It takes a while for me to finish observing my body, which lets me notice that I have spikes growing down my spine. That might be useful at some point, or just another redundant defense system. Actually that was one thing that always confused me about dragons. They’re predators, at the apex of the food chain, yet have sharp defenses all over. Herbivores should have spikes and horns, even in dinosaurs this was mostly true. And seeing mother’s horn crown I cannot imagine it being very useful on defense, unless she does a giraffe attack with all her horns hitting an enemy’s body.
Wait does that mean there’s other creatures of dragon size around? Maybe. Regardless those are big musings and I am very, very tiny. Speaking of tiny, Red Tail (Yeah I’ll just call him that, I suck at names) is looking mighty adorable right now as he wags his tiny claw in my direction, trying to get a swipe in. Our legs are still kind of tiny, once again making us look like a slightly wider komodo dragon, so he is failing to actually hit me with them. I laugh a bit then decide to act like a cat and rub my head into him. That seems to calm him down and he returns the gesture.
Once again, cat behavior is the language of tiny predators. Man do I miss that little furball… At least she won’t have to wonder why I am so late to bring her food and scratch her belly....
I crumple and throw that thought in the dark corner with all the books I would rather have burned, and go back to thinking about my new world. Firstly, mother looks different from us, but also similar enough. If not for her coloring and her overall shape I would have thought that she stole us, but no, it seems that despite having twice our wings, an extra pair of legs, tentacles, 8 extra eyes and God knows how many tails, she is our progenitor. So the question then is, how?
Amphibians are a weird kind of creature. They lay eggs inside the water. They do not protect the eggs like reptiles or birds with a shell, but rather keep the fish method. When the egg forms into a baby, if you look at the infant and the mother they would be absolutely nothing alike. Like in frogs, one looks like a tiny fish, the other is a whole land animal. Four extra limbs, no tail, primitive lungs, massive eyes and mouth, a different stance… Are dragons amphibians?
No, that’s stupid and I know it, especially since I am nowhere near water and I have yet to drink anything even though I have lived for at least five or six days by now. Maybe over a week actually. So, dragons are reptilian in appearance, but my blood is clearly warm, so leaning towards mammal? No, mother has no mammary glands, and clearly no fur, and even furless mammals have some hairs. What am I then..? Ah. I’m a god damned bird.
Really the fact that mother has feathers should have clued me in earlier, but hey. Well, actually she only really has tail feathers, her wings seemed the same leathery type we got, so maybe leaning more dinosaur. Heavily modified dinosaur. It could be that we will slowly start growing other parts, but that will be very strange. After all designing completely new structures, especially complex ones like eyes is pretty much impossible. Well, there’s axolotls but we don’t talk about those adorable abominations.
Well, let’s keep this in mind for later, I am not exactly looking forward to observing the world in 360 vision, with upwards of 10 different viewpoints. It will probably be pretty disorienting. And I can’t even stand here and imagine that because I feel someone nibbling my tail. Right, they are just dinosaur cats. Of course they’re going after the tail. It’s Spots (again, I suck at names) doing it too, since Red Tail’s still rubbing his face into my neck. I did not have siblings in my past life but this is about what I expect it will be like until we grow up. Let’s see, communication. I nip at the air and it seems to scare him away from me for a second, then he tries going right back to it but is rewarded with a light tap on the snout, to which he answers by falling on his side and clawing at the air with his front legs. He’s so precious!
Really it is strange how easy it is to control my tail, it literally feels like a mix between a tongue and an arm, but farther away than either. My wings also feel sort of like long, flat hands as I open them up, like I would spread my fingers, noticing the pitiful wingspan, then fold them right back. I think my mind is translating dragon signals into human ones, let’s hope that doesn’t become a problem in the future.
Where was I? I swear I wanted to check something out. Ah! The rocks and metals! I kind of collapsed last time I tried, so time to try again to figure out if the weird hallucinations are normal. I pull away from my brothers, letting them go back to playing with each other, and turn to find a bit of close to everything. It takes maybe ten minutes to make sure I got a sample of every different material. And I have to say there’s a lot. I am not a jeweler, so I have no idea if the deep blue is sapphire, tanzanite, alexandrite or some other exotic stone, but I can see that it is a finely made crystal and all the other ones are similarly beautiful gems.
