So, something to note about my current condition. I can’t dream. It’s not about my species, or at least I don’t think it is since I know animals like cats and such can dream just fine, but rather about my little library. I spent the entire night inside of it, going through all the animal species I knew, trying to find something that was similar to me. Sadly, all the species that were somewhat similar were also equally dissimilar. I have functioning limbs of some kind on my back, while already having four legs and what I now realize is more than likely a strangely prehensile tail, and having a similar musculature system to my last one. Meaning that I am some kind of 6 limbed vertebrate, something earth simply did not have (or at least they didn’t survive long enough for us to know they existed).

The only animals that could fit were all fictive, like a griffon with a particularly long tail or a dragon, or maybe even a manticore. Actually, that would be pretty damn cool, being in a fantasy world as a monster of some kind. I could continue going down this river of thought, but something drew my attention.

As I woke up I found myself feeling the weight of something pressing down on me. Another thing to note is that my background bodily motions and sounds were muffled enough to not be noticeable, faster adaptation than a human, that’s nice. I open my eyes tentatively and see a lot more than I expected, but not as well as I had hoped. There is something blocking the light coming from the front, something bluish grey? It’s pretty close to my face and my eyes are refusing to focus enough for me to get details.

Let’s see, can I move? I struggle for a bit, trying to wiggle like a worm, but nothing happens so that’s a negative. I try to look around, only to focus back on what’s in front of me. Why? Because it’s breathing. It looks like a breathing rock, but it can’t be, so I try and get a feel for it. I manage to stretch my neck a bit, so the tip of my nose(?), no, snout, can brush up against it and the sensations I’m getting are strange. After a bit of trying to decipher them I realize that I am feeling hard-ish skin brushing up against hard-ish skin. It’s scales. It literally feels like the smooth but hard scales of a lizard but I have them too. Also, it’s warm, and breathing pretty fast, just like I am. Not only that, but once I crane my head, which is a bit more flexible than I expected, I see that there’s more like it. There’s the one right in front of me, another to my right and the one laying on top of us all. So, I guess, there’s at least four of us.

After inspecting all of them I come to an exciting realization. I am in a dragon baby cuddle pile. An adorable dragon baby cuddle pile! They all look somewhere between a crocodile and a komodo dragon, with tiny, horn-like nubs coming out of their heads, and most adorably of all they are all round! Absurdly round at that and with all of them sleeping so soundly I can’t help but squeal! Which comes out like a very weird sound, something like a croak and a sci fi plasma rifle at the same time. Yeap, definitively got some crocodile ancestors or something.

So, taking a step back from the urge to pet the baby dragons, I need to wrap my head around this. I am an adorable baby dragon, currently cuddling what could only be my clutch mates, laying on a sort of nest made out of furs and hay. I can still see a few egg shells around. This explains yesterday’s encounter at least. The reason my supposed parent sounded like a moving house is probably because that’s what she is. If we are actually dragons then it’s likely that she is enormous and didn’t just teleport from the entrance of the room to me, but rather leaned her head and reached me.

Still, I am a dragon. Not on Earth, that’s for sure, but I am a European dragon. This is basically a dream come true. I mean who hasn’t dreamt of being a huge, powerful hermit that has as much gold as a small country just used as decoration? Some mighty beast of magic and flames that, much like a bumblebee, seemingly defies all logic and reason and can just fly through the skies! Yes, I know bumblebees don’t defy the laws of physics, just use very advanced one, but still they look like they shouldn’t be able to fly, as do dragons. Or at least I hope I am the ancient sapient wizard kind of dragon and not the mindless beast that eats livestock and steals shiny things. Or maybe I am fully wrong and I am not even a dragon, just some reptilian with vestigial wings. Or maybe it’s a mutation and my kin is slowly moving to turn airborne? Who knows? Who, indeed, knows?

I am getting bored already, just being stuck here, so I think back through my years of listening to music and put on some classic sneaky music, since I am trying to crawl away without startling the others. I wouldn’t want to have croaking babies draw the attention of our mother. Really it is strange, I can think faster than in life. I mean I am currently remembering a whole song perfectly, running it without accidentally repeating a section, all while also contemplating my seemingly draconic heritage. I really need to figure out what happened to me and why I am like this.

