A Benevolent Evil Dragon

I drop a book. I don't remember for how long I was here, just that it has been a while. Usually time here goes as slow or as fast as I want, with some limits, but this time it is all completely out of my control. It has been a long enough time that I forgot multiple days' worth of work. What kind of work? Cleaning up after magic, of course.

From orchestra to heavy metal, over to russian hip-hop and then to french house. Old, new, everything in between. I think I hear three children's lullabies playing at the same time from under a shelf, and I have to listen to all this while picking up the torn off pages of my books. That… thing… called Rirshka, while failing to rip off my soul, managed to scratch it and it let in some kind of magic based gremlins that have made a mess of everything.

I brush a hand past one of the iridescent shapeless figures and it bursts into a cloud of mana while-

"Please, please, please! Wake up already!" Begged a feminine voice. The warmth of flame licked my face scales as I heard growls surrounding us. Those growls quickly turned to distant yelps and a familiar weight collapsed against me, droplets of liquid dripping down my body.

-that. That happens whenever I touch one. I know I touched others, but I forgot what they showed me. Those are new memories, and not memories I have the energy to burn into my soul. At least I got the confirmation that this is my soul… And that any god can come in and mess with it.

Oh, yeah, gods. Of course there's gods. Turns out, I'm not the top dog even though I am a dragon, because there's already gods that want me. At least I managed to write out those details before the mana got to make such a mess of me…

"Big, big! Make it big!" "Long!" "Shorter!" "Sharp, more sharp!" "Magic, lots of magic, put horns!" "Butt horns!" And giggles fill the air. I look over at the particularly large and multi headed cloud that was saying that and I see the abomination they… it… I see what the cloud is working on. It's an abomination that might bear some resemblance to me, which makes me panic.

I drop the ravaged book in my hands and rush over to disperse it, causing the thing they're working on to vanish too while-

I am drowning. At least I think I am. My throat reflexively drinks the water, which at least doesn't taste too bad. It lacks the freshness of Mother's river and lake. It lacks mana completely. Still, it is better than nothing, my biology uses it regardless. I also smell burnt meat, approaching me, but I don't have the strength to chew, even as I feel it on my tongue. My mouth was pried open forcefully with a stick to even let it get in.

"Please eat… I hear your stomach… Ah… gods why are you so …" Her throat is hoarse. She sounds more tired and her hand on my scales feels more weak. "You're growing too fast… you need to eat…." I do. I am in pain after all. I live off mana but food is still very much needed after a certain point. Wait, I live off mana, but I am drinking manaless water and the meat feels mundane too. I can only smell my mana and Edith's. No wonder I am starving already… But I am too weak to eat…

She removes the meat , but keeps my mouth open. It takes a while until I feel something new again. This time it is more soft… It's still the same meat but processed. It tastes… Ew. Water comes in and I drink in the chewed up meat. "Please… wake up…"

I take a moment to process the vision. Edith is keeping me alive. I would probably cry out of happiness that there's still someone in my corner, if not for the fact that I was my mostly emotionless soul-self. A construct of unchanging memories… unchanging until a god is involved.

Fuck.

Regardless of all that, I go right back to my own work. Books need to be fixed and put back in their place. Memories of memories need to be stashed in the questionable material box instead of being on the shelf. The holes in this space need to be patched up before they devour me and my memories… how fun.

"Whoa!" "Pretty!" "Make pretty, make pretty!" I see two clouds looking at a particular book from the art section, particularly some dragon designs I saw in my past life. Motherf-

"Stop messing with my body!" I yell, which only makes them slither away. Another figure a bit away is looking at a completely different kind of art, namely of a humanoid dragon. It tries to mimic the shape, only to explode as it fails, causing more of a mess for me. This is annoying.. At least these guys are unable to change the content of my memories from what I've seen.

The goddess… she is clearly the reason why I forgot my name. How do I know? Because she probably said it to address to me. She knows what it is but it got erased so thoroughly that I can't even hear it. It was the only thing from her that sounded like jumbled garbage, and she was speaking perfect english so I doubt she slipped up at that point.

I take a moment to recover, and I forget what I have been doing until now. I look over at a hole in my reality and I see a strange continuation of the library. Actually, it looks more like a section that's just being built, but it happens to be underwater and in a spatially distorted field. Half built shelves are twisted every which way, looking more like trees, with pages spread about like fallen leaves. I can't read what is written on them, I can hardly figure out how the distortion works in the first place, but it seems like outside of my library is another one. Are those… my dragon memories? Is that how this place looked before I spent however long fixing it?

I shake my head and patch up the hole. I have the feeling that slipping in there would be deadly. Plus, I still have a lot of work to do here…

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It takes forever and no time at all before I am finally on top of the gremlins. They have ravaged my memories looking for something and the only thing that feels like I've done a million times is finding them looking at a messed up version of me… so I don't disperse them, I think I've done that before. I sit at the table that they made out of books, on a chair made out of the corner of a shelf, and look at their disgusting creation.

"No." Is all I say and I can see either faces drop. Literally. I see a few head-like formations just drop on the ground, turn into dust, then crawl back up into their place and they start making changes again. The only good thing they did, from what I see, is form a 3D image of my entire anatomy from before me passing out. The fact that they go from that to… this... means I got blasted with so much mana that I need to change drastically, like when I got my new hands.

