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Tiamat opens her eyes to a vast sea, every colour of the world laid out before her. The colours mix and there is no division between them; she sees and notes every shade she can, ochre and ruby-red and azure and gold. Beautiful, she thinks—it is her first thought.
She knows without having to be told that this is the great eye of the Dragon-Father, Io. But there are a few moments before she notices for the first time the hazy reflection in the sclera of His eye. It is a dragon, like Him, but blessed with five heads rather than one, each a different colour.
Me. She thinks. She speaks: “I am beautiful.”
She is transfixed by the Dragon-Father’s gaze. The eye is beautiful, but she thinks she makes it more so. He is without distinction; she is distinction itself. There is a beauty in the composite of their extremes.
Then the Dragon-Father, blinks; all is dark and silence. His Eye opens once more, but the claw that previously held her aloft is sinking and she is drawn from its precious colour. Lowered from the consideration of the Dragon-Father, Tiamat watches with wide hatchling eyes as the His great maw opens and he breaths Bahamut to life from platinum flame. She looks at the tiny hatchling and sees one head where five should be; one colour where there should be five and thinks, with rising horror—Not Me.
Tiamat and Bahamut are brother and sister and they will be mates. Tiamat knows this as strongly as she hates it. She will obey the Dragon-Father because he is vast in his strength and his intelligence and beauty, because each of his scales spreads wider than her wingspan and so she belongs to him because she cannot be his superior. Bahamut cradles weakness to his chest and nurses it where he should seek strength and it clings to him, and so he cannot be hers and she cannot be his; not her, not hers.
She tells Bahamut this.
“You hoard weakness. Hoard strength, instead. It is more beautiful.”
He does not understand.
“I only hoard beautiful things.” He tells her. “They are mine and so I am more beautiful.”
He will not listen and so she ceases speaking to him. She polishes the gems in her hoard, bathes them in dragonfire over and over to see if the shadows they cast betray otherwise unseen faults in their crystaline structures. For any weaklings she gives no mercy. When their ten children come, she hoards the eggs, winding them amongst the flawless gems and perfectly stamped coins and statues made by master crafters. She keeps them there until they hatch so she can hoard their namings as well, and for more besides to make sure they are hers.
They are lucky to be her children; the fact balances out their lack, their singular colours and their lone heads. Bahamut thinks they are beautiful despite it and because of it, each a lesser reflection of herself—this is an inconvenience at first, but then she bathes them in fire to burn the dust off their scales and two, the white and the silver, screech a little harder than the rest in pain and it becomes useful.
None of her children are without imperfection. Tiamat is left bereft in a lair filled with perfect beauty of every sort except that that is alive.
Bahamut takes five of the children on as his own. He gifts them kind words in exchange for a building horde of praise and adulation and Io looks upon him with a pleased eye. He is pleased, she thinks, that Bahamut will be so skillful at building him his hoard of descendants. Tiamat is left in a seething rage that blinds her for several days when she realises that all this time she had been hoarding those glances, and that Bahamut has managed to steal them from her before she even knew they were hers.
It is right, then, that she steals back from him. But he has stolen everything , her precious hoard of their father’s approval and pride; her children, which belong to her even though she didn’t want them; the scales on his back, he stole from her too, because there was no distinct colour before her and he came after which means he must have stolen that from her. There is nothing in his lair that she could steal that would not leave her hoards still feeling weakened, imperfect, from the unhealed wound of the theft.
Killing Vorel is beautiful. As he dies, she sees his imperfections, his missing heads and missing colours and weak, weak talons and wings fade as death makes them a trophy, a banner telling of her magnificence and strength. She takes care not to damage his head; it is already a favoured possession.
Io is angry that she has killed Vorel, and she does not understand. He made her, she thinks but does not say. He made her, and so must have known the shape of evil he was building in her heart. He created her to demand perfection in all parts of herself, even her possessions, created her to balance Bahamut’s callous disregard for excellence in his things. Bahamut loves all things because he is able to see himself in them, and Tiamat loves nothing because there is nothing like her.
She does not choose her nature; she is a dragon and dragons are creatures of fire and chaos, yes, but also creatures of fixed mind because even Bahamut, as kindly and magnanimous as he aims to be, hoards a wealth of power that he will not part with even to stem the bleeding wounds of his beloved dragonkin.
This does not save her.
When she falls from the Dragon-Father’s eye and to abyss, the ever-present colour of the His eye is gone. The first time she looks at her reflection in a finely-cut gem, she sees no colour and for the first time in all the time she has lived she sees weakness, imperfection.
In a moment of weakness, she considers killing herself, purging the weakness as she had when gifting Vorel his perfection.
She doesn't, and when the mood passes it is once again replaced by a star-shattering rage that no longer has the power to shatter stars, only endless caves and mindless devils that simper and plot and leer. She could have gone, deprived them of her self forever and a day and yet they do not see.
She has no hoard and so she builds one, little by little. She has learned from Bahamut's betrayal and values submission above all else. In time, her thoughts return to her children, and the five Bahamut had abandoned for refusing to follow his dying ways.
Perhaps she can tolerate imperfections, forge and shape perfection from something broken, if it is what it takes to heal her bleeding hoard of power.
(Perhaps she lied to herself, when she said that she loved nothing. Perhaps she did love Io, because she belonged to him. It does not matter because she is not His now and so she knows that she loves nothing.)