~~~

At first, there were only brief flashes of emotions; joy… interest… expectations...

These feelings persisted until something tried to connect with it… and failed. There was an immediate change to the emotions being received. Sadness… disappointment… and the most confusing and painful one, regret.

It couldn’t understand why it was hated. It was just an egg. Suddenly, images were pushed into its mind. It was a dragon, its form hazy and non descript. It stood all alone in a forest clearing, dark eyes gleamed out from the trees at the strange dragon, clear floating boxes appearing in front of the eyes as they seemed to look between the boxes and the dragon. The dragon didn’t have any floating boxes. The boxes in front of the eyes disappeared as the eyes stared at the dragon again, but this time with emotion. Some seemed to sneer, others looked with disgust, some even seemed to hate this strange lone dragon. The shadows of the trees started to stretch, capturing more and more of the clearing in shadow, the eyes moved closer with them! Getting closer and closer until-

The mind-image snapped off and some final words were given. The first and last the egg’s parents would ever tell it: “Goodbye, systemless.”

The egg didn’t understand! It didn’t yet know what words were, nor what a system was! Yet instead of an understanding parent, it was pushed from the nest. It rolled out of the shallow cave and began to bounce dangerously down the mountainside. As it helplessly rolled it bounced off of tree roots and rocks, crashing straight through bushes as it somehow continued to pick up speed until suddenly, it bounced off a root and smashed into a boulder! Pain filled the egg as a crack formed on its top, the energy of the uncontrolled descent now using the rebound to send the cracked egg skyward! It spun end-over-end in the air as it arced far up and then back downward in a beautiful parabola arc before splashing deep into a muddy bog with a loud *Splurp!*

Pain continued to envelope the egg and it felt its energy begin to drain away into the swamp. It realized, in a panic, that its egg fluids were leaking out from the crack! In an act of pure desperation and a show of draconic willpower, it shoved its half-formed tail into the crack, plugging it. Yet, while it had saved its life by doing this, its almost goopy, half-developed tail-tip was now exposed to the air, mud, and germs of the swamp. Unimaginable pain coursed through the tail-tip as it continued to be unreadily exposed to the world. Unable to do anything else, the half-formed embryo drifted off once again to unconsciousness, now alone and in great pain.

As the egg slept in the warm, life-filled mud of the swamp, the tail-tip swelled, then hardened from early exposure, the outer layer quickly becoming rigid and dead, while the inside of the tail-tip did its best to fight off the germs, infections, and parasites that tried to feed and multiply under the nearly defenseless egg’s shell. Still, dragon blood is a powerful thing, and an unborn dragon’s embryo is an object of limitless potential. Instead of fighting against the germs and infections, it adapted to them. Letting them mutate parts of its flesh as long as there could be symbiosis. Anything that didn’t accept symbiosis found itself quickly overrun by the egg’s new parasitic hosts. And so the egg’s yet-hatched occupant continued to fight off death and develop, alone under the mud of the bog.

One year later, a particularly eventful night occurred. The egg was momentarily roused from its long slumber as the entire forest shook with the rage of its kind. The warm mud around the egg rippled from the vibrations, pulling the egg a little deeper into its warm embrace. The egg could tell it would be time to hatch soon. It had lost some initial muscle development and power with the leaked egg fluid. It didn’t notice that though. It was still just an egg, all it had was the determination to successfully hatch. And just like that, it fell back asleep.

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It awoke with a start. It was time, no longer was it the egg, now it was its prisoner and it wanted out. There was very little room as it tried to struggle and shift, coils upon coils and tightly packed scales flexed and squirmed, trying to weaken its container until it pushed at the tail-tip and a crack quickly re-formed along the edges. The old wound of the egg, once its doom, would now be its salvation. It used its hardened tail to push out a little before pulling back in, slamming it back into place hard enough for the crack to quickly spread. It did it again, once, twice, before the top of the egg shattered around it all at once. Yet, instead of being greeted by its first rays of sunlight, thick swamp mud poured into the egg! It quickly started pushing up through the mud, desperate to escape its surrogate mother’s deadly embrace! It continued to squirm its way up, up, up, through the seemingly endless mud. Its new need of air becoming more and more urgent!

Just as its senses started to blur and it started losing strength, it managed to claw its way to the surface, pulling itself into the light of its first day! It opened its little jaws and began sucking in desperate breaths of much needed air. It slithered and sloughed its full body out of the muddy bog and onto slightly more solid land, the indent of its form quickly replaced by mud with a wet, sucking, *Thwupp* noise. Set free upon the world at last, it let out a mighty draconic roar!

…

Unfortunately, its troubling circumstances while being an egg made its triumphant roar sound more like a sickly, rasping squeak.

It didn’t mind, it was distracted by something much more important. The difficult hatching had left it with a horrific hunger that already gnawed at its virgin stomach. Base instincts had it flicking its tongue in and out of its draconic snout, tasting for the smell of prey in the air.

The pungent smell of decay filled its senses, making it sneeze. While this was a swamp and such things were probably to be expected, somehow the hatchling knew that whatever had died, did so not too long ago. The rot smelled fresh.

It followed the scent around the edges of the bog until it happened upon it.

In an open aired gap between the swamp and the dense forest was the massive carrion of… something. Not much remained of the beast. The head was missing, the withered, decaying flesh barely clinging onto bits of a ribcage clearly smashed and torn open by some great beast. Deep claw marks were visibly scored across much of the carrion, indicating that something powerful had ripped this creature to shreds.

Thankfully, a dragon didn’t care about such things. A properly raised dragon would slay any that even suggested it could eat the rotten remains of another predator’s meal. But the hatchling had been abandoned, its knowledge currently barely above that of a common beast’s. It had some inherited knowledge like all lizards did, but it didn’t know how to use such knowledge yet.

It slithered up to the carrion, the hatchling’s body barely as thick as one of the thing’s ribs, and started to tear into the remaining flesh. The taste was just as foul as the smell, and it could tell that there were many insect eggs already implanted into the flesh thanks to the many small popping sounds the flesh made as it was chewed, but lacking the experience of a proper meal, it assumed that was just how food tasted. It continued to consume the fetid flesh until the bones had been truly picked clean. Then it gnawed on those too. It hadn’t yet had the strength to crack these bones however, so it eventually gave up and slithered away, now looking for water or shelter.

It continued to move along the edges of swamp and the forest, using the many tall, prickly, weeds as a cover against other possible predators in case any happened to be around. It hadn’t seen any tracks around the carrion after all, as if the thing had just dropped from the sky.

It searched for a spot where the swamp possibly connected with a cleaner body of water. It was desperate to quench its thirst by now, yet it instinctively knew its stomach would hurt if it drank the dirty sludge that was more mud and rot than water. The area was mostly an impressively immense bog to be honest. Yet, it did have some sparse patches of weeds and the occasional large, bog-wood tree, the plant life probably being fed by whatever dumb beast didn’t notice the danger and drowned in the near liquid earth.

It continued on, constantly on high alert for any signs of other creatures, yet all it saw were various insects, their constant buzzing almost deafening to its ears. Eventually, it happened upon what it had been searching for. A small creek fed into the swamp, likely one of countless others, but it was the cleaner water the hatchling had been searching for.

~~~