Pitchdark

Melanophobia - Fear of the Color Black

An egg laid outside the territory of the eleven elemental gods will not hatch: without their magic, soul never knits to body and the embryo inside withers and dies. Without an anchor, the little waiting spark of Mind that might one day have become a dragon slips away through the cracks in reality. Most are eaten by the pneumavores that lurk in the hungry Void outside, but a few--lucky or clever or both--survive and grow up to become predators themselves. Shade-touched, these lost souls lurk in the dreams and nightmares of dragonkind, feeding on their fears and growing fat.

The largest of them are the greater horrors, dream-beasts without an identity beyond their Names--the specific terror they draw strength from. Most horrors are little more than beasts, unconscious and unaware of the minds around them, though they ably ape the manner and speech of dragons they meet while dreaming. The larger they are, the more they resemble thinking beings, though the veneer of intelligence lies only skin-deep over a terrible animal cunning. Sleeping dragons caught and seduced by a wandering horror might never wake again, trapped beyond saving in their own nightmares--or worse, awaken possessed, without dreams or mind or reasoning of their own.


The corruption of young life doesn't merely occur overnight. It takes the urging of incessant forces, the snarled talons of the void scraping along the surface of the shell, eventually forcing the egg from its nest and into the wilds that surround their would-be birth clan. Then, the egg can be transported throughout Sornieth, never able to find an attachment to a flight, passed from dragon to dragon, until the gentle heat radiating from it dims completely, and the swirling darkness that had been tracking the little dragonet can finally pounce, sinking its dark fangs into the lifeless body, curling around its very soul and assimilating that Mind into the void around it. Only then does the deathly cold shell begin to chip open, allowing the corrupted flesh to ooze from its protective casing and take form, which was just the case for this writhing lifeform, who broke free of it's sap-infused shell and began to crawl from the Sunbeam Ruins to find a host clan gullible enough to take them in.

The oozing excuse of a dragonet clawed its way into the domain of The Arcanist, drawn to the energy that had attracted The Shade out of its dormancy, and eventually was discovered by a kind Fae, one who took pity on the dragon that she assumed was an orphan, and eagerly took the little form into her claws, presenting them to their mate, a hulking Gaoler with nothing but kindness in his eyes, far different than the vicious beasts that had trapped them in ages past. Perhaps blending in would be easier than it had first thought.

The Shade-touched creature grew alongside of other hatchlings in the Deimos Clan, it's eyes drinking in the social intricacies of those around it, tongue flicking like a serpent to scent for any festering anxieties, and the young lives around it allowed the dark maw to glut itself on the fears that lived inside the dragonets' minds, the fear of the darkness easily manipulated into fear of the color of shade that haunted their little nightmares. Eventually, the other Gaolers grew wary of the life that their leaders had brought back into their territory, and after watching the creature grow at an unnatural rate for any normal dragon, they finally confronted the coral Gaoler that had brought one of the parasites into their home.

Something had to be done.

The rest of the Gaolers began working on crafting an area where they could contain the creature, where they could contain more if any of it's kin were to follow it into the Starfall Isles and into the sanctuary of the Deimos Clan. They brought back splintered shards of crystal to use as blockades, gouged holes into the soft earth that stretched to the skies, and rather carelessly shoved the creature into the crystalline confines they'd created, taking up post guarding as they were made to do.