#dracothscourge

Open Starter

"Ah, won't you have this, on me!?" Dracoth encouraged, drunk on wine and the wild residents of Destarin who were abuzz around them, dancing and roughhousing, raucous with laughter.

The Incubi offered a goblet, filled to the brimmed with berries and various other fruits. Entangled in his hair and sloping horns was a variety of beads and flowers bestowed upon him by others celebrating. 'Eat up, your newly appointed Duke commands it!"

"Do you think you can protect yourself without your indulgences getting in your way?" Evelyn asked of her sons potential inebriations as she prepared the space within the old home.

It was one of the few buildings that had withstood the forty season war, because her husbands parents and their parents had turned it into a fortress of sorts, hidden it away and refused to let any in. Evelyn justified her own escape within the estate as being for the safety of her family, insisting that, if the worst were to come, she would open it's doors and do what was right, but even sometimes she questioned that.

After all, as she looked to her son, strong as he could be, and smelt liquor in the air, she still saw his father's face as it had been in their youth. Handsome and charming. Guilt made stronger in that he did not have his father's eyes, no. Dracoth had her eyes. Her womb had betrayed her. Made the spitting image of her love and given that baby her icy gaze to reflect her failures back at her.

So she took her eyes away, at least for the moment, as she withdrew the dagger she had been throwing, while she had waited for her son, from the target on the wall. Most of the walls had marks within them from arrows or blades, the floor as well, even the door that lead to the estates private weapons room, presently left open. Nothing extreme, no secret explosives, but a collection of swords, maces, and more that had been collected over the years.

Sheathing the weapon she looked back to her son in the fighting leathers she had donned for the occasion, a rarity for the guild leader who tended to imply a sort of white flag with the gowns she typically wore. Her lips parted, unsure whether to indulge him herself with love, or to scold him into rapt attention. For a second the pinkness of them remained simply parted, dark strands of her hair pulled up into a loose bun at the top of her head, loose strands falling around red horns that protruded from the sides of her temples.

"If the worst is to come I cannot lose you," was all that ended up falling from her lips, a vulnerability beneath an unshifting expression. "You cannot fathom the light it would rip from me."

Closed starter @nereidofneed

DELVING into the unassuming minds of strangers was a complicated business. Similar to his feeding requirements, the element of consent was key to gaining access. A dreamers mind had to be open to Dracoth, in some way they had to be calling out for something, yearning or missing. When asleep, dreamers lack inhibitions, they are left exposed to any dream walker who fancied themselves a voyeur or a guest role in those fantasies.

It seems then, a perverse injustice that Dracoth used the dream realm to connect with potential prey in the physical realm. He could sample people's lives and their secrets while revealing little of his own. Where like met like, that is to say, where he saw potential for chemistry, he would then begin to manipulate those dreams. Dracoth gave them a taste of what it would be like to submit to him, to give into temptation. He would show them how he could satiate them; a simple price to pay for pleasure, for survival.

One dark night, watched over by a faithful bed fellow, Dracoth cast aside his physical form and emerged into the cloudless sky of the dream realm. Great, emerald wings commanded the air, and a scaled, horned humanoid creature soared between the dreams of his neighbours, his acquaintances, even his friends. Each dream was unique and shifting, only steadying out if Dracoth decided to take the reins. Something he did only when he had found his select meal.

It was the aquatic dreams of a blood-thirsty water nymph, that caught the Incubi's notice. The sound of a ticking clock mimicking the constant visual waves of water, was pleasantly rhythmic. The scaled and horned incubi swiftly dived from the sky, aiming toward a fast-forming pool of underwater ocean world.

Though Dracoth was no creature of the water, in this realm the lack of air in his lungs caused him no cause for concern. He sacrificed oxygen as one might sacrifice a curated meat over a baked sea bass. His wings took to water as easily as they did air, and the incubi descended into the cool, salty depths of Derya's subconscious, horns first.

A dark cat seemed to slither against Dracoth's pant leg as Morana crawled up onto one of the counters in the laboratory's pantry, drawing up the layers of her soft cotton skirt so her bare feet might help her stand. It had not been made for her. Her own maker had been almost eight feet tall and while the majority of the home seemed to exist as it had been made for others, his lab had evidently been catered to his size. It was, through Morana's own inability to care for such a vast estate, one of the few rooms in the residence that was entirely clean and cared for.

"I need more kraken hatchling embryo," she informed Dracoth as she grabbed the last jar she had. It had been dehydrated and crushed into a bright blue powder and was the main ingredient for the stasis liquid she had his brother in, as well as that of her own parents and her maker. She always went through it quickly, and it was not cheap, Morana often stealing it when she could not sell some ornate object from within the home to get the funds required. Dracoth, of course, had no issue with funds and Morana was not unashamed in her request. Why deny helpfulness for the sake of shame?

The cat meowed, looking up at the man with the one good eye it still had. Unlike Harin, many of the animals Morana had brought back had not had the option of the stasis liquid and so their bodies had come back to life partially rotted. Harin she had protected from such a fake, fortunate as well that his mother had the wealth to restore a lot of him, and to pay a witch to maintain him through the funeral. It gave Morana the time needed to dig him up and get him into the liquid before the magic wore off.

Jumping down with the jar in hand she looked to Dracoth, her wide eyes should have been doe lie but instead they seemed alien, aligned with the patchwork stars on the stays she wore, lightning running up her chest to her throat and down her arms. "Just enough to last the month and then I can wake him up," she smiled, long lips pulling into wide cheeks.

Every time she actually spoke about Harin it made her smile. She didn't know him, not in person, but she hadn't told Dracoth too much about how close she and his brother actually were, just that she was wildly in love with him. Not strange, his brother was charming and many had likely taken his flirtations the wrong way, Dracoth could have likely related, but most had actually spoken to him, Morana just had never explained to Dracoth she had not. Maybe it was mildly suspicious she was not close to his type, her bohemian ways were not like the affluent beauties he had seduced, with their satin corsets he enjoyed feeling against his scales compared to the cotton and wool she seemed to don, but even with her strange features she was pretty, and his brother did like pretty people, so there was some logic to the concept she could have been an exception.

Both hands on the large jar - made for her makers massive hands - she drew it against her core. "Let's hope he doesn't kill either of us," she laughed, as though the macabre notion was entirely a jest to her. The potential so likely it had to be a little funny.