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You are Malleus Draconia.
It is the loneliest thing you could possibly be.
When you are born, the sky weeps. The people say lightning the colour of your eyes struck the mortal realm, warped it, changed it. That you were the beginning of the end. That you are the last of the Draconias, a beacon of hope and destruction.
The few things you remember from your childhood are this: Lilia, the man you call father, who left and returned without warning, who feared not the monster you would inevitably become but those who would turn you into a monster, and your grandmother, who loved and hated you more than anything.
They say you look everything and nothing like your parents, and for the first century of your life, you are a shadow.
You grandmother is a queen, a warrior, a leader, and still, she is your grandmother. She invites you for tea when you are so young you can barely string together sentences. She brushes your hair, as it grows long and silky, and she drowns you with love in the brief moments that you share.
And in the others, she glares at you. She whispers that her own daughter would be a better heir, that you are the failure replacement for a dead woman. She scolds you for bringing flames to her kingdom, and for bringing ice to her castle.
Your grandmother slaps you across the face and tells you: "You are unfit to be a king, and unfit to be my grandchild."
There are more words she speaks, buried somewhere far closer to your heart, and significantly further from your memories. Somewhere bitter and cold, that poisons your blood and deepens your frown. She is a Queen, a general, a woman of fire and lightning, and you are a child who knows not of his own power.
But still, it is in the hellfire of her hate that you decide to flourish.
It takes not centuries, but mere decades, for you to immortalize yourself as one of the greatest mages alive. You set kingdoms aflame and your singing rebuilds them in a heartbeat. you build and destroy mountains, and in some way, you turn into both a monster and a saviour.
When the people fall at your feet, begging the prince for salvation and from the endless drought, you split the sky open and pry rain from the clouds yourself. When the people cry out in Winter, the darkness of the night stealing their families, it is you who hunts down the beast and slits its throat without complaint.
And in the same echo, it is you, who sets the kingdom ablaze when you are but a child. It is you who scares the guards from sparring with you, for even at eleven centuries of age, you are far more monstrous than they could ever dream to be at thousands.
There are few companions of yours, and this only grows more apparent as you grow older.
So you read, in the royal library, from the most basic magic to forbidden spells, from history to fiction, past to future, truth and lies, until you have devoured that too, and even then, that does not deter you. You hone your talents, and you cast and cast and cast, until magic is a castle and you are it's King.
You spar with your father, when he is home, and despite how you have never won, you can see something in his eyes that makes you recoil. Something between pride and fear, and it twists your gut, a bitter feeling caught between happiness in emerging near-victorious, in forcing a new level of competency out of Lilia, and misery, that you will soon best this challenge and lose another companion to fear.
The place you call home is a twisting maze of darkness and thorns, and much as you love it, you know you will be trapped within it lest you escape.
They say you, the future ruler, a future legend, are destined for greatness. Voices that criticize you praise you in the next breath, and it is the most pathetic thing you've witnessed.
You bring the most powerful of mages to their knees, and yet you remain unsatisfied.
Hunger, your grandmother calls it. Ambition, your father. Loneliness, a voice whispers, and you ignore it fervently, for all you have known and will know is perfection. You are holy. You are a king.
And when your father returns home, a boy with hair as silver as the clouds clutched to his chest, you become a brother. And for once, you see what an ordinary life - a happy life - could be.
You help raise a child, and in doing so, you meet others. A half-human boy who talks for hours on end, and despite how he idolizes you, never feared you. Your brother, who is so far form the world you have known. So human, he is, and so fearless of you. Silver, who has known you as nothing but family.
And finally, the dark haze that has hovered around you, that has choked you from the moment you were born, disappears, and you can breathe, even if just for a moment. Your life is clear, is lived, is full of laughter and light, and the dark is gone.
But your father and grandmother have other plans, and while once you had a brother and friend, you have guards a mere fraction of your age, and a father who cannot see you as his son.
You are sent to Night Raven College, with your family following close behind. Your grandmother told you many things: that you would learn, would grow, would see what true friendship and leadership would be.
Instead, you learn a different type of lonely.
Students look at you with fear, whispering as you walk by. You do not rebuke them for it: you expect it.
You are a monster with horns sharp enough to pierce through hearts. You are a monster with the power to bring the world to its knees. You are the future King of a dead kingdom and the last remaining blood of a god. You wear the façade of a monster as a mask, and in time, you know you will become what the world thinks you are.
They see you as perfection, and it is impossible not to be, and yet you fear the day you will stumble, will falter, and the world will see you not as a monster but the foolish prince you are.
Misery loves you, you think. Loves taunting you, stealing your memories, lost to time. Loves stealing your family, lost to death. Loves stealing your home, lost to war.
Nothing and everything are yours and you wish to end it.
And upon watching leader after king after queen give into the rage and hurt that the world has brought upon them, you smile.
And you become the monster the people said you were.
You lose yourself to isolation and hatred. Thunder and lightning shatter the midnight sky in strikes of green, and the night reaches out, calling to you. Whispering to you. In the end, there is no one to blame but you, Malleus Draconia. The bitter, vengeful monster, haunting the skies.
