North Shining-Prologue

Instructions

First: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1281236161/ Next: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1281254463/ Blackice winced as her mother shushed her with a quick jab to her forearm. “Shhh,” her mind-reading mother hissed. “Be quiet!” This is an opportunity for the both of us. Now shut up and stay silent!” Blackice could feel the probing power of her mother’s mind clawing through head, looking for any sign of dissidence. After all, that was the entirety of Mindstalker. Paranoid, waiting for imaginary betrayals and cruelly dealing them out as soon as Mindstalker could find proof, no matter how meager the slight was, as she had unfortunately found out so many times before. Blackice couldn’t remember a time when that cold, brutal force wasn’t in there, carefully waiting for the first sign of displeasure. She schooled her face shut, into an obedient, closed expression. “Yes, mother.” “Mindstalker! Call me Mindstalker, you hopeless brat!” In truth, despite being born under two full moons, (and one almost full moon) Blackice was completely powerless. Well, almost. She could still tell if someone was reading her mind, (Fat lot of good that did her, since the only Mindreader she knew’s name started with an M and ended with an r, and was quite possibly eviler than her unintentional namesake, Darkstalker,) But besides that she was utterly useless, which was why her furious mother had broken up with her father, Chill, cursing his “awful Icewing blood” for doing this to her “poor, worthless daughter.” In truth, Blackice could see her frustration. Weak, cold fire, no nightwing powers, the occasional spike along her back and serrated talons, and that was it! That was her entire reward for “risking life and limb (and dignity) to mate with an Icewing!” Blackice couldn’t recall a day without hearing mother curse her, Chill, and even the ancient couple Foeslayer and Arctic, for “motivating her” with their “perfect dragonets.” After all, who wouldn’t want an all-powerful, devoted son and a beautiful hybrid daughter? Mindstalker certainly would. Blackice? Not so much. Whenever she looked at herself, all she saw were faults. Pale white horns, peppered with “paint-splatter” blue dots sprouted in an elongated, curving, ramlike design. She had tall, spindly, Icewing spikes along her spine, hooked at the end, with the same splattered pattern on them. Her scales faded from black in an ombre effect with pale white at the snout, talons, and tail. Her spikes were crooked, her horns looked odd, and the curved point made it so that she couldn’t hurt anyone-until they got close, in which she could hurt them plenty. The hooked point would get trapped under their skin and it would turn out nigh-impossible to fish out. Needless to say, the only people who got close enough for them to dig in were the people who were her friends, and she had already chosen against having friends at the age of three. That was when mother, purely on a whim, had decided to pair her up with another Nightwing. Gloaming. Nice, friendly, handsome, and a complete bully. (To Blackice nowadays at least.) Mindstalker was on good terms at the time with his mom, Starhorns. Their first meetup started off awkward, but both ended up hitting it off and spending weeks of playdates together, much to her mother’s delight. Then, that one day, the day where they played tag. He would laugh as they both ran around, and then as he was reaching out to touch her shoulder from behind, she jerked, startled. On a normal dragon, that would’ve been fine. On a normal dragon without serrated claws and hooked, sharp spikes and weird slippery patches of scale, nearly invisible, like bits of her namesake black ice. Needless to say, his talon slipped. Blackice saw the hand sliding down towards her sharper-than-sharp knife-blade claw and panicked, tilting up her shoulder so that instead, it landed right on her hooked spike and dug in. No one should have to go into details on how he had howled, how it had dragged into his upper arm, how both families spent hours attempting to remove it before Mindstalker lost patience and cut her daughter’s own spike off, how Gloam had ended up with a long, jagged scar cutting across his left arm like lightning. Of course he painted it in white-gloaming white to be exact, so that it matched his “star-scales” and horns. Of course he flecked it with gold-so that it made him look all the more handsome. But all that was focused on, what was rehashed every night from Mindstalker to Blackice, for roughly two years now, was how “evil, awful Blackice” had permanently “defaced poor, harmless Gloaming,” and many more gruesome details that do not deserve to be recounted to anyone. Blackice grimaced just thinking about all the awful things now seared into her every thought.