The Dragon Princess Will Stay Alive!

Sonata stared into the void of the room, the occasional tapping of water somewhere far away and the vibrations of her own breath against her nostrils scaring her from the sleep like trance she drifted in and out from.

Her nails scratched against her fingers, pinching and scraping and probably leaving white lines and red streaks. Out, out! She needed to get out. The easiest way out was the door. She hadn't succeeded in fire-breathing throughout the entirety of her efforts for the past two days, but maybe if she kept at it, she would show some luck now.

Phwooo, Sonata breathed out, her lips pursed into an O as though she were blowing on hot porridge. Phwooo. Phwooo. She clenched her hands into fists and squeezed her eyes shut. Phwooo!

She should probably keep her concentration, but it became harder and harder to do, the more she failed.

PHWPWPFFPB-

Sonata grimaced, coughing and wiping her face and hair from that spitty breath that had a little too much force. Ew.

She vaguely remembered the feeling of it. Hear building up in her lungs, like anger, the smoke that leaked out from her lips when her firebreath was about to overready and leak out into her nose or choke down into her windpipe. If it was anger she needed, she was plenty furious. Sonata shivered, clutching herself. She was cold. Why was she so cold? She came back to her surroundings and found that the stones were all an old, slow type of ancient cold. She moved away from the wall, grateful for the opened crate of cloths she'd discovered. Sonata lifted something that felt about the size of a proper blanket from the crate, wrapping it around her shoulders. Alright, if this cell was her battleground, this make-do cloak was her armor...and this crate was her camp.

Sonata warily wiggled her crate closer against the wall, trying one last time to summon her dragon's breath before she looked for other options. Okay, the door wasn't her only option. There was the window...

Sonata's breath caught in her throat at the idea of shapeshifting. She was more confident that she could do it, but forcing through a shapeshift when one didn't really know what they were doing could end terribly. It hurt terribly, to have your bones misplaced and frozen half-bent inside you, if you'd managed to keep them from jutting out at the joints in the first place, to end up with your muscles and ligaments and veins all knotted up among one another. To be trapped holding an arm or a leg very very still as it cramped or spasmed as you tried desperately to fix it or just go back to the way it was, the frantic scramble to recall very specific mental directions to fix everything when your mind was blanked out in fear and pain. Sonata brought her hands up to her c.h.e.s.t. She didn't want to do that. She didn't want to try that.

Phwooo! A deeper breath. Phwooo!

Nothing, nor even a little light. Not even the familiar aftertaste of smoke on her teeth. No warmth. Sonata was consistently shivering, even with the blanket. It was like it got colder, the longer she stayed here. Her eyes drooped. She didn't know how long she'd been here. She didn't want to fall asleep though, not here.

She tugged at the bars, feeling all of them in tow.

Tug! Nothing.

Tug! Nothing.

Tug! Nothing.

Tug! —CRK.

Sonata's drooping eyes flicked open.

Tug! Tug! Tug!

She tugged like a maniac trying to escape jail. She was one of those things, anyways. Nothing came of her efforts, but the sound of something cracking, even a little bit, was hope. Sonata kept one hand on that bar, feeling at the others just to make sure it was only that one. Then she felt the base of the bar where it met the windowsill. She wiggled it around with all her weight, just barely managing to slip a pinch of her finger along a tiny gap where the pole had come off from the wall, if she pressed forwards on it really hard.

Huff!

Sonata regained her composure, brushing her hair out of her face with both hands. This was okay. If there was hope, she could do this.

Wiggle! Wiggle! Thrash! Twist! Turn!

She gripped that one rail with all her might until a dizzying glob overtook her brain. It was a slightly bendy bar—She could wiggle it around a lot easier now, but it wasn't any closer to budging, but even by a dent. Sonata leaned against the trail, pressing her face against the corner where the cool bars met the cold, roughly cut stones of her confinement.

Maybe she was going about this the wrong way. She pressed her fingers into the tiny gap, trying to chip or scr.a.p.e away at it.The texture of the mortar around it felt crumbly like it should have been able to easily come off, but it was hard. Sonata bit the outer skin off her chapped lip, subconsciously nibbling at it and peeling it away till she felt a small prick. She licked the wound, rubbing her fingers and scraping her nails furiously against the mortar, trying to crack away even just a little bit of it, but all she recirved for her efforts was a chalk-like residue and a few sandlike granules on her fingertips.

Sonata slowly lifted her head from the windowsill, grimacing. She really didn't want to try shapeshifting like this. But reckless of not, it was just her fingertips. Even if she messed up badly, how painful could it be? If she kept at it like this, she was going to rub the brittle scales raw off her delicate hands. And there wasn't even a certainty she would achieve anything, with all that effort.