I shake my body and despite failing to crawl my way away, I manage to do something better: I rolled away. Well, not exactly away, just turned a bit and the dragon on top of me fell face first into the fur, continuing to sleep peacefully, which pushed me out of the pile and to the edge of the nest. Well, at least I now have a better view of them all. So, my three siblings seem to be very different yet also very similar. All of them have those faint blues and greens coupled with grey for coloring, something that cannot be that useful as a camouflage, so I guess it might just be baby scales that are still not fully pigmented.

Now let’s talk differences. Two of them have red scales, one only has a faint splatters on its front legs and on its side, while the other has the entire tail as a rusty red. I cannot see their full bodies but safe to say the red is not the expected color for them, as it manifests in certain areas instead of all over the body. Maybe one of our parent had more red scales while the other had more blues and greens? Could be that we only inherited one of theirs as our main pigment and the other will just be tonalities and natural imperfections, kind of like how diverse calicos are.

Aside from color there are other things that differ. The head shapes and horn-like protrusions are completely different in all three. Red tail has a longer and sharper face and only two wide horn beginnings coming from the side of its head, red hand has a rounder and shorter head and six tinier nubs in total, three vertical dots on the left and three on the right and the final one, the one without any red seems to have a taller head and flat snout, with way more even smaller beginnings all around it. It seems like… 10? 12? Well, regardless, that’s a lot of horns. I wonder how many I got? Either way, looking even closer it seems that there’s even a difference in how big the individual scales are for each of them.

I try to focus a bit and get rewarded with the entire room darkening for it. I raise my head, surprised, and it goes back to normal. Damnit, new muscle to keep track of. Seems my eyes, while worse than my last ones at close range, have a way better light filtering system, with an entire conscious muscle for that express purpose. Alright, there’s already dissonance. That’s not good for me, not at all. I have a brand new body, that already seems to bring more promise than my old one ever did, but by that very fact I am now feeling a bit disconnected from everything, it’s becoming a problem. Hmm, time to think about something else before existential dread and depression sink their grabby little claws in me.

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Let’s see, I inspected my clutch mates, but I can’t exactly inspect myself much.. Well I guess I can at least look over at my- what the hell? Great, I am born a freak, it seems. Why am I reacting like this, you ask, oh voice that I have been neglecting so far? It seems that while I realized my last limb is a special tail, it did not come to mind that none of my siblings have two fingers at the end of theirs. But I do. Or rather my tail splits in two close to the tip. Not only that but it seems that my tail is split in coloring roughly down the middle. With my right side being painted rusty red, while my left side has washed out blues and greens, the split being where each tip gets separated into its own color. Am I a genetic chimera then? Born from an egg with two yolks, both fertile, both starting to make little dragon babies but I ended up devouring the other one because of limited resources? That’s sad. Is it at least fully functional? Well, I can move both tail tips at once and can also seem to move them separately pretty well, after all I did mistake it for a huge arm at first so I guess this is fine. Just fine.

Now let’s hope the fact that I am a mutant will not make my mother think I am not worth raising. Who knows what makes a runt when it comes to dragons. More problems to navigate. More things out of my control. I really hate this feeling, but there really is nothing I can do to get rid of it, so I just ignore it, and try to look around the room, while I still have the energy to do so. A quick glance is really all I need to realize that I am getting closer and closer to confirming that I am, in fact, a fantasy European dragon. After all, from here on the edge of the nest, I realize that we are raised off the ground by being on top of a pile of valuables. It’s hard to get detail of each individual thing but I am pretty sure we’re on a small fortune of gold, silver and gems.

There’s also stranger stuff. Like an actual giant sword sticking out the side of the pile, that looks way too much like a claymore. It even has the ornate angled cross guard! It does not look like steel, though, or if it is steel then somebody painted over it, because it looks perfectly white, maybe changed in tone just a bit by dust, and it has strange patterns painted golden along the blade and on the guard. It even has what I can only assume is a regalia, some kind of flower impaled by a spear. So, an ornate sword, interesting. It’s not even the only thing that looks straight from medieval times, seeing as there’s even pieces of a suit of humanoid armor scattered about, together with a few other weapons, but none are as ornate as the sword.

Now, the thing that really drew my attention the most: the lamp. Well, it’s not a lamp, really. It does remind me of those salt lamps, being an uncut crystal that exudes white light, however this one doesn’t have wires, it’s transparent like glass instead of a shade of orange and is just placed on a rough pedestal made of stone, which I think might just be a big rock in the end. It’s not even just one of them, there’s at least 5 spread around the room, probably meant to keep it lit up since I do not see a direct exit with natural light anywhere around.