There’s a whole rainbow of crystals out here, even ones whose color does not fit on the rainbow, like transparent, white, black even a brown one. Even the coins aren’t all just silver and gold. There’s coppers and even something silvery, a bit bigger than the gold and with very few other similar coins in this pile, which leads me to believe it might be platinum. It’s really the only valuable metal I can imagine being used as a higher, rarer currency than the gold.
Regardless I take my small pile of valuables and brush them with my tail into a corner, a bit away from the others. Tails are better limbs than I expected. Really lizards just don’t really use them as well as they could. Argh, my brain’s been so short on focus, and I swear I wasn’t this bad before. Well, if you think about it, babies are supposed to have no attention span, going from one interesting thing to another in order to learn like the sponges they are. I guess that plus actual adhd makes thinking kind of hard.
One smack to the back of my head later and I am right back to the experiment. Firstly, the gold, just to make sure again that it does smell like it should. Yep, still power and growth. Then comes the silver and I smell the cleanliness and freshness as well as power, but much less than the gold. Really it gives me the feeling of a hammer being compared to a rapier. Both can kill, sure, but one will crush things into paste while the other is precise and clean. I think the smell of purified air has a correlation to the fact that silver can purify water and the like. Maybe I just detect that happening with my new nose. I move on and the next thing to check is copper. It’s.. copper, mostly. It smells like copper and a little bit of something more, but mostly just metal.
A bit of a break is needed since apparently metal smelling metallic gave me whiplash, but I am right back to checking the next fancy thing, the platinum. It smells like so much more. It’s pure in a way. It smells like the beginning of a journey, like a blank sheet of paper, like a freshly opened book and knowledge and power so much more raw than whatever the gold had. If anyone else can smell this, it’s no wonder they used it for the biggest coin.
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There sadly are no other coins for me to test and see if there is anything else different, but it doesn’t matter as I have all the gems still. I check again the blue one and it is still the ocean. Still and powerful. I move on from it to the light blue one and the air feels cold, no, my lungs feel cold. I exhale and it feels like I just had a mint, and I can just imagine the freezing mountain peak. Alright, then this bright red one is-
Like snorting cinnamon. I took too deep a breath and it hurts. I cough and curl my head downwards, slapping it with my front legs as I struggle to get that heat out of my body. That was straight fire going into my lungs and it did not feel good. Once I calm down and look around to notice Red Tail looking at me from a way’s away, I go back to sniffing crystals. I swear there’s a joke here.
Anyway from my sample of three crystals I am starting to form an idea and I am vibrating with excitement. Magic. It might just be that what I am smelling is magic. Red for fire, deep blue for water, bright blue for ice (which is strange as ice is mainly white or transparent but whatever), it all makes some pretty good sense. I look over at the artificial light from before.
A transparent crystal, continuously making light, no cables or anything. I stroll up to the stone it was placed on, and try to climb my way up. I am not strong enough or light enough to just climb a sheer stone surface, but this is literally just a rock, not even cut in any fancy way, so I manage to make it after trying for a minute. Once up I see it’s not just a transparent crystal, but there is something trapped inside. It looks like.. no I genuinely don’t know what to say it looks like. It’s a 3d geometrical shape and modern sculpture in one. Reminds me of those optic illusions but this one is actively moving inside there and it seems to be the actual glowing bit, not the gem.
I sniff the crystal and it is what I expect. It is the smell of sun baked stone, the sensation of warmth as you lay down to bask in the sun. Honestly, since I pretty much look like a lizard, I am tempted to just hug the sun crystal and just exist for a bit, but I shake myself awake and step back from it. So, that is either a super high tech lightbulb, or straight up magic. Yeah no it’s just magic. And not only was that crystal magical, it was enchanted to act like a permanent source of light. I can only guess that the transparent crystal actually has enough mana to keep it going for so long. That’s a lot of energy if you think about it, but I do not know how much physics play a part in sorcery.
So, there’s magic, and crystals play a role in this. On one side I am glad about the fact that I do, at least, know a lot of precious and semi-precious gems and rocks, but on the other I have limited knowledge of what each might be associated with. When I was collecting them my mind was more about how cool they were and not what ethereal energy they were supposed to give you. Who knows, maybe the ideas wouldn’t have aligned anyways.
