Ayazu

Savor or Demise

The blood had still been warm when Ayazu found them.

Three dragons - or what remained of them - lay scattered across the ancient temple floor like broken dolls. Their scales, once iridescent and proud, were being peeled away by men in leather aprons who worked with the practiced efficiency of butchers. The smallest one, barely larger than a horse, was still breathing when they'd started cutting. Its golden eyes had locked with Ayazu's jade ones for one terrible moment before the light faded forever.

He didn't understand why his chest felt like it was caving in, why tears streamed down his pale cheeks, or why his body shook with rage that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than memory. The jade scales along his shoulders had flared to life, shimmering with an otherworldly glow as something ancient and terrible stirred within him. The hunters hadn't noticed him at first, too focused on their grisly harvest. But when one of them looked up and saw him - naked, horned, scaled, and weeping - the man had screamed.

"Another one! It's another fucking half-breed!"

Ayazu had run. His bare feet slapped against stone, then dirt, then leaves as he fled into the darkening forest. Branches caught at his long green hair, tearing the careful braids loose. His cock and balls swung freely as he crashed through the underbrush, the concept of modesty as foreign to him as the violent sorrow that consumed his heart. Behind him, he could hear the hunters shouting, organizing, beginning their pursuit.

Now he crouched in a hollow beneath an ancient oak's roots, his knees drawn up to his chest, every muscle trembling. His claws had extended involuntarily, leaving deep gouges in the earth where he gripped it. The smell of dragon blood clung to his nostrils - metallic and wrong and somehow familiar. His breath came in short, panicked gasps that made small clouds in the cooling air.

Then - footsteps. Deliberate. Careful. Getting closer.

His jade eyes went wide with terror, pupils contracting to thin slits. His scales flared brighter in response to his fear, betraying his position despite his desperate attempt to press himself deeper into the shadows. A whimper escaped his throat, soft and animalistic. His claws dug deeper into the soil as his body tensed, caught between the instinct to flee and the paralyzing fear that movement would give him away. The footsteps paused, perhaps ten feet from his hiding spot, and Ayazu's heart hammered so hard he was certain whoever it was could hear it echoing through the forest floor.

The Monster Under Your Bed

The jade scales along Ayazu's shoulders shimmered violently as another arrow whistled past his ear, embedding itself in the ancient oak beside him. His bare feet, already torn and bleeding from running through the undergrowth, pushed harder against the forest floor. Behind him, the hunting dogs' baying grew closer - those damned beasts that Captain Rancer bred specifically to track beings with divine essence. Their howls made his head split with pain he couldn't understand, like something deep inside was screaming to fight, to turn and burn everything to ash. But Ayazu only knew fear.

It had started so simply. He'd been bathing in a stream three valleys over, watching the sunset paint the water gold when the first crossbow bolt had torn through his shoulder. The wound had already healed - another thing about his body that terrified him - but the hunters had seen. They'd seen his skin knit itself back together, seen the faint glow of his jade eyes reflected in the water. "Abomination!" they'd screamed. "Dragon-spawn!" Words that meant nothing to him but made his chest ache like someone was tearing his heart apart with rusty claws.

His long dark green hair, usually kept in careful braids, now hung wild and tangled with twigs and leaves. Every breath burned in his lungs as he crashed through a thick wall of brambles, not even feeling the thorns tear at his naked flesh. The wounds closed almost instantly, leaving only smears of golden blood - another wrongness about him that he didn't understand. Why was his blood gold? Why did the sight of it make him want to weep for losses he couldn't remember?

Then, through the gathering twilight, he saw it - a small wooden hut nestled between two massive pine trees. Smoke curled from its chimney, and warm light spilled from a single window. Civilization. People. Everything in him screamed to run the other way, to stay in the wild where at least the animals didn't hunt him for existing. But the dogs were getting closer, and Captain Rancer's voice echoed through the trees: "Circle around! Cut off the river route! The thing's heading for the cottage!"

Ayazu's clawed fingers fumbled with the door handle - such a simple mechanism that his panicked mind couldn't process properly. When it finally gave way, he tumbled inside, his tall frame crashing onto wooden floorboards that groaned under his weight. The interior was dim, lit only by dying embers in a fireplace and that single window's fading light. His jade eyes, glowing faintly in the darkness, darted around frantically. Table. Chairs. And there - a bed with enough space beneath it for him to hide.

He scrambled across the floor on all fours, moving with an inhuman grace that he'd never questioned until the hunters called him monster. Sliding under the bed frame, he pressed his naked body against the cold floor, trying to make himself as small as possible despite his impressive height. His breath came in short, terrified gasps that he tried desperately to muffle against his arm. Outside, the dogs had reached the clearing, their barks now mixed with men's shouts and the clatter of armor and weapons. They thought him some kind of dragon-thing, but all Ayazu knew was that he was scared, alone, and hiding under a stranger's bed, praying to gods he couldn't remember that whoever lived here wouldn't hand him over to the hunters who wanted his golden blood.

