The Hatchling

The early morning chill had stiffened the thin bones in the membranes of her wings. Gthera opened her eyes and watched herself stretch and retract, stretch and retract, the left wing. Toward the sky and back to her side. Willing sensation into it again. The scales along her translucent folds were just beginning to go indigo; winter would soon come to the valley.

She rose from her nest high up in the alpine rookery. Along the cliff’s edge, she slotted her toes into the narrow grooves in the rock where she liked to scrape her razor nails while she stood like a gargoyle and bathed in the morning sun.

Another year had passed like a stolen breath. A near silent one. Only a few autumns back, the rookery had been awake and chirping at this predawn hour. Hatchlings warbled while they fed on squealing marmots. Branches used to make their nests cracked and rustled with dryness so late in the year, as her fellows woke from their incandescent dreamings.

Now, the rocky alcoves to either side of her were empty. No, not empty – lifeless. Hoards still sat back against the far walls of each alcove like temptations. Golden baubles, boxes of ivory, and shiny red rocks in the rook to her left. Feathers of various colored birds in great stacks, held down by stones, to her right.

Gthera looked away. These things were cairns now. Gravestones. On days when she allowed her mind to wander claw in claw with memory, these vestiges would reawaken the dead. On terrible days, they plagued her thoughts. She could barely remember the last time she had heard the sky crack with the thunder of unfurling wings.

Human-fire twinkled in the valley below. A lonesome flame held aloft on a branch, followed by another, and then another. She tracked the harried movement of a line of the male ones marching hastily toward the edge of Crimwell Forest.

“Find it, men! Spread out!”

Barking, always barking, she thought. They were speaking in the jagged tone they used when they came hunting for her kind. Climbing the face of the mountain each winter season when their skin sagged against their bones and hunger gnawed away at their dignity.

In their earliest days in the valley, she had offered to teach them how to feed themselves. When they hadn’t understood, she had laid offerings of birds and sea beasts in the forest clearings for them. She had thought them sweet, clueless little things once. Now, she need only think of all the bones of her kind piled high on their fires to remember what humans truly were – vicious and methodical.

At first, they poisoned fish taken from the rivers, which her kind had mistaken for gifts. Then, they offered tokens, luring her kind into traps laden with irresistible baubles for their hoards. Finally when their tricks failed, they came with long black daggers hidden under their furs, in the dead of winter when the hatchlings were long-dreaming.

And there were other bones in their fires.

Gthera celebrated their impending suffering. They would go hungry this season, for she was the last and her own hoard of loved things that had once held her to the rookery was no more. She was leaving. In their dying hour, they would haul their hungered bodies up the alpine peaks blanketed in snow and gold and treasure…and find them bereft of meat to save them. Oh yes, Gthera celebrated.

The sun peeked brightly over the far range. Gthera embraced her own expanse and dove off the face of her mountain. Morning sang to her in the sheet music breezes flowing across her wingtips. Slopes of rock gave way to open air, then tree tops. The forest canopy waved its melancholy goodbye, the pine needles rustling against each other.

Here and there, she saw a human. They were still in a line, moving through the forest like an armored wall. They didn’t even look up as she passed overhead. Twenty of them in total.

The leader cried out, “Anyone?! Anyone found it?!”

Gruff “no’s” barked back at him.

I hope you never find it, whatever it is, Gthera thought as she set her gaze ahead of her, toward the narrow gorge that would take her beyond the valley to the cerulean sea. Where she would go, she couldn’t quite say. It didn’t really matter, so long as she might find new kin to call her own.

A faint mewling whimper rose to her in the air currents. Gthera spread her wings wide and slowed to listen. There it was again. She arched her neck and swept her wings in small circles to maintain the hover. Here and there, the small fires, the ugly human men, the shriveled black hearts. None of them were crying, that she could see.

“Careful, the dragon, men!” shouted the leader.

A splinter of tree wood flew out of the forest below her, aimed at her heart. Gthera could barely be bothered, spitting a lick of flame at it, blowing it to ash on the breezes. She pulled herself a little higher in the air to remove the temptation for them. Didn’t they understand they would already be but dust upon the soil if she so inclined her throat a little lower? If she but coughed a little harder? Gthera sighed, sniffing the pungent romance of the pine, the lulling autumn ardor of the wild verbena – if she set the forest alight these dearest things, which never threw spears at her, would suffer too. If only the humans knew they owed their lives to trees and wildflowers.

The delicate cry caught her ear again. She turned her head and scoured the valley wall.

There, on a distant hillside. A spot of red. Gthera beat out a rhythmic tap-TAP-tap of her wings and soared in for a closer look.

Another human, her mind’s voice spat at her, full of acid. She shook the intrusive words away. It was another human, a very small one. A third yearling, if that, with a red flower in her clover-honey hair made of something the female ones called yarn.

Frail was a tender word for what she was. She barely moved as Gthera’s wings swept leaves over her in landing. Her pale skin was sunken too early in the season, almost blue with frost. Her furs were ragged around her shriveled figure. Gthera took great pains to gently nuzzle her with her snout, blowing slow, steady hot breaths through her nostrils onto the tender thing’s form.