Sonata pulled her fingers from the crack in the windowsill, examining them in the darkness. They were so...perfect. It had taken her so long to get hands right, much longer than figuring out strands of realistic hair and even eyebrows and eyelashes. They were simple things, but so many creases. They were so important that one could tell something was off right away if they were too perfect or as wrinkly as an elder's on her small body, if she didn't get the front of them to be thicker than the back of them and then figure out how to mold fingerprints, of all things. It was like mentally taking insect-sized forks through sand!

...And now she had to mess them up all over again.

Sonata's brows sunk. She didn't have the luxury of mourning such tiny things. She opened and closed her small, dainty looking, chalk-coated hands, testing and savoring the feeling of them before she lost them, maybe for good.

She exhaled, squeezing her eyes shut as she gathered her bravery.

Alright, assuming she managed to shapeshift in this state, what was she trying to achieve? Rocking slightly in the disorientation of being in the dark for so long, Sonata let herself slowly sink to her knees inside the box, her hands held up in front of her.

It was hard to specifically picture, but the vague memory of her own claws lived in residues in her mind. Sonata strung traits and half-memories together until the inconvenience of the length of her talon combined with the memory of how it felt like when she misstepped and scr.a.p.ed it against the side of a doorway, putting pressure on the toe, to form a vague idea of the shape and thickness of the nail. Tougher than her flimsy humanoid ones, sharper and pointier too. Longer, but slightly firmer to make up for it. She'd need to harden the scales around them to support them, thicken the skin beneath to make to hold them in place. ...How many veins did she cave running through that part of those fingers, where exactly were her arteries? She couldn't feel them.

She wiped the moisture off her eye again.

It was now or never.

Inhale. Exhale. Sonata held her hands straight out, biting her lower lip as she let potential energy seep into her fingertips. She pressed her tongue to the top of her mouth, stifling a startled choke as her fingers launched blindly into warpation. She felt her scales stretch a uncomfortably and the jarring, tiny vibrations of cracks here and there where their stretching and building was achieved sloppily. She felt the dangerous overlapping of nail and flesh and struggled to keep each in its place. By the time she was done, her fingertips felt numb, heavy, a little inflated. She felt the back of her index finger with her thumb and examined her fingers with each other.

They were....wonky.

There was no other way to describe it. Her nails were slightly warped in a way that didn't look comfortable, a few of them arched away from the finger too soon, one nail had slipped off to the side and had grown into her cuticles, thought the fortification she'd given her skin beforehand made it so she didn't feel anything, despite the little bit of blood. Her nails...her nails didn't look the healthiest—they were rough instead of smooth and shiny—but they looked thick and felt heavy enough to do the job.

Maybe she could have shapeshifter her hand, instead, to make her tearing muscles a little stronger?

Sonata lost track of time, scraping her fingers against the mortar and squeezing and shaking the rails. The world around her wasn't complete darkness, but it went black every time she lost her focus in her work or looked faced a direction that was put in shadow by her body. There was no window to the from which she could see the outside world, and without the progression of visible time she couldn't tell if it was her mind that was tired or her arms being strained to the bone. She scratched and thrashed and pulled and tugged back and forth, again and again, like a maddening game. She didn't even know when it was fine to take a break. When I get out of here, she told herself. When she got out of this—stupid—barred up dungeon cage—!

SNAP

Sonata squealed, falling back and barely stopping herself from tumbling off the crate in surprise. She propped herself back up against the window, feeling the sharp, unfinished base of the window tube that she'd finally managed to jerk away from the hole. It was barely poking up from the rock, and she could barely budge it anymore up or down, but it was the second one to go. Just with these two, would be able to squeeze herself out?

She wrenched that bar back and forth feverishly, reinvigorated by a renewed sense of purpose. The bar would get looser for small lengths of space and then not budge again, as though it's hard parts and weak parts were placed in varying bunches of material. Harder, softer, stronger, faster. Sonata's legs ached from pushing and pulling so much, and her feet had dipped small concaves in the fabric where her weight had wiggled them for what felt like hours and hours on end. She felt the warmth of her face from the exhaustion, the cloudy eyes that came back now and then when her working slowed down enough for her emotions to resurface.

CREEEE—

Sonata's angle dipped as her support on the beam suddenly gave way. She blew her hair out of her face to see, and tested her head against the small, jagged-cornered hole she'd managed to make.

Close. So close, she could get to just past her eyebrows where her face widened without risking a pointy iron bar against her cheek or the side of her eye. She could have tried shapeshifting again, at this point, but that still sounded a lot more painful than the hands she could feel the bones under, creaking against one another from so much opening and closing, opening and closing, all day.

