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The sound of her own bones breaking.
That was the thought that played on a loop in Moonwatcher’s mind as she stared at the ceiling of her bedroom, the pale light of the moons filtering through the high windows of her modified sanctuary. It was a luxury of a room, spacious, airy, and meticulously designed for a dragon who no longer navigated the world on her own four steady talons.
Nine years ago, the mountains had tried to swallow her whole. An avalanche, a sudden, deafening roar of white death, had pinned her beneath a crushing weight of granite and ice. By the time the rescue parties from Jade Mountain had unearthed her, the damage was done. The spinal cord, the delicate conduit of lightning and will that connected her mind to her lower half, had been severed. From the waist down, Moonwatcher was a ghost in her own scales.
The guilt had been the first thing to settle in, heavier than the snow. She felt a profound, stabbing stupidity for the carelessness that had led her into the path of that slide. While some dragons were born with missing limbs or succumbed to the wasting sickness of the marshes, Moonwatcher had simply been too reckless. She had lost what millions of dragons prayed for every single day: the simple, unremarkable ability to push off the ground and fly.
Over nearly a decade, the screaming grief had faded into a dull, persistent ache. She had learned the art of the "around." One does not simply remove a boulder from the center of a living room; one simply learns to navigate the perimeter. You build your life around the void. You accept the architecture of your limitation. But the cruelty of paraplegia, she discovered, was that the losses didn't all happen at once. They revealed themselves in slow, agonizing increments. At first, she mourned the dance and the sprint. Then, years later, she mourned the feeling of a breeze against her ankles or the tactile satisfaction of digging her claws into rich soil. She had spent countless hours with a therapist, unraveling the layers of her mourning, until she could finally say, with a shaky sort of confidence, that she was mentally stable.
Her home was a testament to her mother’s desperate love and a staggering amount of gold coins. Every threshold had been smoothed, every doorway widened. There were no upper floors, only a dusty attic that served as a graveyard for memories and a basement for the mundane chores of laundry and storage. It was perfectly situated; close enough to the halls of Jade Mountain to feel connected to the academic pulse of the continent, yet secluded enough to afford her the privacy of her own silence.
But lately, a new kind of fear had begun to seep into the marrow of her bones.
It was a primal, dragonetish anxiety. She remembered being a dragonet, terrified of letting her tail dangle over the edge of the bed, convinced that something lurking in the shadows of the room would snatch at it. Now, that fear had evolved into something more sinister. She would lie in the dark and wonder: If something were to brush against my leg right now, would I know? If a creature were to crawl beneath my sheets and press its cold scales against my calf, would I simply never feel it?
She had mentioned this to Kinkajou during a visit. The RainWing had let out a loud, bright laugh, her scales flashing a vivid, amused swirl of sunshine yellow on a canvas of rose pink. “Oh, Moon! Imagine some weirdo licking your hind-talons in the middle of the night and you just... didn't know! They’d probably think you were into it because you weren't reacting!”
Kinkajou’s optimism was usually a balm, but this time, it felt like a bandage on a gaping wound. The laughter had faded, but the question remained.
Then came the physical decline. At thirty-seven, Moonwatcher began to notice a creeping fatigue. The ritual of her mornings, the mechanical tilt of her bed that hoisted her upward so she could slide her paralyzed frame into the reinforced wheelchair, had become a struggle. Her upper body was powerful; her forearms and talons had grown thick with muscle from years of hauling herself across the world. Yet, lately, the transition felt... wrong.
A few weeks ago, she had woken up an hour late. To her surprise, sliding into the chair had been effortless, as easy as it had been years ago.
That was when she started looking. She began to pay attention to the exact placement of the wheelchair. On the mornings when she struggled, the chair was just a fraction of an inch further away than it should have been. Not enough to be an accident of physics, but enough to make the reach a strain.
Am I pushing it away in my sleep? she wondered. But the chair was heavy, locked in place by a sturdy brake system. She tried to laugh it off, telling herself that some invisible prankster was moving her chair just to mess with her. The joke had echoed in her mind all day, a thin shield against the growing cold in her stomach.
The shower had been the next catalyst. While lathering her scales, a distinct, sharp sound had echoed through the hallway, a thud, perhaps, or the sliding of a claw against wood. Moonwatcher had frozen, her heart hammering against her ribs. She couldn't simply dash out to investigate; she was soapy, defenseless and dependent on the slow glide of her wheels. By the time she had dried herself and rolled into the hall, the house was silent. Nothing was out of place. But the relief she expected never came. Instead, there was a lingering sense of being watched.
Then there was Sora, the housekeeper. Sora had always been a prickly dragon, her patience for Moonwatcher’s condition worn thin by years of resentment. Yesterday, Sora had returned from the attic, her expression a mask of cold fury. She hadn't spoken to Moonwatcher for hours, her silence a heavy shroud over the household.
When Moonwatcher finally asked what had happened, Sora had snapped with a passive-aggressive sneer. “I know you can’t exactly make my job easier, but I would appreciate it if you didn’t just drop all your junk into the attic. It’s a disaster up there.”
Moonwatcher had blinked, a slow smile of confusion crossing her face. The attic had no lift. No ramps. To enter that space, a dragon would have to physically climb a steep, narrow flight of stairs. . . something Moonwatcher had not done in nearly a decade. She wasn't a fan of “talon-climbing," a grueling, undignified process of dragging oneself up stairs by the claws. She hadn't been in the attic in years.
Sora had left without a goodbye, her departure a slammed door and a lingering scent of irritation. Moonwatcher had assumed it was just another one of the housekeeper's tantrums.
But this morning, the illusion of sanity finally shattered.
Moonwatcher woke up and looked down at her feet. Her socks, the thick, woolly ones she wore to keep her circulation warm, were gone. She remembered pulling them on before bed. She remembered the feeling of the fabric against her scales.
Now, her hind-talons were bare.
The blood began to howl in her ears, a rhythmic thrumming of pure panic. Dizziness washed over her, making the room tilt. She tried to convince herself that she had simply kicked them off in her sleep, but a cold, hard truth anchored her: she could not feel her feet. If she had kicked them off, she would have seen them on the floor.
The floor was empty.
She lay there, paralyzed in more ways than one, listening to the silence of the house. And in that silence, she remembered something that made her breath hitch in her throat.
She had not heard Sora leave yesterday. Not once.