This poem came out of the October 6, 2020 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from zeeth_kyrah . It also fills the "Dragons" prompt in my 10-1-20 card for the Fall Festival Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by nsfwords . It belongs to A Conflagration of Dragons series. Warning: This poem contains the aftermath of city destruction and refugee situations. "Chasing Leaves, Catching Feathers" When the dragon Janardana destroyed the city of Shaunaka, then Shalya fled west into the woods, driven away from the coast in the chaos. The journey was nerve-wracking, the refugees tattered and hungry, but Shalya felt grateful for the company. Her creamy blonde wings and her pale streaked hair soon got covered in dirt and tangled in leaves. Whenever more dragons flew by overhead, Shalya cringed and hid herself in the underbrush. The Shu were not pleased when their little band of refugees arrived. Shalya hung around the hunting camp, watching for ways to make herself useful. She was versatile; she could adapt to new situations. Besides, she'd survived a dragon. What were the Shu next to that? They were only unfriends. Shalya wound up working for a gruff fellow called Herunub, who raised strange animals unlike anything she had seen before. He didn't really want Shalya around his charges, but she managed to persuade him to give her a chance anyway. He called them leafcats. They had jagged leafy spots of brown on a golden background, with stiff stand-up manes and long tails with a tufted end. The leafcats did not like Shalya when they first met her. The adults growled or hissed when she approached, and the kittens pounced on her. She watched them chasing leaves and concluded that they were trying to catch her feathers. So Shalya learned to keep her wings well tucked around the leafkittens, and they quit pouncing on her so much. Even the adults began to get used to her in time. Herunub was not so tolerant. He was thoughtful and diligent with the leafcats, but he seemed to reserve all his patience and affection for his charges -- with other people, he was uncaring, even gruff most of the time. It didn't matter, since Shalya had nowhere else to go. She cleaned up after the cats -- who were tidy with their bodies but very messy eaters -- and after Herunub as well. When he trained them to hunt, she did her best to stay out of the way. It wasn't a bad life, at least on days when no dragons flew overhead. Shalya lived in constant fear that one of them would land and burn everything down again. But then, so did everyone else. Then Herunub noticed that her lovely skin, which was sea-green dappled with darker green, allowed her to disappear in the forest. This pleased him, because the leafcats hunted in prides. Some of them would lie in wait while others flushed game in their general direction. When it got close enough, the hidden ones would leap out and kill it. So Herunub began teaching Shalya more about the leafcats and how they worked. It became her job to hide in the brush with half-grown kittens, keeping them calm until it was time to pounce. Sometimes they still gnawed on her wingtips, but Shalya stopped caring so much about that. After all, she couldn't really fly in a forest; there wasn't room to spread her wings. The most she could do was jump from a tree like the Shu did, then glide and try not to hit anything. Sometimes, Shalya missed the white cliffs of Shaunaka and the open sky over the ocean. Then one of the leafkittens would bring her a dead bird to pluck and put in the pot, and the others would chase the loose feathers so that she laughed until she couldn't breathe. No, it wasn't a bad life at all.