"Grr! Hnn! Nnnngh!" She squirmed, stepping one foot in front of the other as the bar pushed back on her body, sending the crate to sloooowly slide away from the window. "Ghnn-" She m.o.a.n.e.d, so close, taking the other bar with her other hand to be sure she could fit her whole self through, this time. "Accho-" Her head get hot and dizzy and her feet were freezing cold. "Nnng!!" It was always a guessing game when those first few millimeters gave way, wether she was just pressing harder and making her own fleshy body give way or it was the metal slowly gazing into motion.

SNAP.

"Hah-" Sonata doubled over the window, holding her sleeve up to her mouth as she gasped into the stale prison air.

Alright. Out, she disorientedly thought. She was...finally...gonna get out.

Sonata crossed her arms against the windowsill, letting her head rest in their nest for a few spare moments as she surveyed the world beyond. It was so far down, but the corner of the steps above her was so far away. They were so wide, Sonata would have to be lying flat on them from above to reach completely across, and there was no way to do that from below, where there was no foothold in midair.

Sonata climbed into the windowsill, her hair being blowed by a wind she hadn't even noticed blowing steadily through the castle as her head dangled off the edge. She reached her hand out cautiously, feeling the stones outside. There wasn't really anything to hold on to, from what she could see under her. The rocks were as roughly cut as inside, though, so if she was careful about where she put her feet and dug her nails as hard as she could between the stones, she might be able to do it. Kicking off her shoes, Sonata maneuvered the rest of her body methodically out of the bars, though the bars prodded at her and scr.a.p.ed her upper arm and a little bit of her leg as she wiggled her way through. She now stood with her back to the cell, which now sounded a lot more inviting. She gripped the bars from the outside as she carefully lowered one leg to test how safe it was, slowly lowering the other foot, her knee still supporting her from the edge of the window, climbing down and down lower, lower and lower, till her fingers finally had to let go of the bars and then the edge, her stomach s.u.c.k.e.d in for fear that even that would be enough to lose her balance and send her plummeting down to the ground. Sonata aimed for the window a bit below her, gripping the first bar she felt between her thumb and index toes, jamming her other foot between two bars so it could safely slide down until it hit the other windowsill. She was making progress, though her entire body was shaking from exertion. If she gave up now, she had the feeling she would only grow weaker, though.

Sonata looked down, peering at how much further she had to go in her moment's reprieve. To her dismay, it was still a good fifteen feet or so from the window. Trembling with exhaustion, the dragoness lowered herself back onto the stones, about to let go of the rails when her foot slipped.

CL.A.P

Before she could even react, Sonata was detached from the wall and freefalling, the stones zipping by her line of sight too quickly for her to grab a hold of them properly. She unsheathed her claws and tore at the wall tactlessly, gritting her teeth as she felt rocky edge and crack after crack take a toll on her stubbornly-holding-on fingers. She managed to slow herself down to the point that when her feet hit the ground she didn't lose her footing, but she quickly felt the aftermath as the blood came back into her fingertips and a tender soreness encased them.

Sonata cringed, slowly releasing her fingers from the rocks, holding her chipped talons delicately up like freshly painted nails as she wobbly ascended the stairs, sticking close to the inner wall so she didn't take another life threatening fall.

TAP, her b.a.r.e feet clapped against the smooth stairs, not really caring for decorum in this state.

TAP, TAP. She'd somehow managed to scr.a.p.e her cheek. She licked a safe corner of her palm and rubbed it on the wound. She could feel the disarrayed scales from a pinky that barely rubbed her cheek as she pulled away.

TAP

TAP TAP

TAL

She got to the level of her own door, only knowing it was such because there were torches on the wall now, illuminating her way. She examined her tattered hands as she took slow, wobbly step up after another, wiping off the blood on her skirt and awkwardly pressing her wrist against the wound on her shoulder to stop the bleeding.

TAP.

She froze, nearly turning around and going back from where she'd come. A couple of turns up from her cell, a familiar man with short blond hair leaned against the wall, still not having noticed her, his eyes dark and intimidating even while lost in thought. The part that threw her off, though, was that he was there. Had he actually not meant to lock her up in a dungeon for eternity for forgetting how to shapeshift for a day? Half of her felt very stupid. The other half just felt...angry.

Sonata's arms stiffened by her sides as she stormed up and past those couple of steps, glaring daggers at the winding staircase in front of her as she completely ignored the King, even though she could see him look up from the side of her vision,

"Sonata."

She began to storm those last couple of steps out of his sight, then stopped. Her battered hand pressed into a first, and she snapped around, her small eyes glaring fire.

"I hate you," she meant to say with all the fury of her six year old body...but her voice sounded pretty pitiful after that first "I."

Before he could respond, she spun around and raced up the stairs, wiping her eyes that felt hot and wet.