He could not remove the sensation of the burning electricity lancing through his body in blatant disregard of the toughness of his flesh and scales. Even as he stared blankly at the ceiling, the only thing he saw was strands of lightning arcing through nothingness.

He wasn’t sure how long he stayed like that before something broke him out of it; the smell of meat. His eyes slid away from the ceiling and towards the smell’s origin; a corner of the metal room, where a pile of… something, lay, smelling distinctly of meat.

His body responded before his mind, and he surged forth without hesitation, biting into the slimy red substance. After a few more bites, however, he found that licking it up as though it were a liquid was faster.

There hadn’t been much of the stuff; only enough to fill a dog bowl, he reckoned, but once he was finished, he felt stuffed to the brim.

Absently, he looked around the room; the only thing of note that he found being that the remnants of his egg and the pool of bile were gone. Distantly, he remembered hearing something moving around over there while he had been dazed, but it was completely possible that it was merely his imagination.

He was feeling tired, but something was wrong about the whole situation. After lounging around idly for a few minutes, though, and failing to form any coherent thoughts, he drifted off to sleep.

***

After an unknown period of time, his mind was pulled away from its dreams by a faint humming and buzzing sound a few feet away. At first, his only reaction was to twitch his ears and turn away, but after a few seconds, he suddenly stood with a start.

It was dark, but his eyes had no problems seeing through the darkness. Sliding across the floor of his territory was a small, circular creature. Its carapace was made of metal, and it seemed to feed on his feces, which he did not remember producing.

The pull of sleep had almost killed him! What if the sound that he had at first ignored had been a predator?

‘I need to remain on guard. I am not safe here.’ He thought, in surprisingly coherent words. The strangeness of thinking in words almost helped him to understand what about the situation felt so uncomfortable, but his attention was preoccupied with the circular creature.

His instincts demanded that he kill the bug, but the memory of electricity coursing through his body made him stay as still as a rock.

The creature finished with its feeding quickly, and began moving towards the wall with the mirror. He expected it to collide with the wall, but instead, the wall parted for it, and within a second, it was gone, and his territory was life-free once more.

‘That’s a bug.’ He spontaneously decided, and the sudden usage of words reminded him to continue investigating why he felt so strange. Before he could even begin trying to figure it out, the answer jumped out at him.

It was because he could almost remember things. When he thought of a bug, he could almost understand what it was; it was a living thing, small and insignificant, but he could not bring to mind any examples of a bug, aside from the one that had just harvested his excrement.

He could think of humans, orcs, wyverns and trees- or, more accurately, the words for humans, orcs, wyverns and trees, but he had no clue what any of them were. Moreover, he didn’t know at all why he knew these things. The words were simply... there.

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They came from the same elusive corner of his mind that had been confused by his nature as a hatchling, and even after an unknown but certainly long amount of time, he made no progress in pinning these elusive, confusing thoughts down.

Eventually, he simply gave up. Trying to remember what a human was only made the word more senseless to him; there was no point to it, and it only harmed him.

All of the thinking had made him tired, though…

***

He woke up naturally this time, and for a brief while, he simply thought about the electricity that kept harassing him in his dreams, but after a while, something happened.

Behind him, he heard a soft squeaking sound, and whirled around in an instant; just in time to watch a small amount of the slimy red substance drop from the ceiling to the ground with gross, slimy sounds, and then watch the small ceiling segment snap closed loudly.

He moved forward and ate the meat-scented slime-stuff, but after that, nothing more happened for a long time. He idly tried to figure a few things out, making little progress, until the lights suddenly and abruptly shut off, and his little room was plunged into darkness once more.

This was night-time, and it was when he was supposed to sleep. It made sense to him, and yet, although he was tired and full, he didn’t want to go to sleep. He guessed that the metal bug would show up to eat his excrement soon. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted to see it.

‘What should I do with it if it does?’ He wondered. Should he leave it be? Try to play with it? Hunt it? The thought of trying to touch it at all made him tense up, the idea of electricity burning through his body heavy within his mind.

He waited and waited, and eventually, after an undoubtedly long amount of time, the wall opened, right besides the mirror and right where the bug had disappeared through last time, and the bug came sliding out.

It made a bee-line to his feces, and this time, he let his instincts win. He lunged forth and brought his claws down on the bug, and, contrary to his fears, they broke the bug’s carapace with ease, and no electricity was pumped into his body.

The bug kept moving, though, but after beating it around a couple more times, it went still. A spark flew from one of the holes in its carapace that his claws had made, and, cautiously, he investigated the insides of the bug.

The bug was full of things that he didn’t have words for, and things he was almost certain bugs shouldn’t have. Wires wreathed in colored… something, boards covered in green bits and bobs, little scrubby things for legs that were visible even from inside the bug, and several other little things.

He took a chunk of the bug’s shiny metal carapace as a trophy and placed it in the middle of the room, covered in nicks and scratches left from his less-than-delicate treatment of it, before curling up around it and going smoothly to sleep.

***

When he awoke, the body of the metal bug and his excrement both were gone. The lights in the room were back, and, while he had accidentally damaged it a bit in his sleep, his trophy was still there.

Had another of the metal bugs shown up in the middle of the night, harvested his excrement and then taken its friend away, only leaving his trophy out of fear, or did they simply decompose?

He wasn’t sure; mostly because he didn’t quite understand what decomposition was, aside from that things disappeared over time.

With nothing to do, he stared idly at his reflection. He was a bit larger than he had been when he first escaped from his egg, and his golden scales were a bit darker. His eyes were still a vivid scarlet, but his wings were a bit more firm-looking.

‘Am I full of weird stuff like the bug?’ He suddenly wondered. The way to find out was simple, and came to him with as much ease as controlling his limbs did; he actively grabbed hold of the Aether in his core and spread it throughout his body, effectively ‘feeling’ his internals all at once.

He was not full of the same stuff as the bug. There was flesh and blood and organs, as well as two large, baseball-sized spheres in his chest. The words for the things he was feeling jumped out at him, and he learned that the organs were composed of hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys, intestines, a bladder and a fire gland. The little tubes that were everywhere in his body, a bit similar to the wires in the bug, were veins and arteries, and the spheres were his Ether and Aether cores.

‘Why doesn’t the bug have any of that?’ He wondered to himself.

Nobody answered, and he had never expected anybody to answer, but he had also not expected a large rectangle in the wall to swing open, and he had most certainly not expected for a pair of humanoid figures clad entirely in big, bulky metal armor, just as they were known to do- from what he knew, at least- and move towards him menacingly.