(What reason did you have to remain human?)
You can see the students who you once respected, and you almost laugh. Because now, it is when they try. Now, it is when they beg and plead for mercy and for you to understand their plight. Now, when you hold the world in your fist and sorrow in your heart, they pray you will be something holier than what they believed.
What effort had they put into understanding you? Into understanding a monster? Into understanding you were nothing but foolish and mortal and destined to years of empty promises and false crowns?
No matter what guilt you may feel in moments, in weeks, in years, in centuries, even, it could never compare to the amount of anger you feel. The rage. It cannot compare to the fact that for years you have watched yourself rot away and become something to be abhorred.
And so you split the sky in half, and you tear your own family apart, and you watch as your dear little brother rises from the ground on the back of your father, a sword of the sun in his hands, and you can only laugh.
You are in love with death. You are intoxicated on the high it will bring you, the happiness, the freedom. You will die as the monster you are. You are the whole of the universe and the empty of the void and you are being.
You know he will strike you down. You know it is the only way to stop you. But alas, you live, because your brother is too good, too pure.
You hate him, and you love him, and it is in those feelings that you realize you will die alone.
For your brother, begging you to awake, begging you to remember, as you see nothing but the ink that had clouded your vision for weeks, is all you can see. And you know, that he is and always will be the only person who could never see you as a monster.
You were only ever his brother.
When you awake, and when you remember, when you can conclude and draw lines and take the blame, you see fear in the eyes of not just the people. It lingers in the eyes of your family. In the eyes of Riddle Rosehearts, of Leona Kingscholar, of Azul Ashengrotto, of Jamil Viper, of Vil Schoenheit, of Idia Shroud.
They may have been consumed by ink, but even then, did they hold the power you have? Did they bring together the world and shatter it without a second though? Did they become monsters?
You cannot blame them for failing to understand you despite having gone through the same thing.
At the end of the day, when everyone looks to you, they see not Malleus, but a monster. What you have done is and always will be unforgivable, and you feel enough regret to drown you, and simultaneously, none at all. You want to beg for forgiveness. You need to, and it is all you can think of. Let the world see you as something far from a monster. Let the world see you as human.
You know they haven't forgiven you. You can smell the fear of not just Night Raven College, but all of Twisted Wonderland. It is all you have known and all you will ever know. You know that the world will not - cannot - change for you.
It is impossible to become human when you are, by principle, a monster. When you are fae. When you are a dragon. When humanity is imply a box you have molded yourself to fit into hopes that someone, anyone, would find you and claim you worthy of love.
When you learn to love loneliness, the sky weeps. You turn your head towards the rain and what it cleanse all you have done.
You undo all you have done, unravel your promises like a string until they are a list that has been completed, until you have repented infinitely, until the islands rise from the sea once more and the sky cries no longer.
You are tired, so tired, and your body aches from the burden of existing. You are not supposed to exist, are not supposed to have lived through your overblot, and you are not supposed to be fixing a world when you lay exhausted and broken.
But you did not become feared by letting yourself rest, and you are not and cannot become a shadow. Not here, not now. Perhaps not ever.
Ironic, you find it, how in the one moment when your power was needed, you despise every moment of it.
You are a shadow god, and fear is your King.
For the first time in your life, you learn to appreciate the loneliness that comes with being yourself.
You awake early at dawn, and sleep long after the night's beasts have tired. The sky watches you, whispering, over and over. Child, it calls. Child, we will watch. Child, you are known. It is a blessing and a curse, and you bear it proudly, for it is all you have.
You walk through the darkest paths within the forests. You smile as the sun dies and the moon rises, and as stars decorate the sky in millions of colours. You open the curtains in your room and let the sunlight capture you.
You are not happy, but you can breathe. You can finally breathe, and the realization makes your heart stop. You are alive because you have died, because you have shed a layer of ink that clung to your body and heart, because you have left all who loved you, because you have been reborn anew.
Because you miss everyone you love, and you find yourself okay with that.
Your walks take more than hours, they take days. You meet the more-polite Leech brother on mountains, and you swear you can see your father's bats, trailing behind you, flashes of black against the corners of your vision.
It is small, but you know he is there. He is here. He is your father, despite what you have done. He is your father, and he will remain as such until the day you and him are nothing but ash and dust.
You pick flowers and laugh. You see the world for the first and last time.
The sun falls from the sky, and as you catch it, you agree with it that you have indeed lived a full life. Perhaps, you will become a tale parents tell their children at night. A beast so spiteful and lonely he lost himself, haunting ancient ruins. When you are dead, perhaps the sky will reach out to reclaim you and hug you close, whispering your name like a prayer.
"Draconia."
You nearly laugh. The day you feel in love with loneliness, the day you accepted it as a part of you, the day you looked to the sky and said prepared to return to the cold of the universe, would be the day a hand was extended.
Funny ways, the world worked.
"Kingscholar," you greet, and the name is familiar on your forked tongue. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
You are Malleus Draconia, and you are free.