The gray hatchling gave a snort and returned to his meal. He didn’t seem to mind sharing. After eating, Mother lulled him off to sleep with a song, and Jizara dozed, bits of shell and membrane still on her limbs.
Wistala’s sharp ears picked up the sound of claws and scales on rock. She crept to the edge of the egg shelf and looked down.
The copper rooted around in the waste near the trickle at the far end of the egg shelf. He appeared to be hunting. She wondered if he’d try to attack her siblings while they slept.
That’s a male for you, Wistala. They’re always satisfied with a win, even if the victory’s incomplete.
He worries me, she thought back.
You’re ahead of your brother and sister already. How well-formed your thoughts are! And the way you pulled your sister out of her egg. That ability will help you in the Upper World, when it comes time.
Pulling Jizara with my tail?
No, the ability to improvise.
Wistala wasn’t sure what that thought meant. Tell me about the Upper World. Is it like my dreams?
Yes and no. But you should rest, little hatchling. Leave the worrying to me, for now.
The copper stared at her from the garbage pile. If Mother could see the hatred in his eye—
But sleep beckoned. And Wistala hoped that with sleep would come more dreams of flying.
Chapter 2
Hatchlings! Your father has arrived. Come and know your sire.”
Jizara left off complaining to Mother about having to eat her eggshell—Mother insisted it helped grow healthy scale, and Jizara claimed she just said that to get rid of the messy broken bits. Auron dropped Wistala’s tail-tip, which he’d been biting.
The hatchlings smelled Father first, so quietly did he approach the egg shelf. The air around Mother smelled oily but comforting. Father’s scent had a harder point as it went into the nostrils.
Wistala listened to the scrape of his scales and realized he was approaching the egg shelf in a back-and-forth manner, as though inspecting the cavern. She caught a gleam as he passed a thick growth of cave moss hanging from a crack in the ceiling.
Dwarves’-eye, Mother had called it.
Then she saw her father’s head, six horns, bronze scales a blend of liquid gold and blood. So wide, even with wings folded tight against his spine, he made Mother look like a drakka. He walked oddly, limping, holding one leg up against his chest. Had he been maimed in his youth like her copper brother?
“AuRel, meet your hatchlings,” Mother said, inclining her head. “Auron, Wistala, and Jizara, out of their eggs in that order.”
Next to her, Auron quivered when Father gave a snort as he sniffed the hatchlings. He barely acknowledged her or her sister. He ground his upper and lower jaw, setting his teeth clattering.
“Wistala is speaking already,” Mother said.
“Which is she, again? The thick one?”
Thick one? Yes, she was bulkier than Jizara, who was all neck and tail.
“Greet your Father, hatchlings.”
Auron extended his neck and peeped, a bit clumsily in his twitchiness.
“Hello, Father,” Wistala said.
“Wel’ome home, Faszer,” Jizara added.
“Was your hunt successful?” Mother asked, to break the silence.
“Not very. A sheep and a tired goat. I’m going to have to try in the foothills east.”
“That means men,” Mother said.
“I remember,” Father said.
He reached out with his foreleg and dropped the carcasses. “You have the sheep, Irelia. The hatchlings can divide the goat.”
“I’m full up on slugs,” Mother said. Wistala only remembered Mother eating one slug, the slimy creatures that ate the cave moss, bat droppings, even dragon waste. “Let them eat. Eat, you three.”
The hungry hatchlings tore into the bled-out feast. Not a trace of warmth was left, but their appetites were such that it didn’t matter.
“I’m for sleep,” Father said, winding himself around a towering stalagmite. But his tail still thrashed and his teeth ground.
“What’s the matter?” Mother asked. “I’ve no appetite, honestly.”
“It’s not that.”
“What, then?”
“There weren’t any grays on my side of the family,” Father grumbled.
With that they fell into an argument over Auron’s merits.
Wistala couldn’t think of many, unless being a nuisance counted as a merit. Mother changed his mood by praising him for siring two males—the skulking copper counted, as he seemed to be surviving on his own somewhere in the cavern. As Wistala understood it, all the males fought after their hatching until one became the champion of the nest. She and her sister were afterthoughts.
