(Twenty-one years ago)
Life as a young dragon wasn't exactly easy.
For one, Rudra hadn't shifted yet. It wasn't like he knew any child he could compare himself with in the restricted area of Ashkavar Castle, where he was practically the only child. But he doubted anything would have been different had he been allowed to go outside the castle.
He was the only one of his kind in the entire castle, maybe the entire kingdom, which meant there was no crowd of shifting children to hide inside. There was only him, and the silence where a first shift should have already happened.
And there was only his father.
The Dragon King, Ravaan, was rumoured to have shifted before he could even walk — a wet, silver-scaled thing squalling in his crib, startling the midwives so badly one of them had fainted. Whether or not the story was true, it followed Rudra everywhere, told and retold by servants who didn't think he was listening, by tutors who sighed when they thought of what he might have been, by the very few courtiers — the ones allowed in the restricted part of Ashkavar where Rudra and his mother lived — who smiled too sweetly when they asked, again, if the young prince had shifted yet. Rudra had stopped answering that question. He'd started leaving rooms before it could be asked.
Then there was his body — which had started changing in ways not only he didn't understand but neither did any of the adults who were in charge of him. Including his Ma.
His canines came in wrong. Not wrong exactly, just slow, and cruel about it — pushing up through swollen gums night after night, aching so deep it felt less like growing and more like breaking. Some nights he cried through it, biting the corner of his pillow so the maids wouldn't hear, because crying over teeth felt like something a proper prince — a proper dragon — shouldn't do.
His nails grew too fast, sharpening themselves into small curved hooks within days. If no one cut them, he woke with thin red lines across his throat and cheeks, self-inflicted in his sleep, and had to sit still while Ma dabbed salve on his own face like he'd been in a fight with himself.
And it wasn't only teeth and nails.
His skin itched in patches that never showed anything when he checked — no rash, no scale, no explanation, just an itch that lived underneath where he couldn't reach it. He ran hotter than everyone around him, always kicking off blankets, always being handed cool cloths for a fever the healers insisted wasn't a fever at all, just "the dragon in him, settling." Bright sunlight left him dizzy and short-tempered in a way it never seemed to bother the human children, while moonlight, strangely, made him restless — unable to sleep, pacing his room like something in him was listening for a call no one else could hear.
He was always hungry and never full, eating twice what the older guards ate and still waking hollow. And some mornings his joints ached the way old soldiers complained theirs did, as if his bones hadn't decided yet whether they wanted to be a boy's or a beast's, and were arguing it out inside him while he slept.
No one in the castle had a name for any of it. Not the healers, not the tutors. Not even Ma.
He was the only dragon in Ashkavar — which meant, when something went wrong with him, there was no one who'd been through it before to tell him it would be alright.
Well, the only dragon except the Dragon King, Ravaan Azhdar, himself, of course. Rudra almost never saw him. He was more or less a distant figure Rudra heard of from the maids and servants when they gossiped, thinking he was asleep.
But at least Rudra had his mother. His beautiful, kind Ma.
"Ma, where are we going?"
"To the garden, my dearest."
"But why?"
"_____ because that is my favourite place."
Rudra walked fast to match his mother's pace. He tripped and stumbled twice, but Ma kept pulling his hand, leaving him no option except to continue down the path with her.
Usually Ma wasn't like this. She was patient — not the way the servants and maids were, whose patience was different, suffocating somehow, in the way they always stopped him before he could run, caught him before he could jump.
Ma's patience was nothing like that. It only involved her watching him, quiet and patient, letting him get hurt but always being there to pick him up.
It was the kind of patience that made him... brave.
As they arrived at the garden, Rudra perked up. Unlike the cold, stiff structure of the rest of the castle, the garden was alive. It moved when the southern wind blew. It grew until the gardener didn't want it to.
It was not exactly soft, but it was better than staying trapped inside the cool, dark rooms of the castle all day.
Rudra could understand why this place was Ma's favourite in Ashkavar. It was also Rudra's own favourite — possibly his favourite place in the whole world, though his world was limited to the restricted structure of Ashkavar.
"What are we going to do here?" asked Rudra, excited. "Play?"
Ma looked down, head tilted, the heavy earring she wore clinking in the slow, lazy breeze of the afternoon. "Not today."
"Then?"
"We are here to think."
"Think?" Rudra scowled. "Think what?"
He didn't like thinking, because thinking, for him, involved studying. Thinking involved quills and papers and numbers and letters which had yet to make sense to him.
"Think about where you would like to be, if I could take you out of this cramped little place," asked Ma, a hint of a smile blooming on her face.
And Rudra thought. Or tried his best.
The palace of Ashkavar was not cramped or little to him. Just... familiar. The corridors he had played in, the bed he slept on, the closet where he liked hiding to give the maids a hard time when he felt like it. There were lots of places to be, in the part of the castle he lived in with his mother. The kitchen, the window, the shadow under the table, the library (his least favourite place, since that was where the tutors taught him the complicated letters and numbers).
Rudra didn't think the place was little. But if his mother thought it was little...
Then he guessed it was little. To him, his mother was never wrong.
"But... where will we go?" he asked. "What is outside the castle? Trees? Mountains?"
"There are many, many other things, Rudra," Ma's voice shook, for reasons Rudra didn't understand.
"And someday, I will take you to all of those places."