Awakening from his slumber, the soon-to-be-born pup, Maxim was feeling himself getting compressed by something warm and fleshy.

During his beauty sleep, he grew quite a lot thanks to the very consensual participation of his sibling.

He was roughly one meter(3.28ft) long and now he is nearly two meters(6.56ft) in length, his wingspan for both of his flippers being approximately the same, the one on his back being a bit bigger than his pectoral ones.

'I'm getting birthed!', he directly understood, excitement filled his entire being. He felt the muscle around him contract as they pushed him out, head first.

All happened very fast as he felt himself wiggling and moving his tail from left to right as he left the shockingly cold water to enter his three sets of sensitive gills slit for the first time. He shivered at the alien sensation.

Between his pectoral flippers was the shredded remain of the umbilical cord that was sending oxygen until now, directly from his mother during the last few months.

It wasn't really painful when it was shredded, just unpleasant.

He was currently disoriented, with his many news and hypersensitive senses bombarding him with information at the same time.

His ears were constantly moving as if they had a mind of their own, picking on every minute sound.

His snout smells everything in the surrounding, and his sense of smell is incomparably more powerful than a human's.

He could smell himself, the smell of blood from the shredded umbilical cord, and his mother.

And also the overpowering smell of fear coming from the latter while also every other unfamiliar scent of the cave.

With this same snout, he could feel something new, it was a mix between smell and hearing, he was sensing the surrounding electric field. Like a shark or a manta ray would.

There was a big one just above him, his mother and he could sense her heartbeat, it was extremely erratic.

He didn't know what it exactly was at the moment, same with the smell of fear, the only thing the latter did was make him feel strange and jumpy.

He could sense something else, he also didn't know what it was. The pup was currently sensing the bio-energy in his body, the biggest and most powerful source, he could moreover feel another source above him.

This one was weak and small compared to him, the water in the cave was containing a diluted amount of bio-energy.

He finally opened his eyes when all of his other senses didn't feel like they were trying to violate his newborn brain with information.

Two black eyes with yellow-slitted pupils, opened, he looked around and noticed something big in the middle of his vision, it was blueish green, covered in scale so small and well interlocked together that it would pass for skins.

His scale also had a pinkish hue due to the pin ice reflecting and emitting light of the same color, he currently was in an underwater cave made of ice.

This cave was dug by pigrons, aka the species of his mother, the particular coloration of the ice is caused by said pigrons, and there were three subspecies of them.

Each variant sporting minor physical distinctions from one another, and the major difference is their scales pigmentation ranging from pink, and purple to red.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Those ice caves most often than not were connected to the sea and partially underwater, they were localized in the coastal area of the region named in the future Hoarfrost Reach. An immense arctic region of the New World, a continent.

'Oh… That's my snout. And I'm of this color now and have scales that I didn't even notice until now.', he thought while his target of attention changed, his brain automatically ignored his large snout from his line of sight. It was still here just ignored.

His eyes landed on what looked like the chimeric spawn of a dragon, a pig, and a walrus at the same time.

Maxim also smelled the water and could instinctively tell that the animal above him was his mother.

And he instinctively bared his fang at her, then growled while slowly swimming backward with his three very flexible and agile sets of flippers, that also could very well serve as wings not that he currently knew this.

His eyes softly glowed accentuating their intense yellow color, then the surrounding water started acting strangely, as if alive.

With this Maxim felt a strange and deep connection with the water and more, it was a very supernatural feeling if reincarnating as a new species wasn't already but he pushed these thoughts aside for the moment.

His reaction was caused by the way she looked at him, her body language, the smell everything screamed to his new instincts that she was afraid of him, absolutely terrified of him even.

In the female pigron's mind, the pup she just gave birth to, was wrong, it was incredibly wrong, it was the wrong size, the wrong color, the wrong shape, and the wrong smell.

She knew it was her pup, a male to be precise, but that didn't change the fact that every fiber of her being screamed at her to flee. Flee and never come back.

Yet she was also paralyzed in fear and so she bared her fangs at her pup, mostly out of the fact that she felt trapped, caged, an animal in a corner And it was the only response she come up to.

This is why Maxim reacted like this when he saw his new mother. It was greatly confusing, why was she like this? What was going on? Was she going to attack him?

Those were the questions going through his mind as he continued to growl, even more, making himself more menacing and appear bigger by spreading his flippers apart.

She could hear the growl coming from Maxim, this growl made her even more terrified, the staring continued for what felt like an eternity before she snapped out of it and swam as fast as possible to the surface of the ice cave, her destination the air pocket above the water.

She quickly reached her destination and flew away, to hopefully never meet this thing ever again.

He might be her pup but morals were a human concept and even with them it was a fickle thing, and she wasn't one, to begin with. Nor even knew of their existence.

She didn't kill and then ate Maxim as he terrified her on an instinctual level. Because that is what a mother should do to her malformed pup. It was like this.

'Ah…okay… I feel sad and at the same time angry.', the newly abandoned and extremely confused pup thought. He was also surprised by how he acted and how right it felt to act like this.

His body progressively relaxed, he stayed motionless like this for some time before coming back to reality.

'I just got abandoned. I…fuck it. At least I'm alive. She abandoned me so be it. It won't stop me from living.', he declared to himself.

The mix of his body instincts and his 'human' mind was greatly confusing him about how he should feel about this, though.

He didn't look like his mother, which didn't mean much but her reaction told him his appearance is quite unusual, to say the least.

And so.

He could roughly understand the reasoning behind it, animals(also humans) abandoning their offspring to their fate for x or y reason was a common occurrence, so common that when it doesn't happen it can be considered a rarity.

Animals truly 'caring' for their offspring is a small percentage of the animal kingdom. And even then, it was survival of the fittest, they weren't above eating, killing, or abandoning them if they felt the need to.

It was life and life was more often than not cold, cruel, and chaotic. But it was one of its many facets, it's not only black or white.

Anyway, he was now alone in a world he didn't know, as a species, he didn't know. Which he found was strangely exciting, so many things to feel, experience, discover, and more. So many things that would have been impossible for him as a human.

Now that there was nothing but him, he felt how he moved his gills drawn in water and also expelled water with their respective muscles and with the help of his mouth and snout.

It was very different from the human way of breathing, it was a bit odd but the oddness rapidly vanished, replaced by a childlike excitement.

And he could breathe underwater! Something he always dreamed of, he did scuba diving as a human but this is this and that is that.

He felt that he had a sort of lung-like organ in himself, its use being unknown to him at the moment.

The pup also noted the great difference between him and his non-human mother, she didn't have gills, at least ones like him, and she had fewer wings only two on her back the rest being four small atrophied legs with little claws at the end, his tail was moving left and right while she moved in an up and down way.

He was very different. He didn't even know if he should even count as the same species.

Maxim eyed his surroundings and finally noticed the peculiar color of the ice, he swam closer to inspect it.

His eyes went wide open in shock as he saw for the first time the distorted and blurry shape of his body reflected on the ice.

'So this is me…'