The world did not come for us immediately. There was a certain cruelty in that.
Days became weeks. Weeks blurred into months. Time slowly lost its sharp edges and softened into something cyclical and monotonous, measured not by hours but by hunger, sleep, and the slow creep of growth. I stopped counting after the first few years as they started to blend together.
The Northern Wastes were quiet. Not peaceful – quiet.
Winds scoured the plains endlessly, reshaping rock and carrying the distant cries of every creature that called it home. The cold was constant, biting but, at some point, familiar. My body adapted faster than my mind ever could. Scales thickened. Muscles thickened, becoming denser and denser. My wings grew broader, heavier, their span brushing the cavern walls I had once thought to be vast. I grew.
My mother watched it all with the careful consideration of a proud parent who worried and hoped for their child.
She taught without lecturing. Lessons coming in the form of corrections, repetition, and long stretches of silence where I was left alone to hone my instincts. Control was not taught – it was molded into my everyday life, again and again until failure was non-existent.
Hunting improved. Slowly.
I learned to circle instead of diving. To isolate my prey instead of crashing into herds. To strike with enough force to kill quickly, cleanly as to not destroy my food. Every mistake was met with the same calm disapproval.
"You are not starving," she would say. "You are impatient."
The hunger never went away. It sat deep inside of me, waiting for signs of weakness. I learned its patterns the way sailors judged storms – not how to avoid them, but how to prepare for them.
Eating became… complicated.
I could not stop thinking about them. My prey. About the life leaving their body. About the finality of it. They did not scream in words, but they screamed all the same. There were moments – fewer as time goes by – where I hesitated with blood on my claws and wondered what all of this meant. My mother never mocked that hesitation.
"Guilt is a poison," she told me once, watching as I cleaned my talons. "Drown in it and you will suffocate to death."
I didn't know what the right balance was. I still don't.
Flying became easier. Natural, Addictive.
The sky was freedom and escape braided together. The wind spoke up there, pressing against my wings, daring me to push myself and try new things. I am ashamed to admit; I fell more than once. The first time, I panicked. The second, I learned. By the third, I trusted myself enough to correct mid-drop, wings creaking in protest as I pulled myself back up.
My laughter still came out as a roar. That embarrassed me more than it should have.
When I wasn't flying or hunting, I explored. The cave system stretched deeper than I had first realized – tunnels branching into chambers filled with mineral veins, frozen waterfalls, and ancient stone formations older than anything I could comprehend. I learned there where not to tread, which stones would shift under my growing weight, which paths echoed too much.
I also learned how small the world was.
There were no other dragons nearby. No voices carried on the wind. No distant fires or signs of civilization. Just ice, rock, and the vast indifferent sky. Occasionally., we would spot smoke far to the south – too distant for me to investigate, too dangerous.
"Not yet," she would say.
That phrase began to weigh on me. I asked questions when I could no longer sit with them alone.
"Are there other like us?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Far."
"Do they hunt people?"
She didn't answer that one immediately.
"Yes," she said at last. "And no. And sometimes."
That was a very confusing answer. I asked about the world beyond the wastes. About forests, cities, rivers that weren't frozen. She spoke of them as places she had seen but never approached. Her words carried no longing – only distance.
"You are safer here," she told me. "For now."
The phrase was chilling. Not yet. For now.
I began to realize something uncomfortable: safety and isolation were not the same thing, but they started to feel identical when stretched over time.
I missed things I couldn't name. The sense of others' minds nearby. The background noise of humanity – voices, movement, contradiction. A robust cacophony of connections. Here, there was only my mother and the vast emptiness beyond her.
I loved her. Fiercely. Familiarly.
That scared me because I knew – instinctively, inevitably – that she would not always be there. Dragons lived long lives, but not infinite ones. And the way she watched the horizon, when she thought I wouldn't notice, told me she was worried about something I didn't know.
One night, curled up beside her, I finally asked a question that had been bothering me for months.
"What happens when they find us?"
Her breathing slowed. Frost glistened along her horns.
"They will come with fire and steel," she said. "They will call it justice. Or safety. Or glory."
"And you?"
"I will fight."
The certainty in her voice made my chest ache.
"And me?"
She shifted, tail brushing against mine.
"You will choose," she said quietly. "And that choice will define you more than anything you were born as."
I stared into the dim glow of the cave, heat flickering faintly beneath stone.
I didn't want to choose. I wanted time. But time, I was learning, was never benevolent. It was a pressure. A constant force that moved you whether you wanted it or not. Outside, the wind howled across the wastes.
Somewhere far beyond the horizon, the world turned – unaware, uncaring, but moving inexorably closer.
Fate… is a fickle bitch.