So, to recap, I am one of four baby dragons, sitting on a hoard of valuables in a cavern lit up by weird crystals. This is a fantasy world, straight up a sword and magic kind of fantasy world. Sure this is just my first overview from details spread only around a single room inside a cave, but still, it all points towards me being reincarnated somehow into a fantasy world, as a literal dragon at that. Once again, dream come true, at least if I ignore the metaphorical writing on the wall.

The problem, then, is what can I do now that I have observed all that I can. I still can’t walk around, I know, I tried. Either my muscles are still too weak, or I am still too fat. I mean, the others look like overweight munchkin kittens, so it’s no wonder I can’t exactly walk well like this. The others are just sleeping, breathing peacefully. I hum, a strange sound coming out instead, and decide that I can’t just go back to sleep by virtue of simply not being tired. So I try to focus on my body. My breathing is still strange and fast, but it feels so effortless that I can barely even notice it, despite the fact that I actually strained my body by moving around.

Hmm, let’s see, what else, I can see my snout! Somewhat. It’s bluish, just as pale as the other’s, and that’s about it.

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I am bored. Very, very bored. So, while listening to some rock to keep my brain active, I try my luck at using my tail as a hand. I throw it over the side of the nest, then spend close to 5 minutes just trying, and failing, to grasp a coin. Scales, to be fair, aren’t known for how they stick to stuff, so it makes sense it takes me a while to figure out how exactly to wrap something to make it stay. Still I get a coin and I get to analyzing it.

Honestly it kind of draws my attention more than I expect. It does look very realistic and has a beautiful design, showing that it might be actually minted currency and not just a decorative piece. It’s shaped more like a polygon than a circle, probably beaten into shape rather than poured into a mold. Or maybe it’s just from the wear and tear… It also has a particular smell, not just of metal, but of life and growth and power and more! And that intrusive thought makes me stop and think a bit deeper. Why does it feel like that? Why does scent give me these abstract ideas and thoughts? Alright, dragon instinct I guess. That’s bad… Or is it?

We, humans, like to think we beat our instincts and that’s why we are above the rest of nature, but we haven’t. The acceptance of others is part of our social nature, an instinct to be accepted into the whole so we may survive easier. The fear of the dark and the unknown are instincts. Really if you break down everything that a person does, there’s a good chance you can trail it down to some survival mechanism, an instinct passed down through genes for generations. Sapience simply grants the ability to analyze and override a few of these instincts with enough effort. So now I have a bit of a bird brain situation, being excited about shiny stuff, but I can make do if I just work towards keeping that in check.

Still, I do have to try, is this really gold? How can I try though? Well, one thing that I know about gold is that it is fragile. Sure, it doesn’t react with much of anything and it’s basically impossible to truly destroy, but it does scratch and bend easily, so I guess I can try that. Do I even have teeth? A quick check with my tongue gives a resounding yes. Not only do I already have grown teeth, but they seem pretty damn sharp. All of my front ones seem to be either canines, sharp and thin, or wider but equally sharp ones that kind of remind me of shark teeth, but I do also have a few flat ones in the back. That is strange since I expected dragons to be obligate carnivores, but I guess being an omnivore helps with the ludicrous caloric consumption a giant flier would have.

Regardless I focus back in the moment at the coin in front of me and try to test it. While my tail can pick it up, it does not have the force or joints required to squeeze it, so I use my mouth. It’s actually easier than I expected to just grab it. It’s tiny, to be fair, and having an elongated mouth makes biting stuff easier. Now that I have it between my front teeth I angle my head to the side and lead it with my tongue to my molars, biting down on it, lightly at first, then slowly using more and more force.

I feel just a bit of strain, but not more than I felt in my past life biting through wood or metal sheet. That is interesting to note. What is even more interesting, though, is what happened to the coin. I spit it out and the thing is, plainly put, punctured straight through. There is a bit of flat sheet left behind, but I managed to put a hole through a gold coin. Not an impressive feat if this is pure gold, but still it is something to note. Wait, did I seriously just… I just picked something up off the floor and put it in my mouth then bit it.

I literally used logic to talk myself into acting like a baby.

What even is life?