The babe roused at her nuzzling. Its eyes were gray ringed in green.

“Mama…” it wailed only once, before shivered sleep stole it back into dreaming.

The humans are looking for this. She craned her neck back to stare into the forest, below the treeline, willing one to turn in this direction. They’re looking the wrong way!

She turned back and blew more warm air across the thing. Color gently migrated to its cheeks and it rolled over, burrowing deeper into its furs.

It’s alive! It can survive until they come–

–Gthera’s mind quieted with sudden chill. There on the babe’s back, a mark, inflamed and purple at its edges. It wasn’t bleeding, but it had once, if the faint red trickles of long-dried blood were any indication.

She had seen this mark before. Her breath began to hitch inside her chest. She knew without seeing that the spines along her back were fading from their neutral black to raging silver. Her stomach churned inside her. She could feel the roiling acid burbling uncontrollably in her throat. Gthera turned her head and released her sickened flame against the valley wall until it sputtered out.

No, said the suddenly cowed voice inside her, they would not do that to one of their own. But even the voice couldn’t disguise its own uncertainty.

Other bones in their fires. Other bones in their fires!

Gthera chittered with fear and disgust. She peered down upon the tender babe again and warmed it. It gave her something to do while various thoughts stampeded through her head. Thoughts of burning cabins and fleeing forms. Thoughts of claws wrapped around grown men, ripping them into pieces. With the latter, at least, she could prevent the forest from suffering under the might of her vengeance.

But what of the babe?

Gthera took a deep breath. Her back ridge settled to a languid darker silver. First, she would need to protect the babe. Spears would fly. Arrows would patter. Fire would come as a last resort. The forest would forgive her many things, so long as the babe remained safe.

And warm, of course, she thought as her eyes turned to take in the valley again. She must be kept warm while I repay them their own unkindness.

Gthera raised her wings to reach the softest scales along her wing folds. These she plucked gently from her own body, donating the pinpricks of pain to the growing fervor of her impending wrath. Then, she carefully nestled each translucent disc around and over the babe until its furless form could scarcely be seen through the cracks. Already, the babe looked more contented.

Alas, the scales were for other things beside warmth. She would need to find more.

Stay here, little one. As if it could do anything else. Gthera spread her wings and rose into the air. Her eyes scanned the river to the east, the valley walls around her, the gorge to the west that led to the sea.

Like a bullet, she sped toward the sounds of crashing waves, spinning quickly through the gorge, over the heads of men. Salt thickened the air ahead of her, its scent tangy and clean in her nose. She studied the beach below her until she saw it – the bones of a long-gone beast of the sea. Its ribcage cracked as she clamped her beak gently around the end of a rib and extracted it like a rotten tooth. This she laid between the spines along her back, secured, and reached for another, until she had four curved bones as tall as the human men.

A harried sweeping of wings brought her back through the gorge, quickly to the slumbering babe’s side. Careful not to wake the little thing, Gthera rooted the thick ends of the bones into the rocks around her, then pressed their narrow tips together over her, containing her within. It would do. A start, at least.

Gthera took flight again, scanning the valley, ignoring the voice inside her which whispered what compels you to save a thing that would grow to hate you so?

Her body blanketed the valley in great shadow as she flew to the river, where the long algae grew up from the river’s bottom to nearly the surface of the churning rapids. Gthera plunged her beak in again and again, until she had gathered a bale of the slimy stuff.

Again, she returned to the babe.

“What’s it doing?”

“Over there! Hurry!”

They were coming. Their clumsy footfalls fell heavy on the dampened forest soil. They thought they moved with stealth, pfft. The thought made Gthera laugh as she carefully wove the long strands of quickly-drying algae around and between the sea beast’s bones, until like sinew, they netted the bones and fused them together.

“Mama.” The little thing mewled again from within her swaddle of bone and slime. Gthera blew a gentle puff of warmth over her. It would have to last while she gathered the remaining pieces she needed. Her gaze turned toward the alpine rookery.

Gthera passed over the heads of the men, rolling easily away from their splinters of sharpened wood. She passed from cool to chilled air, landing with a slight scramble on the edge of the alcove she had only just abandoned this morning. A bittersweet flicker ran through her body as she realized it no longer felt like home.

We’ll go west, past the sea. She can make that, even as she is now.

Even if she can’t, I’ll carry her. She weighs hardly anything at all.

On a high shelf in a natural cave, Gthera found the hoard of Jonqua, whose wings had been so golden with age he had seemed a beam of sunlight flying freely through the air. He had cherished spider silk. Great puffballs of the stuff sat forgotten, wrapped around stalagmites.

Gthera felt a warming sense of pride as she unraveled the silk; Jonqua would have been honored to know how she would use it.

In an alcove below and to the left of her own, Gthera raided the hoard of Izkima, who prized metal shields from the men who had come to claim her. It contained all save the shield of the last man, who had boasted loudest when he succeeded where so many others had failed.

Gthera took the four largest shields, two blue, one purple, and a silver one splattered in old blood, and flew back across the valley, clutching two each with her lower talons.

