Kra opened his eyes, slowly.  He was always cautious in the morning, and moving quickly alerted darcats and blade hawks.  It was better to look around slowly, to check for predators.  To see them before they saw him meant that he could live that much longer, maybe even get to eat.

He remained still. Tempted as he was to spring away, he know that as he was nothing around him could know there was anything there but a pile of stone.  Though he was a dragon, his scales now resembled the bulky, blackened stone of the dead land.  The earth had no life left, the sky billowed with smoky clouds belched out from deep volcanic craters and mixing with the dust storms that ravaged the middle lands to cover all the land, as far as anyone knew.  Not much was left of the way things had been, or so he was told.  It had always been so for Kra.

There was always dark, always suffering.  He remembered somewhere in his mind there had been pity once.  That feeling was much dimmer than it had been in his youth, replaced more and more daily by his deep seated instinct to survive.  Even before when his clan had not cast him out, every day was another battle in the war to survive in this broken world.

His gaze dropped to his paws.  The tips of his claws were starting to break off, being crushed by their own weight and size, and worn down more every day.  He used to have agile paws that even before he was Twisted could move with the flexibility of human hands.  Now their grace was replaced by heavy, stony scales, designed to weigh him down and make even the simplest task of balance and movement a contest of patience and determination.  He could hardly even flex the talons to his palm anymore. 

But where other dragons had fallen to this curse, he had learned from it.  He changed the way he ran to compensate for the lack of flexibility, flowed with the shifting of his heavy hide to outmaneuver and roll into blows.  The heaviness allowed him to crush where his claws could no longer tear, and the thickness gave him the ability to disguise himself completely against the dead landscape, giving him the edge of surprise.