She flew back to the nest laboriously, and heaved the heavy worm over the edge. It compressed itself and then expanded suddenly, pushing the trailing tip out over the edge, but it was too late. Three tiny beaks had already bitten down on the length accessible to them.

Her children were cute, ferocious, and always hungry. Their downy fluff contrasted with their sharp little eyes and their tiny talons gripped the knotted surface of the nest that cupped them snugly as they 'battled' the 'wily opponent' she had brought them.

A few moments later she dove after the fragment that fell over the edge after the weight of the rest of its body was removed from it. She caught up to it, and with a skilled maneuver, she tossed it up and then snapped it down in one gulp.

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Worms were hard to come by so high above the world. A fluffy cloud puffed itself up below her, giving the illusion that it would have caught the valuable fragment if she'd missed it, but she was old and wise. She darted upward before she glided too far from the island above her.

Her own nest mates had let themselves glide down into the thinner air where the clouds and dragons played, and had never returned. She returned to her nest to gave her children the same warning that all of the young of their little colony received a thousand times before their flight feathers lengthened.

A cat observed her with lazy eyes, tracking her movements out of habit before blinking and yawning. He stood and stretched, and glanced downward toward the puffy cloud, which suddenly scuttled aside on a gust of wind and revealed the contours of the ground far below.

His eyes narrowed with amusement.