The Dragon Princess Will Stay Alive!

//Eyy my readers. Welcome back to the show~Anyone?

As silently as she listened, she couldn't hear anything except the vague sounds she couldn't discern wether or not had had just been the echoes of her own thoughts. As dedicatedly as she stared, she saw nothing change in the barely-there light except for the occasional flicker that might have just been her own eyes twitching from the strain of not blinking for so long.

Sonata slowly turned towards the inside of the room of her confinement, her body completely pressed against the door the entire time. It was dark, so dark. She couldn't begin to imagine what lurked in these shadows, if anything lurked there at all. She squinted as much as she could, but couldn't even make out if something was moving in the darkness. Something could be soundlessly pacing the floor on the other side of the room, or hiding in the corners, not yet awakened but deathly with the smallest misstep. Her imagination ran wild in the worst of ways, but breathtakingly slowly, her eyes began to adjust to the darkness. Her head throbbed with all the effort it took to squint into the room that had previously been made out to be nothingness, but it was the only way she could get away from the door. Sonata's small shoes took one hesitant step away from the door, and then another. It was dusty. The air was murky and irritatingly scattered with bits and pieces of dirt and fabric she could hardly make out how had gotten all the way here. She could almost feel the caked layers of uncleaned, uneven stone beneath her feet. She felt the place where her body had hit the floor when she fell, and felt disgusted to hastily brush off the dust bunnies and whatever other granules of stuff she vaguely felt as she coughed.

As far as the tiny dragoness could see, it was only a room. A storage room, maybe, mostly empty. Boxes, probably wooden crates like the ones she'd seen piled up in the storage rooms that were scattered about the castle, were stacked over one another against the deeper side wall to her left. To her right, there was barely enough room for the door to swing a little over halfway before it hit the wall, and to her front, to her very very dark front...

The little Sonata of her dream began to walk, slowly. Suddenly, she'd stop, as though sensing something where there was nothing to sense, a make-believe beast her mind was toying with her to think was there, in a moment when she had no way of proving her fears wrong. As time went on, her strained nightvision got more efficient, though, and the time it took her to unfreeze from these sudden stops dissolved so that she was (if not shakingly) walking normally ahead.

And then she noticed it, a little more light, a second source of lighting, this one much dimmer, coming from the far wall. Her feet fastened and her heart felt a little relieved. By the time she got there, the light source and her nightvision had combined just so that she could make out the far wall early enough to reach out her arms and touch it instead of running into it with her head, and just barely see the outline of a proper window just high enough to tease the tip of her outstretched fingers.

She craned on her tippy-toes to try and reach it, but just managed to get the tips of her tallest fingers over the corner, not nearly close to enough to pull herself up with.

Sonata decided to try and move one of the boxes over. She hurried to the first box and cautiously peered around and over it to make sure there was nothing hiding in it's shadows before forcing it's wooden lid open.

To her dismay, there was just cloth inside. She touched it to shove her hands further in and see if there was anything hidden below it and found in the process that it was very smooth, silky feeling cloth, but the unknown nature of the cloth's used or clean state combined with the mystery of why it was down here in the first place was enough to make her hands quickly leave the box and go back to the task as hand.

SCR.A.P.E...SCRAAAAAAPE

Sonata forced the box over to the window, the wood of the box itself being worn and tattered by it's weight against the unfinished, uneven rock floor as she worked. Sonata felt about ready to collapse after her small feat, but the anxiety of being trapped here was enough to make her continued on with her quest and quickly climb the open crate.

The window had several bars on it, that was the first thing she noticed because she hadn't seen it from below. They were cold to the touch, colder than stone, which was weird because she was used to metal being shiny, and she couldn't understand why it was so hard to see in the dark. But more importantly, why bars in a storage room? And why a window at all? Her brows furrowed as she pressed her face against the window, barely able to make out the world outside her...or rather, the world below.

