Hiya, this is my second version of the idea that follows on from a thread I made on the discussion forum, as I thought it might be fun to have some writing prompts!

The last two were 'vessel' and 'scapegoat', and there were some really awesome stories written. I'm going with another one-word prompt, but if anyone else has any other ideas let me know/make your own prompt story thread!

The word I picked for this thread is 'scale'. I like it because it can be a many-meaning-ed noun, or verb!

I'm going to post my interpretation of the prompt below this as a 'chapter 2', so that my submission doesn't sway anyone's ideas on what to write, and hope you guys will get involved with your own takes on the prompt by adding new chapters/story paths below! Love to all of you -- I'm thinking of turning this into a monthly thing :)

Riot45

The first scales appeared on Jander's leg, right above the knee: shiny and smooth like river pebbles.

As an apprentice healer, he knew the symptoms of Serpent's Plague all too well. First the scales on your skin, black and tan and diamond-shaped like the rattlesnakes of the distant desert. Then lesions in your throat causing raspy hissing sounds when you spoke, sometimes accompanied by a change in eye color. By the time it got to your voice, most people never recovered. You wasted away slowly over the course of weeks or months, scales continuing to grow until you ran out of energy and lay down forever.

Many times, he had sat with victims and their families, trying to comfort them with soothing words and potions. He and his mentor had experimented with hundreds of combinations, plants and herbs and spells, but nothing worked. The plague wasn't an affliction of the body, but of the soul. It didn't spread through bad water or poisoned air, but through the very roots of the world. It drained songweavers of their magic, showing them a fate even worse than death in their last few days of life.

He hid the scales for as long as he could, even as they spread up his side and down his arm. His friends relied on him to be the funny one, the one who smiled all the time and kept them healthy. He stayed up late nights, combining ingredients. Maybe antivenin? Maybe moonflower, glimberry, eldergrass? His mentor had taught him how to draw the magic out of all these plants and combine them with his own... except that Jander was terrible at using any magic of his own. His songs always fizzled out with only the barest whisper of green aura, no matter how hard he practiced.

The day the infection reached his throat was the day he met the fox-shifter. The scales were all the way down his arm now, and he no longer hid them from his friends. He noticed them looking at him differently now--even when he made his usual jokes, their laughs were full of pity instead of genuine fun. They were camped out in a ruined city with some new traveling companions, shifters from the distant clans who believed in saving magic even though they couldn't wield it themselves. He crouched in front of the fire, creating a new potion even though he knew it would be useless, when he saw a reddish shape in the shadows.

It was one of their new allies, a fox-shifter, who approached him warily and transformed back into her human form. "What are you doing?" she asked.

Jander sighed. "I'm sick with the Serpent's Plague, trying pointlessly to heal myself. You can't get the disease because you don't have song magic, but it's sort of a big deal for songweavers like me."

The shifter cocked her head. "No, you're not," she said matter-of-factly.

"What do you mean?" Jander asked, looking down at his scales. But now that he did look at them in a fresh light, he noticed things he hadn't before. The plague's scales were usually darker in color, less reflective. Mottled black and tan instead of copper.

"You're not dying, stop moping," the fox-shifter said exasperatedly. "How sure are you that you're a songweaver?"

"Not sure at all," Jander admitted, thinking back to the many times he'd tried to call on his own aura. He'd seen weavers do miraculous things--calling beams of light from the sky, creating constructs and illusions and barriers. But he couldn't even manage a simple light.

"You're not dying," she repeated. "You're just shifting into your other skin. Totally uncontrolled, which is hard for anyone to do, but it doesn't mean you're going to die."

"Not a rattlesnake," he said to himself. "A copperhead." The scales seemed different now, less painful to carry around. "Could you show me how to shift?"