[Writing Prompt] You’re the half-dragon child of a king and a dragon mother who gave up everything to marry him. When you hit puberty, dragon features start to emerge, and now your father spends his days fending off knights determined to 'slay the dragon.

My father did not understand my love for the wind. He was unwinged, his human nature solidly grounding him to the earth. He could not dream of flight, and so heights to him, meant nothing. But for me, from the moment the buds of wings started to sprout from my back, I yearned for places to take off from, places where I could reach out my hands and almost touch the clouds.

The transition was not easy. I could not control when and how I turned into my dragon form. Sometimes I walked the corridors of the castle, with my giant wings dragging along the floor behind my slight human body. As time passed, I learned to control it. Most days, I spent in my human form, just another princess. Around dusk, when the birds went to roost, I set out to hone my flying skills. I was less visible then, my red scales blending in with the setting sky.

My father had a tower built to the south the castle, so tall I could see the entire city. It took four turns up a spiral staircase to get to my rooms, but the windows were large. There was a small balcony I used as a point to land and to take off for flight. It was the perfect room for a growing girl who needed her space.

When the first warrior scaled the walls and climbed into my room, I didn’t understand. It was night time, and I had settled in front of the hearth in my dragon form. I slept better in my dragon form during cold nights, and I liked the feeling of curling my body into a ball, my long neck folding neatly along my curved body.

“Where is the princess, you beast?” the warrior asked, brandishing his sword. “Tell me, or I shall slay you!”

I was half-asleep, and did not understand his question at first. I yawned, and the warrior rushed forward, thinking I was about to breathe fire. This, ironically, gave me no other option to protect myself, and I did. He stumbled back, a living flame, and fell off the balcony. That was only the first one.

Then they kept coming. The first I had assumed was only an intruder, someone intending me harm. But as time passed, I realized that they were fools who thought they were saving me from a dragon, from myself. The story grew stronger the more knights managed to make it into my tower, and by the time we understood what people outside our city thought, it was too late. The tale took on a life of its own. My father the king had lost his daughter to a dragon, and while I was within a stones’ throw from his castle, I was trapped in the tower by a dragon no knight could defeat.

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To knights, it did not sound like a tragic story. It sounded like a challenge. They did not ask my father first, thinking him an incompetent fool who had failed to protect his own daughter. My father erected walls around the tower to keep them out, created mazes of bushes to slow them down and trap them, and placed guards all around the tower. My mother suggested moving into the main castle, but I was thirteen and strong-headed. I did not understand why I had to leave my room because grown men were being idiots. I did not see why I had to deny half of my blood because people did not understand what dragons were.

So they continued to come, and they continued to die.

I stopped flying, as my father forbade it. It was too dangerous, he said, as the knights could try to shoot me down from the sky. He had sent out messengers spreading the word that his daughter and the dragon were the same, but everyone only thought he was trying to defend his reputation, trying to cover his own ineptitude. I stopped attending the castle balls and parties, since he feared I might transform into my dragon form in front of knights in disguise, or that people would come to abduct me and claim the glory of saving the princess.

A few years passed, and a knight made it into the tower once more. It had been months since the last one, who had been shot down by my father’s men as he was climbing over the balustrade of the balcony.

“Hello, princess?” he asked. I was in my dragon form, and did not bother answering. Instead of looking around, he approached me. “You are the princess, correct?”

I slowly transformed, bit by bit, and wrapped myself in a blanket while my scales melted away into skin.

“You know I’m the princess?” I asked.

“Well, yes. Everyone knows of the princess kept locked in her tower by the monster,” the knight said.

“But I am the monster,” I murmured. “I’m the dragon.”

“No, that is not what I heard. The whole continent knows, there is a princess who is a dragon, who is trapped in a tower by her father. You are not allowed to fly, or to leave the tower. Your father is the monster I speak of.”

When was the last time I’d left the tower? It had been months, perhaps even a year. My mother visited me and told me of knights who came and perished like mayflies, of young princes who my father eliminated as soon as they reached the city’s borders. So many fools ready to die, I had thought. I had been the fool all along. I had missed the edges of madness that had crept into my father's words and actions.

A story with a life of its own had the ability to change. The lies became a truth, and the story that had started all of this trouble... it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.