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The ink was drying in thick, obsidian clots on the parchment, smelling of crushed gallnuts and old minerals. Winter didn’t bother to blot it; his talons were shaking too violently for the delicacy of a blotter. He leaned back in his chair, the carved red-wood throne of his own making, and felt the oppressive silence of the Shard Mountains pressing against the walls of his home. Outside, the wind howled in a register that sounded almost like a voice, though he knew it was merely the geography of the peaks.
He was exhausted. His eyelids felt as though they had been weighted with leaden coins, a lingering fatigue born from three nights of interrupted sleep and a persistent, gnawing anxiety that sat in his gut like a cold stone. Yet, he could not sleep. Not while the air in the house felt wrong.
With a heavy sigh that frosted in the dim light of the room, Winter gripped his quill; a pristine, snowy owl feather plucked from the tundra, and began to compose a missive to the one dragon he trusted to handle a crisis without immediately ordering a massacre: Queen Snowfall.
***
‘Dearest Cousin,
I find myself writing to you from the isolation of the Shard Mountains, a place of breathtaking austerity and, as it turns out, unsettling mysteries. Please forgive the haste of my prose and the tremor in my script; my mind is a storm of contradictions.
Before I delve into the matter at talon, I must provide a brief update on our domesticity. Moonwatcher, as you know, my beloved wife, has adapted to the frost better than I anticipated, though her NightWing sensibilities still clash with the sheer emptiness of the tundra. She remains a dragon of faith, adhering to the spiritual tenets of her tribe with a quiet grace, and as such, she maintains a steadfast disbelief in the 'paranormal.' She scoffs at the notion of ghosts or lingering spirits, viewing the world through the lens of logic and the foresight granted to her by her ancestors.
However, logic has a way of crumbling when faced with the inexplicable. Moon has recently claimed three pet snow leopards, rescued from the wreckage of a great avalanche last season. Two are docile, but the third, a scarred, temperamental beast; possesses a streak of rebellion that would put a MudWing general to shame. He treats our counters as his personal playground and spends the midnight hours emitting yowls so piercing they could wake the dead. He behaves with the tact of a common street-walrus, an utter affront to the dignity an IceWing household should maintain.
But it is not the leopard that troubles me, Cousin. It is the silence that follows the noise.
Last night, Moon and I spent the evening in a rare moment of leisure. We had shared a few glasses of chilled berry wine and engaged in a spirited game of board games, she is, as always, infuriatingly good at strategy. As the warmth of the hearth seeped into my scales, I decided it was time to retire. We went to bed together, as proper couples do, the fire crackling softly in the grate, the world outside frozen in a crystalline slumber.
When I awoke this morning, I did not wake to the gentle nudge of the sun. Instead, I woke to find Moon clung to me, her talons digging into my shoulders, her eyes wide and dilated with a terror I have not seen since the day Darkstalker emerged from the depths of Jade Mountain. She was trembling, her breath coming in short, jagged gasps. Moon is the most confident dragoness I have ever known; she has stared down royal courts and ancient prophecies without blinking. To see her reduced to this state of raw, primal fear was more alarming than any alarm bell.
When I pressed her for an explanation, she recounted the events of the deep night.
She told me that when the middle moon reached its zenith, she was awoken by a sound. At first, she believed it to be one of the snow leopards meowing in the hall. She lay still for several minutes, listening with that keen NightWing focus, only to realize that the sound was... wrong. It was not a cat. It was something mimicking a cat. A voice- low, guttural, and sounding like scales grinding against stone, was mimicking the leopard’s meow, but beneath the mimicry, it was speaking. It was saying ‘hello’ over and over again in a distorted, rhythmic cadence.
After several minutes of this auditory torture, a sudden, violent bang echoed through the house. The sound came from our front door, the one that faces the towering, red-wooded slopes. When Moon told me this, I admit I was weary to believe her. I am usually a light sleeper, but the wine had anchored me in a deep, dreamless stupor. I asked her, with some frustration, why she had not awakened me. I am a warrior of the IceWing aristocracy; my battle talons were ready to defend our home. She replied, her voice barely a whisper, that she had been too terrified to move. She claimed she could feel a 'dreading presence'- a weight in the air that felt like water freezing instantaneously around her heart. Most disturbing of all, she told me she tried to reach out with her mind-reading, but she found nothing. There was a void where a mind should be, a cold vacuum that repelled her touch.
We have just finished our morning hunt; a necessary chore to keep our stores full, but the details of her story have left me profoundly unsettled, Snowfall. Last night, fearing the polar bears that have been sighted prowling the perimeter of our valley, I had set a series of heavy-duty traps and alarms around the house. I set them at sundown, and we did not unset them until this morning to allow the leopards out. The traps remained undisturbed. Not a single tripwire was triggered. No snow was displaced. Furthermore, we slept with all three leopards inside our bedroom, the door firmly shut.
Whatever was at our door, it did not trigger the traps. It did not leave tracks. And it was not one of our animals.
My mind immediately raced back to the old legends Aunt Glacier used to whisper to us in the nursery, tales of the Scale-mimics. Those shapeless, predatory horrors that wear the scales of what we love, twisting the familiar into something grotesque. I tell myself I am being paranoid. I tell myself that the isolation of the Shard Mountains is simply playing tricks on my psyche.
I have checked every room in the house since waking. I found nothing out of place, yet the anxiety claws at my throat. It is a paradox that Moon, who believes in nothing supernatural, is the one trembling in the wake of this encounter. We built this home ourselves, stone by brick, yet Moon has confessed to me recently that the house has given her 'the chills' since the day we moved in. She says something has been 'off' about the land, a misalignment of the spiritual currents.
Moments ago, after returning from the hunt, I went to hang my fur cloak in the bedroom closet. As I did, I noticed that the heavy wooden board covering the attic access had shifted. Only by a fraction of an inch, but enough to reveal the darkness beneath. When I asked Moon about it, she looked at me with genuine confusion, claiming she had never even been up there and suggesting that perhaps the builders had simply not seated the board properly years ago.
I am anxious, Cousin. Truly so. Has anyone else in the royal line, perhaps Aunt Glacier in her private journals; experienced such things? I recall her stories of military training, her encounters with the strange and the occult. Am I merely losing my grip on reality because I am so far from the Inner Palace? Or is there something in these mountains that hungers for us?
I pray you have answers.
Your loyal cousin,
Winter
***
Winter set the quill down with a sharp clack. He leaned back, exhaling a long, shivering breath that clouded the air. He listened to the distant sound of Moon humming in the living room. She was playing with the leopards, her voice soft and melodic, the sound of a domestic peace that he desperately wanted to believe in.
He looked toward the doorway, watching her silhouette bathed in the warm, orange glow of the hearth fire. He smiled, feeling a surge of protectiveness for his wife.
Then, he paused.
The light of the fire hit her scales at a certain angle, and Winter noticed something that made the blood in his veins turn to slush. The pattern of her scales- the way the midnight-black plates overlapped along her neck.. Was slightly misaligned. There was a seam there, a jagged line where the scales didn't quite meet, as if someone had tried to sew a suit of scales together and missed a stitch.
And as she turned to look at him, her smile was just a little too wide.