"Need!" "Lots of mana!" "Affinity! Chaos Affinity!" "Can't help sibling after this… Sibling needs strong!" On and on they go. At least I can understand them… Sibling though, that's not a word I expected. I will let my meaty brain unpack that, if I even remember it when I wake up. For now I just agree and get to work.

Firstly, my organ makeup looks so weird. Most of my body is a huge lung, which I knew since I felt the air sacks, but I genuinely don't even have guts. My stomach is a large chamber surrounded by many glands that make the caustic fluid which melts everything down, and there's a lot of large veins carrying mana infused blood to it, so it clearly is one of my magical parts. After the stomach there's a small chamber that takes in the sludge, neutralizes the caustic part and then sends the nutrients and dissolved mana into my bloodstream, and to the rest of my body. It also seems to act as a smart liver and kidney combo, because it has blood vessels meant for toxic stuff incorporated. I don't get how that works…

I can't find a core, instead I find that my heart is odd. It is very large compared to my body, has a partially crystalline texture, and seems to have a lot of chambers and individual transport cycles. My breath organ has its own pair of chambers. My horns have their own. There's also a communal chamber in the middle of the heart where almost all the blood mixes, which makes me partially panic. It's also the place where the most crystalline structures are localized and where my mana is densest, so that might be why. At least the chambers that pump the blood carrying waste from my cells to my lungs for exhaling are separated from the rest, though there seems to be a sort of valve that lets a bit of the toxic blood mix with my healthy one, which I don't understand.

I sigh and ultimately leave that organ alone. My heart, my breath shaper, the nutrient chamber and apparently my horns are organs I do not comprehend and as such can't mess with. What I can do, however, especially now that I understand somewhat how my systems work, is add in some new stuff.

Already the clouds worked out how to add in a lot of glands and extra weapons, I just need to give them a cohesive position that won't interfere with my ability to walk through a forest. If I was as big as Mother, I would have just bulldozed through, but I am not and I simply can't make myself unable to exist on a non flat terrain. As such I take out most of the random horns, leaving them on the head area and giving them a more contained shape, though they are still chaotic and pointed in random directions, with random growth paths.

Next I change my tiny pair of arms into something more similar to mother's form. The back legs are fully made for leg work, but my front ones are a leg-hand mix. The claws are now connected to a venom gland that makes all the worst mixes I remember. Turns out reading about the most venomous animals around was quite helpful. Coagulation agents, anti-coagulants, venom that causes necrosis, neurotoxins… With the help of the gremlins I manage to make complex glands in both of my forelegs, encased in a protective armor of fat and bone plates. It will make whatever it can based on what I eat and what mana I have available, but it will help in a pinch. It will also be a calorie hog in the end, but I need choices when I can't rely on magic.

My body ends up staying somewhat like a lizard. My middle pair of legs is closer to my front so I could use my forelegs as arms without being unable to run. My front pair also has retractable claws now, since I need to keep them sharp and I might sometimes need gentle fingers rather than deadly ones.

I look around while drawing the body and I notice that there's a lot less of the chaotic mana that makes these half sapient creatures. They're… not dying, they're being absorbed. The more I become certain of a few changes, the more they vanish. I think they're the mana that I've been using to sustain myself…

That's a macabre thought, but I am not here to be horrified, I am here to fix my body. I am pushing too much to my meat brain, but I am simply not equipped to deal with this. I sigh, for no particular use since I don't have lungs, but habits die hard. I need a few more things… I obviously need my tails to be fixed, but when I go to draw that, i realize that they were already modified and not with my input. Three tails. Great. Well, I see that the tip of each tail has a bony blade, so I modify that a bit. I make the blades single edged, so I can still grab things without hurting them, and I add in a pressurized acid gland in each tip. I just reuse whatever my stomach uses, so that I don't need to ruin my throat each time I am put in a tough spot.

Two more big changes… I know I am probably a rainbow mess by now. If the gremlins are to be believed, I somehow did what my siblings worked months to accomplish, I got my affinity for real. And of course it is chaos. Because of that I will be a lightshow to anyone nearby, so I spread tiny pigment glands throughout my body. Technically, my body was already capable of changing color based on the mana that infused my scales, this will simply make that much faster and more easy to control but it will still be magic based, I can't get away with it being full biological work. I simply don't have the skin of an octopus or cuttlefish, which would help with quickly changing color.

The change locks in and I find myself standing face to face with a handful of the beings. They look sad but also happy… and they don't even have proper faces. I don't know what to say, so I just look at the projection that is my body. It changed again. The horns are bigger, I have five eyes, a singular big one in the middle while the other ones are spread in pairs. My wings have also changed, somehow becoming a pair of arms, mimicking the way the wyverns had them.

"No more time… no more control…" "Good luck… Sibling. Learnt much from you. Go back to you. Give back to you." "Fight. Kill. Need to survive…" "Siblings out there. Siblings alive!" They vanish, one by one, until the silent one is left. "She is a strong girl." it says in a voice far too similar to my human mother's. "Take care of her… like she did with you." The voice slips into something different by the end, but I got it. It mimicked my mother… It needed to remind me.

Humans ruined my somewhat peaceful life. Killed two defenseless women when they wanted help. Pillaged and ruined and… Edith stayed by my side and helped me. I need to keep myself from becoming angry at all of humanity for the action of some noble and a goddess. I need to keep myself from becoming a monster.