Author's Note: This story takes place in the same world, and the same timeframe, as 'Toofy', but that isn't required reading for the story to make sense.
Author's Confession: I'm an arachnophobe. I may not draw as much from the real world with Drachne's physical attributes, because I don't want nightmares.
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It's always raining when the world is turned on its head.
It might just be the humour of the gods, when they decide to change the fate of the world, just to screw with the mortals. Send the rain, and let them know that chaos is coming.
It was raining the night a small temple found an egg on their doorstep, abandoned.
It wasn't entirely unusual.
The temple was a place of many services. They raised the companions, woman of education and influence, who were sold off as slaves to lords and ladies alike.
It was rumoured that the temple also raised some of these official companions not just as the madams of the Empire, but also as political assassins.
Whatever the case, the temple took in orphans of every race and every species.
This particular temple was located on the mountain deep inside the subjugated elven empire of the Golden Mountain. The mountain. There were others, but this was the namesake.
A once beautiful place, with traces of gold and silver buildings, in the heart of a rain forest. Now little more than charred remains, having been the arena for the human emperor, his bodyguard, and the greatest of all dragonkind.
Irrlichdan, the black-scaled salamander.
So when this small temple, already hated by the native elves, found an egg on their doorstep, they made the leap that it was the egg of that great warrior.
Believing it to be the heir of the dragon, they hid it from sight. Kept it warm and safe, for two years before the creature inside cracked open the shell and emerged.
She was named for their confusion, uniting what they'd thought she was, with what she actually was.
Drachne.
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It had been eighteen years since she'd hatched, and Drachne still didn't feel at home in the temple where she was raised in secret. Not permitted to meet the other girls, and especially not any of the boys.
She had broken the rules a number of times, of course. You couldn't both train someone to seemingly disappear, and also keep them under lock and key.
It was rarely worth it, though.
She knew she was different than everyone else. Anyone who wasn't blind knew she was different.
For starters, elves and humans dominated the city. They shared the same basic shape. Two arms, two legs, a skinny torso, and a head full of infuriating superiority.
The temple had a few exotics, but only a handful. The racism of elves made surviving through childhood more than just a difficult prospect for most.
They had an incubus, Raltin, a timid boy who would accidentally suck the life out of you if you kissed him. Training himself in preparations to become a hermit monk.
There was also Cookie, a golden-eyed neko with long brown hair. The bitchy cat often crying and demanding things, because she thought the whole world should belong to her.
Finia was the last of the exotics. A haughty but tolerable buneko girl whose natural talent for magic all but guaranteed that one of the two empires would apprentice her.
Despite all three having varying tails, and Raltin having horns, they also had the same basic shapes as the rest.
A shape that Drachne didn't have.
Below her armoured back, you'd find her spinners on the end of a large and fat piece of meat that couldn't even pass for a tail. And if you could drag your eyes from that, you'd notice she had three legs.
She used to have four of them, but she'd lost one to a pissed off mage with a penchant for fire spells early on in her career. She'd howled for weeks, but now the tiny stump was painless to the touch.
If you dared to look upwards, you would see her chest covered in black bone, the exoskeleton growing out of her waist, and biting into her breasts.
Either side of her cleavage was two arms. Totalling four. Her wrists might be slender, her fingers delicate, but she'd never seen anyone be okay with the count.
Finally, her face was something she knew nobody could stand to look at. Wasn't her fault she'd been born with eight jet black eyes, arranged neatly into two rows.
In short, Drachne was hideous when compared to anyone else.
Right now, she was lying in her web, high above the bed the priest tried to force her to use, crying as she looked at herself in a mirror and wishing that she wouldn't come back alive from her next mission.
The only physical feature of herself that she actually liked was her hair that she used to try and hide her face. It was as silky as the strands of her web, and a deep black she'd never seen on anyone else.
Her abdomen, hanging uncomfortably above her ass, was currently full to bursting with milk-soaked cookies that she'd stolen from the kitchen.
She could probably live of the contents for a year, the damned thing had got so fat.
She didn't care.
She was sick of the last words of her target always being, "What the fuck are you?"
Not who she was. Not who had hired her to kill them. Not why she was doing what she was, or even any kind of pleading for their life.
Just a racist revulsion of her.
Drachne rolled onto her side and did what she always did when she was feeling completely like crap. She plucked at her web, closing her eyes and trying to find solace in the tides of the music.
The bell-like sounds of her web were discordant, bouncing back and forth, rising slowly. Echoing back on itself, beeping and bleeping. Eerie, and eerily comforting to her.
Her music was interrupted as one of the feelers of the web picked something up.
