Chapter 12: Breath
Mid Morning - Mid Winter : Year 3 : Home | The Nest
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*Woooom* The crash of each wave was unlike anything I had ever witnessed.. a transfer of energy so ludicrous you could feel the shockwave from kilometers away, yet so physically massive the impacts dragged and stretched like time was being slowed.
*Wooooom* It almost didn't make any sense. -Just how much energy is in those…- Watching the foam roll back down the icy rocks as the next mountain of water neared, my head simply spun. "Are the waves normally.. that huge..?"
Mother was quick to nod. "It's actually fairly calm today."
My breath hitched.
"There have been days I've felt mist from waves crashing all the way up here."
-On the peak?!- My body went rigid. -HOW?!-
A warm smile crossed her face as she watched my reaction with a curious sway in her tail. "You know, we actually had a storm so intense one time, that nearly all the snow on the peninsula tasted salty."
-What..?- Hearing her shift behind me, I quickly got up to follow.
"The waves were so big that their impacts made everything in the Nest rattle, and actually flooded the forest around the base of the mountain."
-Holy shit…- The Nest was kilometers from the side of the mountain the waves were crashing on, and yet, after following Mother to the inner edge of the peak, that sense of scale only warped further. -Wait…-
The forest, the clearing, and the entrance to the nest below… -Why does it feel so much closer than sea level..?- Looking down the rocky and mossy mountainside, my eyes drifted outward, tracing the cliffs and comparing them to the ocean beyond them. -Uh…- "How tall are the cliffs, Mother?"
"Hm…" She paused as she followed my gaze. "Probably a kilometer or so, depending on the weather or time of year."
Suddenly imagining a wave not only huge enough to reach around the mountain, but crash and flood land a kilometer above sea level.. my mind broke…
*Pomf* Sitting down, looking over that glistening strip of snow-buried forest squished between two sparkling oceans, my mind simply ran in circles.. burning to visualize something so incredibly massive, yet running out of steam.
It was like trying to visualize the Lituya Bay tsunami on Earth.. something simply beyond the scale of the human mind…
But it wasn't long for that ingrained, human sense of scale to be shattered entirely.
Noticing my fascination, Mother continued with more stories, detailing how waves would occasionally crest the cliffs, and how animals that wandered too close to the edge would occasionally get picked off by monsters in the ocean.
And after responding to each story with a surge of questions, it ended up turning the whole day into a lecture, not just of the world's scale or the caution we needed when leaving her side, but how I'd one day be the monstrous being everything else feared.
As it turned out, while the existence of twenty meter tall wolves and waves that may as well be mountains of water simply blew my mind and made a chill pass down my spine, dragons were far more unfathomable.
And that was all because of how we grew.
Mother began this lecture simply. "We grow in stages."
Starting as a newborn, or a fresh hatch, we spend about a year growing from a couple dozen centimeters to around a meter tall, before reaching what was called a dragon sleep, something I somehow inherently knew about.
"During these 'dragon sleeps', we enter a sort of hibernation, where we absorb abnormally extreme volumes of mana, and undergo a major growth spurt." A type of growth that other species called 'evolution', a rare phenomenon that rarely occurred naturally.
Outside of dragons at least. Unlike other beings that required extreme conditions to 'evolve', dragons experienced it every several years to bridge between our 'growth stages'.
…'Growth stages' that went as followed: After the first sleep at around a year old, dragons would spend 13 years or so growing from around 3 meters to 10 as 'children', then sleep again to become 'adolescents', growing from 12 to 17 meters over the course of 25 or more years.
The adolescent stage was where dragons would begin fleshing out their frames, growing large amounts of muscle, and awakening the ability to use their mana.
From there, the adult stage came, spanning ages 40 to around 200, and similarly, from around 22 meters tall to 35. At this stage, dragons gained their fertility, and were generally forced out of their 'nests'—their homes—to explore the world, and pave their own path into the future.
It was the stage where dragons started living on their own.
The stage that followed after that was the elder stage, where dragons from around 200 to 750 years old grew from 40 meters to around 64. At this stage, they were considered mature. With sharper features, stronger builds, and absolutely monstrous mana cores, they awakened the ability to use proper transformation magic I.. couldn't fathom at the time.
To put it simply, it was the awakening of the ability to transform a walking city block into something human sized.
