Shame is a weather-worn, golden dragon with scales like liquid sunlight. A lone beast on a craggly shore, wondering whatever happened to the eggs that used to dot the hidden caves where they lie along the rippling line. He is left, only a dredge of what used to be – what could have been. He needs the rocks to cover him, the moss to cover his form, the beating in his chest to cease. He cannot stand the fatal end to his people, an end that he feels as though he could have – should have – prevented the march of.
Perhaps in death, the little ones can forgive him.
He torments himself on this thought, wishing he could flay scale from skin and skin from flesh. If for nothing else, he imagines that this may relieve him of some of the burning guilt they have bound around his core like coarse rope, all enacted with their incorporeal eyes.
He is immured within their gaze.
Death is not a kind mistress, and would not like to give him this solace. He must wait… for while stone-sleep drifts about as a word on his tongue and soul, there is no way for him to be truly ready for its screeching, grinding, gasping end.
Sleep will hurt. Sleep will be an acrid lie. He knows this bittersweet, comforting mistruth to be what it truly is, but he cannot fathom any other solution but the final one.
He stretches tired wings for what could be the last time, an impossible, fatuous hope still festering… would an egg be there? Perhaps he missed it the other hundreds of times.
The others, existence unbeknownst to him, will weep that he could not last to see the tender vestiges of his people still yet alive.