On the first day of spring, the dragon slew the unicorn. She then took his beloved, immortal bones into the deepest waters of the sourthern seas, rushing as the spawning salmon might back to where she had been born. By the height of summer, the frothing white waves had cast their love and the pearly shells of their clutch back onto the volcanic beaches. Year after year, the tides would carry the proof of their union, and in the deep darkness no swords, no golden bridles, and no feckless maidens with their soft hands would ever find the unicorn. It was frighteningly safe.

His was the only egg that had ever hatched. He had cracked the pearl with his nascent horn, casting long, spindly legs onto black sands while seagulls shrieked and pecked at all the brothers and sisters that had not lived. He didn't blame his parents for their deaths; a dragon was never meant to love a unicorn.

He still visited them from time to time. His mother would toss shells and silver coins and sea turtle bones onto the sand where he would lay and listen to the waves. He could always smell fish and meat on her breath; his father’s starlight always danced between her fangs. He assumed they were happy.

He had been born with no talent for swimming and a poor stomach for blood. He ate primarily thistledown, moth wings, pine cones, and other not-quite-meals until the dark of the year, when his throat was too thirsty for blood to listen to his groaning stomach. His mother had tried to teach him the essentials of feasting and his father had insisted no immortal creature truly needed to eat, but he had in the end set to scavenging. Silently, he would give his parents an apology every time he stood with the ravens and the red ants while waiting for a bear to leave his meal, but to be fair, his observations had shown that most predators were waste-pickers when allowed. Pursuit cost energy and immortal or no, the days brought just as much hunger as they did boredom.

But he could hear their phantom scolding anyway, because he was a bearer of infinite time and so had infinite energy and infinite patience. Supposedly. He did not have to settle for anything. But he would argue in the comfortable privacy of his head that while he did not have to, he could choose to. He could wait for scraps and he could let his tail grow long and tangled and he could gnaw his hooves instead of sharpening them. What would the point have been?

There was no creature in all the world the same as he.

~*~

Or Prand, for short. The product of a deep romance between strange and difficult creatures. He shoulders the ordinary troubles of immaturity, isolation, and laziness, aching for adventure yet never out of sight of the sea where his parents dwell. Kind, noble, and fierce at heart, he shares the good traits of his parents, while also sharing the bad: temper, pride, and vanity, which one would think would get him to groom more often. Unique to him is a deep loneliness and a longing for companionship, which his know-it-all attitude and stubbornness does not help at all.

Original art adopted from on my previous account. Lore by me.