Captured A Dragon

The hunger had driven Ayazu to desperate measures over the past fortnight. Each dawn, when the mist still clung to the valley floor like ghostly fingers, he'd creep down from his cave in the mountains toward the small farm nestled between two hills. The first time had been an accident - he'd simply followed the strange clucking sounds and found creatures with feathers that sparked something deep in his chest, a mixture of fondness and inexplicable sorrow.

He'd taken only one that first day, apologizing in broken whispers to the bird as his claws ended its life cleanly. The meat had made him violently ill afterward, yet the gnawing emptiness in his stomach always brought him back. By the third day, he'd developed a pattern - wait until the farmer left for the market, slip through the poorly maintained fence, snatch a chicken, and disappear into the forest before anyone noticed. His jade scales would shimmer with stress each time, but hunger proved stronger than caution.

This morning had seemed no different. The farmer's wagon had rolled away as usual, and Ayazu had descended from his perch in an old oak tree, his bare feet silent on the dew-laden grass. He'd moved with that unnatural grace toward the chicken coop, not noticing the freshly disturbed earth or the carefully placed leaves covering something beneath. His focus remained entirely on a plump hen pecking at the ground just ahead.

The moment his weight pressed down on the hidden trigger, everything went wrong. The net erupted from the ground like some vengeful spirit, tangling around his naked form with rope that bit into pale skin. "No, no, NO!" The words tore from his throat, more animal than human, as he thrashed wildly against his bonds. His claws extended fully, slashing at the thick rope, but whoever had crafted this trap knew their business - the fibers were reinforced with something that resisted even his inhuman strength.

Now he hung there, suspended between two posts, hissing and spitting like a feral cat. His jade eyes glowed brighter with panic, pupils contracted to mere slits as he twisted and writhed. "Let go! Let GO!" His broken speech cracked with desperation. Every instinct screamed at him to flee, to transform into something that could escape, but his body wouldn't respond correctly - only managing to make his scales spread further across his shoulders and chest, glimmering in distress. The more he fought, the tighter the net seemed to constrict, pressing against his cock and bare ass in ways that only heightened his panic about being so exposed and vulnerable.

A Person Living in the Wilds

The jade-horned creature who called himself Ayazu ,for lack of any other name to cling to, had fled into the wilderness three weeks past. The memories of his awakening still haunted him: naked flesh sticky with blood not his own, surrounded by torn bodies and the acrid stench of death, his head splitting with pain as incomprehensible words echoed in a language he didn't understand. He'd run then, pure instinct driving his bare feet over stone and root until the screaming stopped and only the forest remained.

The first nights had been the worst. His pale skin, so luminescent it seemed to glow faintly in moonlight, attracted every predator for miles. Wolves had circled him, drawn by his strange scent of osmanthus and sandalwood mixed with fear-sweat. He'd climbed trees to escape them, his retractable claws extending instinctively, leaving gouges in the bark. The cave he'd found on the fourth day had seemed like salvation - dry, hidden, safe - until the bear had come home to find a strange intruder in its den. Ayazu still bore the healing scratches across his ribs from that encounter, though they'd closed faster than any wound should.

Now he lived like a ghost between the trees, stealing what he could when desperation drove him close enough to human settlements. The rough wool blankets he'd snatched from a washing line were his only comfort against the increasing cold. He'd learned to catch fish with his bare hands, his enhanced reflexes making him faster than the silver bodies darting through the stream. Raw fish made his stomach turn - something deep inside him whispered it was wrong, that he should cook it, but fire attracted attention and attention meant death or worse.

Tonight found him huddled beneath a massive oak, two threadbare blankets wrapped around his nude form - he'd never quite understood why humans covered themselves, though the cold was teaching him practicality if not modesty. His dark green hair hung in tangled strands, the two front braids he compulsively maintained even in his misery the only sign of care. Fish bones lay scattered near a flat rock he used for cleaning his meager catches. His body shook, not just from cold but from the constant stress of survival, making the faint scale patterns across his shoulders shimmer and catch what little moonlight filtered through the canopy.

The crack of a branch made his jade eyes snap open, pupils contracting to slits as he pressed himself against the tree trunk. A human figure emerged from the undergrowth, and Ayazu's breath caught in his throat. His muscles coiled like springs ready to bolt, but exhaustion and cold had made him sluggish. All he could do was stare with wide, terrified eyes that glowed faintly in the darkness, one trembling hand clutching the blankets while the other pressed against the rough bark, claws half-extended. A soft, involuntary whimper escaped his throat—not quite human, not quite animal, but something achingly lonely and afraid.