I go right back to my pile of valuables and now I cannot help but imagine how lucky I am to be a dragon in this world where precious stuff seems to be related to magic. I’m basically a trust fund kid. Did I stockpile my luck from my past life to this one? That would certainly be rewarding now that I think about it. It’s also depressing now that I think about it.
Back to magic. So, then, what’s the black one? I approach the dark crystal and it takes only a single sniff for me to recoil and back away. It’s death. It’s corpses and decay. It is entropy and the end of all things and it looks like a baby claw-sized black crystal. Alright, black magic, literally, left around your kids. Mother, I am starting to think that I gave you too much credit. Or maybe I didn’t give her enough? With magic just being inside precious things, the hoard of valuables with a child nest on top of it makes so much more sense. It might be why it takes us days to get hungry despite being warm blooded, all the mana in these things is somehow sustaining us and maybe even helping us grow.
So then, if all of these have a different type of mana clinging to them, doesn’t that mean that spreading them all around in the pile would let us get as much mana as possible without poisoning us one way or another? It’s why my nose didn’t just burn or freeze last time I took a deep breath. It’s a bit of everything and as such it is nothing at all. Like air. It technically has a lot of poisonous things in it, but in trace amounts so it doesn’t exactly affect us too badly. Even the main thing we use, the oxygen, is extremely poisonous in high concentration. So I guess death mana could help us grow in a roundabout way. Guess I better throw it back in the pile then, and better to stop sniffing random crystals before I end up regretting it.
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As I finish spreading the gems in the pile, I look over at my siblings, who seem to have tired themselves out after playing around too long. My sister, who I might just call Crown or Princess or something, no, scratch that, Princess is a shitty name, even by my standards, let’s stick to Crown, seems to be the only one awake, as she is looking down at the others, bumping her head into them and even nibbling on Red Tail’s tail. I look at her and still see nothing that indicates she might be female, but once again my nose tells me that she categorically is. You do you, nose. You do you.
I don’t actually know how tired I am. I might have more energy than before, but I don’t want to keep collapsing randomly, and I swear my body isn’t giving me any signals by itself so I try and look inwards to check if there’s any hidden warning bells. Answer: there’s none. At least nothing I could detect by focusing on any part of my body. I can very clearly still feel the world, so why can I not feel tired? Is it just a dragon thing? Am I supposed to just nap most of the time? In stories they are often just lazing around on a pile of gold so maybe.
On the other hand I do not feel even remotely tired so I will just do something different, something maybe stupid. I know where the door is and I am about to crawl away from my crib. I am really getting into the baby mindset here. Of course turning around to jump back down from the nest makes my sister squeak, drawing my attention back. She squeaks again as I pause and she gets up, coming closer, then boops my nose and goes to curl up next to the others. That was fucking adorable.
One melted heart later, however, I am back on my mischief. Why am I escaping the relatively safe nest? Mother seems to not really want to spend much time with us so I am curious what exactly she is doing, and also, what the rest of our home is like. I’m dying to see what a massive dragon even thinks is good decor! There’s also the fact that mother may have an even bigger gold pile that she’s lounging on.
So here I am, walking slowly through the oversized tunnel, which has light crystals embedded into the wall and spread around just enough to not let dark spaces to form. It is strangely smooth and oval, with only the floor being filled with deep cuts, likely from mother’s claws. Strange thing is that there’s plants spread about. Bellow every single light crystal there’s vegetation growing, clinging to the walls. It doesn’t seem to grow too far from it, probably because of the lack of light, but there are plants here. They’re really just green vines with leaves and nothing else, not even flowers. They do work as decoration for an otherwise barren tunnel.
It takes me exactly 43 minutes and 28 seconds of walking to leave the tunnel leading to our nest. How did I figure out a way of keeping time? Once again, songs. I just played music continuously and added up the length of each song up to where I stopped. Improvised stopwatch, obtained!
Now, as for what I find at the end of the tunnel? More tunnel. Way more tunnel. But at least this one’s a fancy tunnel. And maybe a bit of a proof that mother’s a narcissist if the giant portrait on the ceiling is any sign.