"It's quite hard to explain, but think of it like them making their entire body a mana core, and using that unreasonable surplus of mana to squeeze themselves into a smaller frame."
-W..what..?-
"They still weigh the same, so they need to constantly spread their weight across the ground with more magic to not just sink through the ground. It's also incredibly uncomfortable, movements are stiff, and mentally, it's incredibly draining, but at this stage, they no longer need to 'fake it'."
It broke my mind to try and even fathom, but oddly enough, while I yearned to know how it actually worked, and how it was even possible with the existence of physics, I had almost no desire to do it myself.
After all, over the last few years, I had not only grown quite attached to my new body, I had further separated myself from my previous human life. "Is it normal for dragons to transform regularly?"
Mother was quick to shake her head. "It largely depends, but typically only if they're visiting or living in a human nation. It's not only incredibly uncomfortable, but extremely dangerous." She lifted her head with a cold look before taping the claw on her wing against her neck. "Without scales, thick hide, and most of all size, even small daggers can be lethal."
A chill zipped down my spine in an instant.
"But regardless, just consider it a spell woven into your blood that you can only maintain as an elder." Quickly returning to the prior lesson, she continued with a quick explanation of the 'final' stage, called the ancient stage.
Spanning ages 750 to around 2000, dragons would grow from 70 meters to sometimes over 100.
And well.. that was well past what I could wrap my head around. -How is that even possible…-
A two thousand year old creature that was practically a walking mountain… It was an unfathomable being to say the very least. -Is it even possible theres anything that could prey on that..?-
But such were the beings dragons were… The absolute pinnacle of the food chain.
Though, while I assumed we just died from disease or from old age… "We dragons don't really die the same way other creatures do."
-Huh?- It was a possibility that made my mind spin. "Do we just live forever, then?" -How is the population controlled..?-
Staring at the horizon as the sun began to set, she spoke bluntly. "We usually die during dragon sleeps."
My mind stuttered briefly.
"Sometimes, the thing connecting us to our bodies is too weak or too strong, and we die during a sleep... Most die trying to become ancients or in the sleep to step beyond, but it can happen at any stage.."
Words couldn't form on my tongue as I looked up at her, watching the golden glow of the sunset sparkle in the ice covering her body.
"Either way, it's too early to worry about such things." Briefly closing her eyes as if trying to drown out worry welling in her chest, she paused with a heavy breath before looking down at me. "We are all still young, yes, but instead of worrying about things so far away, we should simply make the most of the time we've been blessed with, okay?"
Looking out toward the sunset, the racing thoughts in my mind finally slowed down with a moment of silence.
It was a breathtaking sight—watching the sky and ocean alike shift from a deep blue to a vibrant, fiery orange…
But in that moment, I found myself counting my breaths and blinks for the first time since my reincarnation…
-To think it's already been 3 years…- It all passed in a blink—years packed with love, warmth, and memories I'd have begged to re-live as a human, yet felt no regret as a dragon.
For some reason, I simply couldn't pull my eyes off what was in front of me.
With every passing day, I continued to discover more things that made my mind run wild. Wonder, fascination, and curiosity filled every breath I drew, and watching that unfamiliar star sink below the horizon, I yearned more not for the past, but for tomorrow.
After shedding my attachment to my humanity, allowing immaturity and naivety to reshape my mind to Mother's will, I had found it hard to not wake up feeling like every day was Christmas.
And on that mountain top, it was no different.
Feeling my eyes growing heavy, I laid my head down, basking in the radiating warmth of the sun while wind gently rippled over my scales.
This time around, I was going to make sure I enjoyed my life.. separated from the burdens of time, age, or memory.
And sure enough, after closing my eyes, I slept better than I ever had.. awaking the following morning with a refreshingly unburdened and energetic mind.
Though, while I told myself I would take my time and enjoy every moment to the fullest…
…That promise would be tested sooner than I expected…
Returning down the mountain, we resumed our normal routine, though with one fluffy white exception.
Refusing to leave, Ilios tried to walk into the clearing for weeks straight, and eventually—though not without Mother's insistent resistance—he became a part of the family.
But the passage of time refused to slow.
Spending our days lounging outside, watching sunrises and sunsets, playing, and gazing deep into the stars while Mother fed us stories and knowledge endlessly.. another five years passed.
And before any of us knew it, our 8th birthday, or rather hatchday, rolled around.
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