Learning to be human twice over
by Anadoxion Prestor
Originally posted here on January 11, 2024.
Content warning for mentions of violence, kidnapping, and murder (including against children, although I don't go into detail), mind control, and questioning reality.
Like most dragons, I started off as an egg, then a whelpling, in the care of my mother. Unlike most dragons, my mother was Onyxia, one of the most powerful and feared members of the Black Dragonflight. Look--she did evil stuff. I agree, and I don't support a lot of what she did, but that has to be tempered with remembering that the entire Black Dragonflight had to deal with the maddening whispers and control from the Old Gods--eldritch horrors well beyond our ability to deal with that sank their claws and tendrils deep into our minds before we were even hatched. The first voices I heard were the Old Gods--I knew them long before I knew my own mother or my siblings. Of course the whole damn flight was crazy. Hundreds or thousands of years of whispers, demands to hurt, to kill, to destroy, will do that to you. When they convince you that you can't trust anybody, you can't trust your own senses or judgement, that everyone will turn against you--yeah. That's something that will make you do things you wouldn't normally do, and it destroyed us, because it made us betray the other four dragonflights and they turned on us in response. Black dragons are some of the loneliest and least-loved creatures in the world of my source (until recently), and that's just how it has been for ten thousand years.
Back to my story, though--my mother did bad things, and I won't deny that. She took over the human kingdom of Stormwind, deposed its king, and kidnapped its child prince when the king returned with a vengeance. As a result, Stormwind came knocking at her lair, and she defended herself, her captive, and her children viciously. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you ask, the heroes of the Alliance that the king of Stormwind, Varian Wrynn, brought with him to rescue his son Anduin were more than enough to defeat Onyxia. She fell in battle as I watched from an upper shelf in her lair, and after that, the adventurers turned their blades on my enraged siblings, the swarms of them that charged the "heroes."
I had been sick that week. I couldn't fight. Instead, I ran, and as a result, I might be the only living child of Onyxia left in the whole world. The Old Gods were sure willing to let me believe that--and over the next handful of years, as I eked out a desperate living on my own in Dustwallow Marsh, they convinced me that I had to sneak into the Alliance, into Stormwind City, and kill King Varian Wrynn and his son Anduin Wrynn, they who were responsible for killing my mother. Why the Old Gods wanted me to do that, I don't know. They liked violence and chaos, even (or especially) when it was senseless. Maybe they were angry that Onyxia, one of their most powerful pawns, was off the board.
Finally, a handful of years later, I unlocked the ability to take my visage form, meaning I could appear as a humanoid instead of a young dragon, and I took the form of a human. I chose a man in his twenties, and took on the name Anadox, shortened from my full name of Anadoxion. As the Old Gods made their move, manipulating the leader of the Black Dragonflight (my grandfather) into attempting to destroy the world in his madness, I fell completely under their thrall and slipped into Stormwind. I worked hard to become one of their great adventuring heroes so that I could get close to the king and prince, and get my chance to kill them.
That chance never came. I met a red dragon named Marastrasza, who recognized that underneath the Old God corruption, I was just a scared, angry kid, and she took me in. She helped me ignore the whispers, break free of their control (even when I wondered if I was just sinking deeper into one of their traps, fooled by delusions and hallucinations they had cursed me with), and blend in better amongst humans. Eventually, the Old Gods' gambit fell apart, my grandfather was killed, and the Black Dragonflight was nearly completely wiped out, leaving only perhaps a dozen of us left on the planet. (There were a few others on another world, but that's not relevant to my story.)
It was absolutely essential that I not let anyone know that I was a black dragon. If anyone other than Mara found out, I'd be killed--people saw us as harbingers of evil, and rightly so. We'd caused more death and destruction in the past year than the other dragonflights had in thousands, because the dragonflights were meant to be protectors of the world, not destroyers. Our reputation had been destroyed thousands of years ago, and this was the final nail in the coffin for the Black Dragonflight. We were done for.
So I hung up my scales and became human.
It's weird to talk about, and harder to wrap my head around. I am a dragon, I am, but it sure doesn't feel like it. I forget. I settled into human life, becoming one of the prime adventurers of Stormwind and the Alliance, and I got close to the king and prince alike--and befriended them. I liked them, even though Varian had killed my mother, because in him I saw only the fierce, loving protectiveness over his son that Onyxia had had over us. And wouldn't she have killed him, too, if he'd kidnapped me or my siblings, even if she had to go through eleven-or-so-year-old Anduin to do it? My anger melted away, and I found myself guarding Prince Anduin on occasion, rescuing him during his teenage years on the expedition in Pandaria, talking philosophy with him, earning respect from the king and the people around me.
