Listen close to everybody's heart...

The magic that binds him has begun to fade.  

He can feel it in those brief moments of between, when day merges into night and night begins to brighten into day.  Thick and clinging as spider silk where the spell was worked into flesh and bone, and spun soft and vicious across the the surface of his mind.  He does not know how many seasons he has lost beneath the weight of it, but now that the spell has begun to weaken he can feel the distant echo of lost memories.  

He cannot always remember that he is enspelled, that this monstrous form is the result of the greatest cruelty, twisting him into something obscene and other.  Yet now in the twilight years of magic it has faded enough that he can wrest his mind from the spell’s clutches for whole days before inevitably slipping back under its hold.  He does not know which is worse, those knife sharp hours of knowing he is enspelled, or the haze that descends and he no longer recognizes his body as the prison it has become.

With the spell losing it’s hold his body has begun to take back it’s true shape.  His mind still lingers in the trap of the spell’s making, false memories and vile instincts rolling over him at a moment’s notice, but his body has at last begun to reflect the truth.  Caught in-between he is forced to linger in the wild, feral places where man and monster fear to tread. Better to fight tooth and nail in the darkest wilds than warn those who crafted the spell that their pet was close to freedom.  

And he is so close.  The spell has begun to give way in stops and starts, and it is only in the wild places of the world that he can conceal the festering magic that has begun to emanate from him in a near invisible shimmer.  The butterflies alone would mark him as magic-touched. They are drawn to it like moth to a flame and he is never free of them now. Every new flicker of dark wings is a promise that soon he will be free.

He dreams of what he will do when the last shreds of the spell finally give way.  He cannot help but smile, sharp and furious and hungry for vengeance. So he waits, patiently haunting the feral edges of the world while the spell gradually unravels thread by thread, and when it does….

A dragon will once again rain fire from the sky.