Auron finished his gorge and then, hearing the copper at the base of the egg shelf, jumped down to chase him off.
Perhaps Mother read her mind. She brought her head close to Father’s, began to clean him behind his griff, the armored fans that descended from his horn-crest.
“Oh, of course,” Father said. With that he disappeared into the darkness beyond the moss light. When he returned, he had a bulge in the side of his cheek.
“Here you are—”
You can do better than that! Wistala overread Mother think. “—my little treasures,” Father continued, a little lamely. He dropped some things before them that rattled as they fell. “Gems for my gems.”
They glittered enticingly. They were stones of a dozen different colors, cut and polished to catch light and throw it back broken into dozens of pieces. Jizara squealed in delight. Wistala thought them marvelous, and she joined her sister in placing them into colorful spiral patterns.
Father sagged with weariness, his smell no longer sharp and strange but a comforting shield between them and the forbidding shadows of the cavern. She would grant the Gray Vex that much: he plunged into the darkness readily enough, despite his lack of protective scales.
She and Jizara encircled the dazzle their father called gems, lying snout to tail-tip to form an unbroken wall of hatchling between jealous world and hoard. As they nodded off, Mother sang:
Daughter, daughter, shining bright
Precious jewel within mine sight
Oh, if I could soar with thee
As you seek your destiny.
To see with you the caves and skies
Vistas grand beneath your eyes
Taking wing to horizons new
Let us wonder who waits for you.
A dragon bright?
A dragon dark?
Victor of duels with battle mark?
A dragon strong?
A dragon keen?
Singer of honors and triumphs seen?
Red, Gold, Bronze, and Blue
To your lord you shall be true,
Copper, Silver, Black, and White,
Who will win your mating flight?
For in your hearts our future rests
To see our line with hatchlings blessed
And for those who threaten clutch of flame,
To feel the wrath of dragon-dame.
Chapter 3
The last fragments of eggshell disappeared, and in time the gems did, as well.
Mother neither ate nor slept, as far as Wistala could tell, save for a slug or two, and a whole horse Father brought back along with a dirty-smelling monster Mother insisted was a human. To Wistala he smelled like a two-day-dead sheep not properly bled and gutted. Auron got the honor of hunting and eating him.
Wistala watched the Gray Vex disappear with Father. “Auron’s crest must be made of gold, the way you favor him,” Wistala said to Mother.
“Don’t whine, Tala,” she said. “You and your sister have a whole horse to share. That’s ten times a man or more.” Mother had already consumed hers, and was licking the last runnels of blood from her teeth and lip-line. She sighed, and her golden eyes brightened. “Eat those metal rings from the saddle. They’re good for you.”
“I’d rather be hunting that man,” Wistala said.
“You’ll be hunting on your own soon enough,” Mother replied. “Practice on slugs.”
“They’re a bore. Tell us more of the Upper World,” Wistala said. “Fish leaping at waterfalls!”
“I want to hear about Father’s mating song again,” Jizara said. Jizara liked to imitate the tunes, and even Auron admitted that she had a gift for song. “Did he really cause an avalanche?”
Mother’s stories always entertained. She mixed words and pictures and sense-memory so skillfully, Wistala felt as though she were living it.
“No, you shall have a lesson.”
Both sisters drooped at that. Lessons came only through Mother’s words, and one had to form one’s own imagery and sensations. Learning about The Hatchling Who Cried “Dwarf ” or The Geese That Saved the Seven-Egg Clutch couldn’t compare.
“Since you’ve both seen and smelled a man today, I’ll tell you about the Great Betrayal. A man had a hand in that.”
Jizara closed a nostril at Wistala. She stifled a snort and tried to clear her thoughts so she might summon her own mind-pictures.
“As you know, the Age of Dreams ended when the ravenous Blighters appeared. The Four Great Spirits of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire each gave a gift to Dragons to make them supreme over the Upper and within the Lower Worlds to tame the foul Blighters. But while fighting over their reward for this deed, they created the Dwarves, Elves, and Men who now come to kill us. Men are the worst. Men, who breed so fast that a single female in a dragon’s lifetime can produce a nation, like a small rock falling from a mountain’s height can knock two that send six rolling that create a landslide. All of that horde seek to kill us.