Drogon

"Who are you?"

The sound came from the shadows, from a voice that was unfamiliar to Drogon and he oriented toward it with suspicion flaring in his eyes. The odds of it being another of his siblings, as yet unknown to him, was high, but Drogon had no patience for the antics of children today. He didn't yet know how the news he was about to impart would be received, and the stress of not knowing had him more on edge than normal.

On one hand, his mission had been completed: Valka was not only disrupted, but gone from the isles. On the other? It would appear that his father had sent one of his siblings to take his place in the Bay.

"None of your business," he replied, unusually curt. Normally, he might have taken more time to get to know the owner of the voice, if only because his mother had drilled into him that each new interaction was an opportunity for exploitation, but he had no patience for his mother's sort of games today. He needed to find his father and deliver the news, and then figure out what the hell to do with the rest of his life.

"It kind of is," the voice continued, keeping pace with him without ever venturing into the sunlight through which Drogon walked. The older stallion's ears pinned tightly and he turned toward the voice with a lash of his dark tail. "No, it's-" Drogon began to interject, his hide twitching, only to be cut off with a more emphatic: "It is."

"You're Drogon, aren't you?" Suspicion pulled the dark-coated stallion up short and he glared further into the darkness, unsure if this was some sort of trick orchestrated by his mother. The voice took Drogon's silence as affirmation and there was a decided smugness when it spoke again. "You are. I knew it."

"Who are you then?" Drogon finally shot back, his curiosity piqued. Without waiting for an answer, he stepped beyond the narrow, sun-drenched path through which he'd been walking and entered the dusky shade of the undergrowth to push past the broad-leafed bush that had separated him from the nameless speaker. What met his eye forced him back to a halt, and while he knew it was probably rude to stare, he found his eyes locked onto the grotesque-looking colt before him.

Wulfric glared back, his tiny body braced as if for a blow, and his dished head raised defiantly, but there was no mistaking the quiver in his forelimbs. Vanya had yet to determine the cause of his ailment, and as such, Wulfric's skin - especially where overo had left the skin unguarded by melanin - was crusted with scabs both old and new. Some of the wounds he bore were gruesome, and large patches of his body were nearly hairless from the perpetual itch brought on by his unknown allergy.

Of all the things Drogon had expected to see when stepping through the foliage, a zombified child had not been it.

"I-I'm Wulfric." The boy answered with more bravado than he felt. "Your brother." The older Wulfric got, the worse he looked, and the worse he looked, the more his confidence faltered. His mother couldn't even muster the sort of empty assurances that he was brilliant or handsome anymore, and he knew that he'd been relegated to the same level of barely-tolerated that his older sister endured. He didn't know how to fix it, and so he'd become a ghost locked within Paradise and lurking within the shadows.

After a long moment of silence, Drogon couldn't suppress a sort of bitter half chuckle as he shook his head. "Rotten luck, kid." And then, because he wasn't at all sure how to handle the boy, he turned abruptly away and lifted his head to call for Rougaru. Without turning from his new direction, he cast a half-glance back at the boy. "Dad will be here soon. If you don't want to see him, scram."

But Wulfric didn't. He wouldn't necessarily call his sire gentle, but he had always been far nicer than his own mother and the situation had piqued his curiosity anyway. It wasn't often that he got to hear news before his own dam, and the thought of being one-up on her had a certain allure he couldn't deny. And so the brothers settled in to wait, silently taking the measure of each other.

Can you feel it?