Sonata's eyes widened. While she hadn't noticed going down the stairs, the door to the room had been relatively level to the steps, while there was a far drop between the window and the nearest bit of the staircase. A the smooth curve she could only presume to the the underside of the staircase she'd just come down from was almost reaching distance from the window, but there was no way to hold onto it and didn't help her escape in the least. There was a deep gap between the staircase and the far wall now that Sonata looked long enough, deep enough that if she tried to jump out and jumped too far, it would be a quick pummel to however far down these steps went. But something else was there on the far walls. Sonata made the mistake of squinting at the small compartments she'd ignored going down the stairs until she recognized the steel bars going down the open part of them, much like the window, and revised her perception of the size of them, just big enough for a humanoid person to take a couple of steps back and forth while still being completely visible to anyone outside. She eyes had adjusted to the terrible lighting so well that she could make out the details inside cell across from her, see the slits of something in the darkness, coming out and dangling something on a wall inside it. Her eyes just barely made out what first registered as a person, and then registered as a set of conveniently misplaced white blobs, and then what she finally figured to be a human skeleton, one hand still dangling in midair, shackled there even in death. While the head and torso seemed particularly intact, leaning against the wall in a way close enough to vaguely look like a person at first glance, the bottom section was scattered and fallen into itself, the arms completely detached and puddled at the floor. The blank eyes of the skull stared into her soul like a cursed image, and the distant flicker of torchlight that trickled down from the hole in the wall just illuminated everything in that much more of an eerie effect. The smell.

Realization hit her like a carriage on full gallop: she was in a dungeon.

Sonata desperately tugged and pulled at the bars of the cell. Out! Out! She needed to get out. The fear of being left here, the fear of rotting away in this small room was suddenly so much more real when she was no longer in some forgotten broom closet. She struggled to suppress a scream that would do nothing to ease the sore feeling of her dry throat, nearly falling off the box because she'd only remembered it was there when her her foot hit the back of the opened crate she was standing inside. Sonata forced herself to look around again, pull of the rails made to trap her inside harder. The sooner she found a way out, the after she could get out, but the bars on the window didn't budge, and there was nothing else of use outside she hadn't already seen.

Sonata felt her eyes water again, despite how thirsty she was, despite her trying to be strong. She wiped her cheeks bravely as she sank down to the box of unidentified cloth, her eyes wandering back to the circular room that held her, too small to hold a grown dragon, and clearly not made to be fireproof. She poked her head up to peer again at the world outside through her tears, though she could barely make it out again with her teary eyes. This place clearly wasn't a dungeon for dragons. A grown dragon just shapeshifting into their normal form would crush these walls open, they could probably tear these flimsy bars, and a good amount of firebreath would burn the door down easily. The smallest flicker of hope rose in her c.h.e.s.t that maybe this meant her father hadn't actually meant to leave her here for eternity, before it was quickly replaced by the realization that his taunt had been a serious dare. She could get herself out on her own, technically, if she hadn't completely and unequivocally lost her ability to do anything related to being a dragon. It was completely wiped from her head, overnight. One day, she was a perfectly normal dragon child who'd just perfected her human form, and then it was like she was starting from square one again, except from the other end of the mental wall, this time around. Maybe this was worse than square one. At least hatchling Sonata could firebreathe almost immediately.

Sonata quickly wiped away more tears that threatened to fall. The good thing about being dehydrated was that it took longer for her tears to acc.u.mulate and clog her vision than before. It hurt a little and made her constantly blink and rub her eyes to make up for it, though.

So Sonata was stuck there, back against the wall, sitting in an open crate, staring blankly into the lonely, dark dungeon cell with her legs pulled up to her small form.

Hopeless and terrified.

//POLL: In your opinion, who would you rather have around for a zombie apocalypse?

>Sophia—Can be m.a.t.u.r.e if you ask her to be, will keep you sane with cuteness, and very portable. The perfect daughtaroo.

> Sonata—Older but no less worthy of protecc. Can take out a few zombies as a last resort, but is constantly having emotional breakdowns. Has a strong sense of morality that will weigh you down with guilt if you don't do the right thing, but will keep your conscience clean.