest that you might go for a walk? How long has it been since you’ve been in the crossroads? Surely better to patrol them then stay to stew in your restlessness?”
The King sighed heavily, his flame orange cape draped over the left side of the throne. “Your sister hasn’t written yet,” he said, eyes still on the writhing mass of his court in front of him. His hand moved from propping up his chin to covering his heart, “I should go and see her.”
“Father,” said the eldest son, struggling not to implore the sky herself, “She has not missed a single day of letters, we both know that it will come. Stop sitting like a house cat and find something to take your mind off it until it comes.”
The King sighed even more loudly because he knew his son was right, with a flick of his wrist his cape turned into an emerald green hunter’s jacket standing up. He turned to face his son, seeing the crowd in the reflection of his eyes. His son was taller than him now and it brought a great pride to him. “I leave you to watch til I return my son,” he said with a slight head bow.
His son fully bowed his head, laurel green curls falling past sharp black horns, his hand over his heart, “Thank you for the honor father,” he said.
Solaris couldn’t stop a soft smile thinking of the same boy he brought home all those years ago. He reached out ruffling his sons hair, laughing at the slightly annoyed look his son gave as he stood up height again.
“See you soon father,” said Callan, a touch more dry than before. The King laughed again, turning and completely disappearing from the court.
It had been a while since he’d been in the cross-lands where human and fae territory overlapped. The human area changed from time to time, no one knew where the crossroads would be, and when that would change. When he reached the other side, he found it to be in he same place it had been about fifty years, he counted the years in a tree nearby. It was an early summer day where all the birds and insects were singing together but they knew well enough that the King was not in a fair mood and so went silent in respect.
The King stalked forward hands in his pockets as his mind wandered over the state of the forest, feeling how much closer the humans had settled nearby. He could smell them, even this far away and it irked him more with each passing second. It was odd for the boarder to stay for so long, usually half the time it had been here. He hadn’t cursed a town in quite a while. It might be a good way to bring back respect the humans seemed prone to do.
He was brought out of his thoughts by the sound of a thin reedy but full hearted singing. He clicked his tongue out loud, listening closer to realize it was a human whelp that was singing.
A child should know better than to be loud when the forest is silent. Where is it’s guardian to keep it safe? Or do the humans think we so weak to not show our teeth?
It was an easy task, show himself and play with them a bit, see if they were smarter than their parents. Maybe he’d turn them to a songbird since they seemed to love their voice. A lesson to neglectful parents about teaching your child to walk around the forest alone, as if they owned it.
He did admit that the child did have a rather sweet voice, and he had thoughts of shaping them something into more than just a simple songbird, maybe one that could also speak and mimic. Something he could put in a glass birdcage and listen to when he was bored.
The child was bent over in the dirt, singing some old folk song, hair loosely back dirty and sweaty. Who knows when they last had a bath, the King scoffed internally. Their clothes not much better much too big, covered in a thick layer of dirt. It all only strengthened his resolve to turn them to a songbird they would be treated much better than they were currently.
He stepped into the forest clearing, the air around them both growing thick and wild, a smell of hot summer grass hung like a cloud. The King watched motionless with a smile as the hunched figure froze in place, smart child to know when they were outmatched, no grand heroics or disrespect. The child lifted their face, and the King was oddly pleased, it was cleaner than their hair and he could that the child had spent most of their life facing towards the sun. Their eyes looked the same as a fawn caught in the sight line of a wolf, but their mouth was turned into a hesitant smile.
The King cocked his head to the side at the child’s smile, before he could say a word the child spoke.
“Hello,” they said, their voice soft with a slight tremor but a distinct note of hope, “what’s your name?”
With those simple four words, the Solaris knew that this was to be his third child. A neglected songbird, but with a quick wit and curiosity that spoke of greater things than their tiny village. He wanted to scoop them up, and tell of all the great things they would see and do. But this was not his first time bringing a child of his own. So he smiled as he knelt to be closer to the eye-line. of the child.
“You, songbird, may call me, Solaris, may I know what you to call you songbird?”
When the child’s face brightened, any hesitation was gone, this child was his and he couldn’t wait to bring them home.
