A Benevolent Evil Dragon

Well, I am grounded. Actually, no, grounded is the complete opposite of my current state. I was unceremoniously put in air jail for my crime of fucking with the very concept of life. Mother smacked me with a tentacle just hard enough to exhaust my body without putting me into a coma, which really hurt by the way, then tied me up with an absurd amount of vines and left me hanging from a tree.

This sucks. I lock myself up in my brain enough, I don’t need more self reflection time!

...

Or maybe I do…

I literally just hurt myself twice then almost killed myself… while trying to learn how to heal… I think I tipped over from being “a strangely smart kid” to being the baby that is running around with a blowtorch. Sadly, messing up like this was bound to happen. There’s just so much I do not know and so much I can’t just guess or apply my past knowledge to. When I saw life and death mana existing in this world I expected life to be all about healing and death all about killing… But that’s a very game-like thought process in a very ungame-like world.

Regardless, I am now stuck, unable to even really struggle, while my siblings are being given a ride back to the nest. They’re not going to keep me like this forever, right? Wait, this is the first time mother would punish any of us… how harsh is she going to be? Thinking about the life and death battles me and my siblings went through because of her… yeah I might get to see the afterlife again so soon…

Or… maybe not. I’ve been slowly recovering my reserves thanks to how rich the mana around this is, so I am able to stand upright when mother brings me down, returning from probably taking my siblings to play a bit in the cave before sleeping. While I expect her to hit me again, she instead summons a very tiny version of the life rune… by her standards I mean. It’s still bigger than the version I made. I take a step back and I see how she rips the life out of a patch of grass, then throws it right back… but it doesn't get fixed. Not really. The blackened blades of grass try to stand upright, but something took hold already, the concept of death, and just throwing the same energy back where it belonged doesn’t seem to fix things, it just makes them pretend to be alive for a bit.

I watch as she then uses nature to quickly regrow the patch, and this time she focuses her magic on a single blade. She adds in the rune for control and seems to take out a very small flow of life, the grass looking sickly, but not dying. When she pushes it back, I can see as the grass seems to fix itself, but the weakness remains… and then she makes a combination. So far mother has not shown us how to combine elements, probably because it might lead me and my siblings to do something stupid like rending the life of everything around, including ourselves, level of stupid, but here she is doing just that. She merges life with nature, making the life rune sort of feed into the nature one, but without using a conversion rune. It’s like it was meant to be, like both of them had little nooks for this specific goal and now they just fit together. Regardless, I see the blade becoming perfectly healthy, no patch of yellow, no little crease, it doesn’t even obey gravity anymore, standing upright despite being a very flat and thin thing.

As mother dispells her rune, I approach the blade. It’s perfect… and it still smells of vitality. It smells of something living as best as it can, as if it refuses to allow things like disease or decay to even exist around it. It smells… And I ate it. You know, I should expect “life” infused into something to be a delicacy… which is a bit cheaty when you got a mother that just oozes the thing somehow…

Actually, how? Seriously, how can she do all this? Mother’s affinities are clearly water, nature and something else… not life, not earth, something weird, but not something that she’s using right now, so how can she do all this? I mean, yeah, there was some life mana coming from below, a result of some magic rocks she has stashed away under the glittering crystals and metals, but even so… She can use air, earth, fire, basically anything kind of mana she needed she could use. Is this what happens when you have enough room, or just an effect of growing that I do not yet know about?

Ughhh… I hate being unable to properly talk. There’s only so much that guessing is good for… Man, is there really nothing I can do..? Hmm… Alright, mother, you convinced me that life magic is not a good idea right now… But what can I do?

I hate being powerless. I hate seeing people struggling and suffering and having to turn my head… Magic is supposed to be the fix for that, to let me do something! Anything! Yet here I am, standing before a powerhouse, being shown that I could do so much more, yet I can’t. Not because of some injustice, not because I was unlucky and wasn’t born with sufficient talent, a healthy body, or in a family that can afford to help me reach my goals… because I was born in the best position, body and place for all of that.

I am just not good enough.

I have every advantage under the sun… But I am just not good enough.

So I breathe in, then I breathe out, and finally I let loose a frustrated cry. I bite the air, I claw the ground, I let loose flames to burn the grass, and finally I just curl up.

Because there is nothing I can blame for my inability to help. There’s nothing I can hate for being forced into the position of a bystander again. I am just not good enough to help, so I will not.

It’s morning and I hate it. After mother brought me to the nest, I quickly fell asleep and woke right back. My emotions have already dulled, but instead of a pathetic tantrum I am just loathing my inability to fix things. Now I don’t have delusions of grandeur and I don’t think I am some kind of hero… but I wanted to be able and at least stop bad things from happening where I can see them. Not in a “brush it under the rug” way either, just stopping them altogether wherever I can.

Yet I sit and watch through the vines as the people inside go about their day. The old woman’s healing is… It’s basically faster regeneration. It just speeds up whatever natural processes are already in place, it’s not exactly a cure all like I thought, just a helping hand. The downside is that the scarring will remain, and their flesh is now soft, weak, and clearly painful from the way they wince every so often, but they went quickly past the worst part of the burns.