And I liked it. I'd never grown up thinking that I could have this--community, respect, people who cared about me. The Old Gods still lingered in my head, whispering and trying to get me to turn against them, but go figure, like a bad mental illness, it gets better with support. When the only people around you are also mentally ill and feel hopeless, and want you to feel hopeless, too, you struggle--but when you're surrounded by people that respect and care about you, you start to think that maybe it'll be okay. I fell in love with humanity and being human. I love how social humans are, I love how they help each other and reach out, I love what a strong community they have. I love their ingenuity in the face of annihilation and their fighting spirit. I love everything about humans and blending in with them, to the point of almost fooling myself, at times--until reality would slap me in the face, the Old Gods would say something, some magic would detect a draconic presence, something. I lived my life in anxiety, sometimes wishing I could shed my scales and claws for good and actually be who I said I was, Anadox Prestor, an orphan and victim of Onyxia, too. (I'm a bad liar and accidentally said "my mother" in reference to Katrana Prestor, Onyxia's human guise, to Anduin--and had to cover up by saying that Katrana was a real noble, but Onyxia killed her and took her place, and that I was her son. He was very sympathetic, and, I learned years later, didn't believe a word of it, and figured me out long before anyone else did, but accepted it because he knew who I was deep down inside and that I wasn't there to hurt him.)
Years passed. Many years, in fact. I passed from that awkward stage between whelpling (baby/child) to drake (adolescent) and barely noticed, rarely taking my dragon form and being surprised every time by how much I had grown and changed. I became one of the most powerful and well-known warriors of the Alliance, and I adored it. Bad things happened, but through it all, I remained Anadox Prestor, human warrior and champion of Stormwind. A liar, a bad one, but good enough to hide something that no one was even looking for. Why would they look? Why would they ask? What an insane thing to think of someone--being a black dragon, the dragonflight that was (supposedly) wiped out! One of their most loyal heroes, a black dragon? Who would think of it? No one. No one ever accused me, and I never had to deal with it, because being human came easily and naturally and sometimes I wondered if I was meant to be human from the very beginning. I don't dislike my draconity, separate from the Old God thing, but it doesn't feel like what I should have been, necessarily.
It's sort of like the other side of the coin from being dragonkin, I suppose--someone born in a human body that's really a dragon on the inside, one way or the other. I'm the reverse--someone born in a dragon body who is, really, probably, just human on the inside. Isn't that funny? Can you imagine the hordes of dragonkin that would want to swap places with me, my own system host included? It sounds fake, but that's my experience.
Then, I ended up here, in the DWW. Human-bodied, no powers, what I'd always wanted. Right?
I don't know.
This isn't the human I was. This isn't the identity I used and wore, that I let sink into me and become more real to me than my own talons and scales. And yet, I have to be it anyway, wear the host's identity as a mask when I front, because being plural in public is like being a black dragon--shunned, feared, mistreated. I don't know how to do anything other than become who people expect me to be, and lie, but this time, the discomfort has stayed. There's been no settling in, no taking it in, and for once, being human is uncomfortable for me. I don't like it. I got got by the monkey's paw, I guess.
Worse, in-source, I'd just begun accepting my draconity again--the dragonflights are reuniting, the black dragons are coming back, we've purged the Old Gods from our minds, and we're recovering--and being accepted again. I'm open about being Anadoxion now, and people see me as Anadox Prestor and Anadoxion both, man and dragon, son of Onyxia and champion of Stormwind, and I really, really like it. I'm human, I'm dragon, I'm both and I'm all of my component parts and so much more than that. For the first time in my life, I'm my true, authentic self, every piece of it, nothing left to hide--and then, at the same time, I'm here, dragged into this system where all I am is what I say I am and I have to lie externally almost all of the time. It's whiplash and it sucks, and I'm having to re-learn how to be human in a different world, in a different time period, everything. I just don't know what to make of it or what to do yet.
I guess I'm still figuring it, and myself, out. I'm still grappling with who I am and what that all means, and I know a lot of you can relate, too. So rarely do you settle down and know exactly who and what you are, especially when you're young. For my kind, I'm still quite young--and I'm still figuring it out, too. Fingers crossed it all settles out into something I can live with in the end. If not, then I'll keep fighting until it does.