When she landed this time, she could see the men coming through the forest, when she peered beneath the canopy. Some already had their swords drawn. Gthera curled herself around the babe and set herself to task. With her gargantuan claws, she daintily leaned each shield against the strands of dried algae, between the four great bones. Then, she licked the edge of the spider silk, catching its delicate fibers on the hooks along her tongue, and spinned it round and round the shields to tie everything together.

Gthera sat back to take in her work. The egg made of bone, slime, silk and shield was nearly complete, save the small opening at the top.

Gthera sang a prayer in her mind, pressed her beak to the opening and blew a fount of molten amber flame into the egg, fusing the various pieces together. There was barely the sound of a mewling yip from within before the thing was done. Peace coursed down Gthera’s spines for the first time in ages.

“--Hark beast! Flee or die!” The first human had arrived, hauling himself over the edge of the lowest boulder, to begin his climb up the slide of rock to where Gthera sat.

Gthera bristled, snarling. The other humans soon surrounded her.

“We know you have the girl,” said the one that led them. The one who sent them up the mountain to the rookery, and rewarded himself with flesh upon their return. Where their skin sat sunken against their bones, his never did.

It had been ages since she’d last used the human tongue: “The branded child, yes.”

It was the men’s turn to bristle. The leader stepped closer. “That is not your concern, beast. Leave rational thought to the minds of men.”

Gthera flamed with laughter, forcing the human back.

“Rational? Last year, you sacrificed a goat you could have easily eaten as food to keep yourselves alive a little longer. Now, you mark an equally useless sacrifice upon a child–”

“–a cursed child. Her own mother saw the seed of her own wickedness. Talking to flowers and singing to the air.”

“As children do, before the depravities of age darken their minds to cinders.”

“We have no qualms with you…yet. Let us get on with our sacrifice. Release it at once, and we will let you live.”

She tutted, deep in her chest. It sounded like charred logs collapsing in a fire. As she gazed upon their collective weakness, the stormy flames of fury within her died to a simmering blaze. She wouldn’t need to kill all of them now; they would cause their own demise, eventually. And the death would be sweeter still for how long it would take.

Finally, she spoke: “You are the curse upon the child. You only seek to spare yourselves an extra mouth to feed, come the death of winter.”

Several of the men looked away. But not the leader. Oh no, never him.

“You should have let me feed you.”

“Men!” he barked. She knew the next: “Attack!”

But something happened she did not expect. The leader bolted forward, up the rockslide toward her, until the bravado left him and he realized he was utterly alone. He turned back to gaze upon the faces of those who had abandoned him to find them fleeing, back into the forest.

“Cowards all of you!”

“Dead cowards at that.”

Gthera’s shadow fell across him. He turned, his legs too frozen to save him.

“It belongs with its own kind.”

Gthera smiled, “She is with her own kind.”

She opened her maw and tore the head from his body like a child plucking the blossom from a dandelion. She watched the rest of his uselessness tumble down the hillside before the body disappeared out of sight over the last boulder.

This will do, she cooed to herself, as she quickly ripped the flesh away from the head. A couple shakes of her beak emptied what little there was inside it to lose. She used her claw to study the skull carefully. Her bite hadn’t damaged it at all. She smiled: Yes, this will do lovely.

With a quick plunk, she settled the skull into the opening at the top of her egg and funneled one last molten breath into the core of it, melding bone and steel, sealing the egg tightly. A gentle light began to glow from within.

There we are, little one, she cooed. Come out, now. Let your new life begin.

Mama?

She heard the girl’s voice whisper inside her own mind.

If you like, you can call me that.

The egg wiggled in Gthera’s claws.

There you go, almost. Almost, you’re so close–

–there was a sudden stirring, as a crack split its way across the egg’s metallic surface. She would be a fighter, with an egg made of shield. And strong, spun tight with spider’s silk.

Just a little further.

The purple shield shattered outward first, as a delicate clover-honey-colored beak made its debut. The hatchling’s eyes were still closed when she gazed up, searching for her mother. They opened, gray ringed in green. Four sharp claws tore through the rest of the egg as if it were made of paper, sending her twirling into Gthera’s embrace.

I had a scary dream, said the hatchling in her mind.

Gthera smiled. No more of those, now…Come, there is much to learn after the long journey ahead of us.

Gthera rose into the air several feet, and waited for the hatchling to extend her wings. She marveled at them, the clover-honey, the indigo on her wing folds, and the spot on her shoulder shaped like a red flower. Then, as if she had always known how, she flapped them, drawing herself up into the air.

Look, mama! I’m flying!

Gthera motioned for the hatchling to follow her toward the gorge. Over open water, they caught the tailwind headed west as she showed the hatchling how to skim across the surface of the cerulean sea and how to bathe in the sun. Gthera rejoiced silently, watching the little thing spin and soar, growing stronger with every beat of her new wings.

She had never much been one for irresistible baubles of gold or silk. Her hoard had always been the horde, lost on the day the last of her kin had died at the hands of men. The aching that had so plagued her was gone. In the way only her heart knew, she had her horde back again.