They… They will live. They will eventually get used to it all, though they may be shunned if they ever make it back to society… The poison woman specifically will have it rough. She was decently beautiful by past me’s standards, so she took a massive hit by society standards by having half her face melted. Then again, she came here in cuffs, so maybe her social life was already burnt down…

Yeah, no, not even macabre comedy can fix this roiling, cold disgust in my chest. It quite literally feels like a cancerous growth is squeezing down my heart… Even my mana is looking weird. Whenever I don’t control it, mana escapes me like the soft plume of smoke after you snuff out a candle. Right now, however, I can see it fluttering and escaping in bursts, like something is pulling and ripping at its very fabric.

Right, most of my basic manipulation of mana has been purely mental… Makes sense.

A sound brings me back and I look up at Ayrah who just spawned in front of me… or maybe I was trying so hard to pull away from the scene in front of me that I ignored her coming close. Whichever works.

Honestly, she’s doing better. Previously the beastly arm, basically all of her fur and hair, and even her back were burnt, making her look… yeah… regardless I now see her being mostly healed. Her fur is very short, but there’s only a few patches where it refuses to grow, so she’s looking pretty alright. She’s also rocking the short hair. It seems to grow back fast so she will soon be right back to normal, just with more scar tissue. Huh, is it the animalic mana that does this? Might be. I am surprised she still has any since we don’t have a crystal that fits it, but I guess she produces her own mana.

Anyways, it’s weird that she just walked up to me, she’s been ignoring me the entire week… ah, she’s reaching for my head… I guess a hit after messing up so much wouldn’t be undeserved. I close my eyes and wait for it, despite the protest building up in my gut. I deserve this for being so irresponsible.

But she doesn’t hit me. She’s brushing my cheek… ah, I was crying. Not full on crying, my eyes weren’t even fully watery, but tears were running regardless. There’s very few ways to look any more pathetic than this… Rock bottom, nice seeing you again, old friend.

As I open my eyes I see her worried face. You know, for someone who looks objectively scary, she’s a very gentle woman. I nuzzle into her hand, which seems to make her at least a bit happier. A moment later my head snaps to the sound of something big landing and starting to come closer. That didn’t sound like mother. I bare my teeth at the tunnel, then roar. It stops father for a moment, but then he seems to continue on his way towards us.

Ayrah looks surprised, confused and a tad bit fearful for a moment, then her ears seem to pick up on the far away sound and she rushes back inside the room. Hopefully she’ll take everyone into a corner…

Father is faster than mother, terrifyingly so. It takes him a minute and a bit to get to me, after which he seems to peek an eye into the room next to me, but I growl at him. He focuses his attention on me, then behind me. My siblings come, all eager to leave. They seem to have accepted him as a parental figure, probably because of the instinct that tells us who he is, but still it is strange to see how quickly strangers become close. He reaches down and picks us up, then goes on his way rushing through the tunnel like a subway.

Once outside he takes us up… and up… and up…

NO!

No fucking way he is trying to teach us flight like this… We are way above the height needed for easy flight, to the point where I got hit by the change of pressure. My siblings are all very confused since they never got this high either… And he let us go.

I spread my wings and I am pretty much fine. Really, I am not worried about myself, I can literally fly for a bit, so gliding down should be no issue. My siblings on the other hand… They’re a mixed bag.

As I said, we seem to have reached the age where differences start appearing and our parents can start molding us to resemble them. RT actually has a pretty good wing span and his wings are a lot rounder than mine, acting like decent parachutes. Crown’s wingspan is pretty small, and she seems to be going way too fast forward and her directional control is bad, but at least she’s not falling.

Spots is falling however. He let out a cry as he started tumbling down the second he was let go. His wings are a mixed bag. They are rounder, kinda like RT, but they are tiny like Crown. I turn to see father’s reaction… and he goes down and catches Spots, doing his best to soothe him.

Huh.

I expected him to be like “only the strong shall survive” or something, kind of like the way mother just watched us get our assess kicked so many times… man do I wish I had a normal family for once in my lives.

Anyways, the rest of this situation was quite enjoyable. I was able to get a good view at the world, even better than while on mother’s back, because I could just sit in one place as long as I wanted. Speaking of, I see her actually out of her lake, seemingly working on restoring the forest while we glide above. Guess she isn’t all lazy.

Ah, I also see something I didn’t see before. There’s a village some… a lot away. It’d probably take me half a day to get there flying, so yeah, pretty damn far. Still, it is a small village in the middle of the forest. There’s some paths I think, parts where the trees are less dense, probably their way to walk towards the rest of civilization. I can’t imagine anyone decided to just start colonizing dragon land, so it might be an old recluse village, with people… in the middle of nowhere surrounded by thick woods… where I could, say, sneak in and observe an actual fantasy society…

My plights, worries, fears, they all melt away. Or rather they are thrown to the side. I know they will come back, they always do. They like to hit when I am weakest, yet for now the brightness of curiosity makes it impossible for me to not be excited about the prospect of seeing people just existing in this world. The few glances I got at that one town at the edge of the forest was far from enough. What sort of culture do they have? Architecture? Is it a feudal style village? Is it a nice place or a shithole? Do they have better agriculture thanks to magic? Stranger livestock?

Do they…

Are they missing someone?

Did they sacrifice someone?

…

Whose home is that?

…

Can I help them go back?