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Somewhere below, he heard his brother, worrying rats from among the offal at the base of the cave wall. He reversed himself like a whip cracking, and dashed back to the carcass.
“Wind and sand, how quick you are! But rest now, Auron. When you’re grown, you’ll have a clutch of your own to fight for.”
“Not sleepy!” he insisted, glaring at his sisters and spoiling for action. They retreated to the shelter of Mother’s left hind, meeping.
Auron belched, and the fetid smell pacified him. But the horse still needed guarding. Mother’s warm belly beckoned, yet he curled himself around what was left of the head and forequarters. If Mother was right, the next horse might be some days off, and he could not bear the thought of the copper making off with such a prize.
Days passed. Once the remains of the horse joined the pile at the shelf base, and not a bite of slug was left to be had, Auron felt bold enough to explore the cave. Should his brother gain the egg shelf, he felt confident enough to teach him a real lesson, though his desire to kill him had ebbed.
While the cave looked like a vast expanse from the egg shelf, it was anything but. There were great pillars of stone that met others hanging above like the teeth in his mouth, only less precisely arranged. There were cracks and fissures too small for his parents but a satisfactory size for an inquisitive hatchling, and places where the ceiling came low enough for him to torment the bats who clung here and there.
Away from the smells of the egg shelf, he snuffled amongst the pools and refuse of the cave floor. Music in the form of trickling water sounded all around; each fall had its own syncopation, from deep plops of heavy drops to the more rapid cadence of little streams splashing from ceiling to cave floor.
Stalagmites were almost as easy to climb as Mother. He tried one in the higher part of the cave, wrapping himself around it in imitation of his father. Finding a comfortable rest, he froze. Rolling only an eyeball, he looked down at his body, almost indistinguishable from the cool stone he clung to. Faint darker bands could just be distinguished amid the gray. Was he developing a different color? Mother said dragons came in many colors, though dragonelles were usually green. His sisters asked endless questions about colors and played with sparkling stones and bits of metal Father gave them. They arranged them in intricate patterns, rhyming as they counted the colors:
Red, Gold, Bronze, and Blue,
To my lord I shall be true.
Copper, Silver, Black, and White,
Who will win my mating flight?
Auron wondered why grays weren’t part of the song. Was something wrong with him? The question worried at him. But only until he caught the scent of a fresh slug trail on his tongue.
Chapter 3
A season had passed. The bats became torpid, their endless output of guano slowed, and the fungus that lived off their droppings shrank back from a carpet of light to spotty patches, little green points like stars on the cavern floor.
Auron, his belly holding nothing but hunger, hunted.
The slug trail was old, but not old enough to fade into the cavern murk with the growing hatchling’s sensitive nose held to the rock floor. The slugs had also slowed with the change in the bats, until they hardly moved from hiding place to hiding place.
Even his sisters, who shared none of his interests or sports, joined him in hunting. Useless in all other respects, he grudgingly gave them credit for slug trapping. Though they were not so active in searching out food as he, they did show some skill at guessing where the mindless soft-skinned prey would be in its wanderings, and more often than not, chose the right perch to while away the day waiting for the faint slurping sound of a moving slug.
Auron’s legs were longer now, the claws thicker at the end of his four digits, divided three long and one short. The hind limbs, more muscular than the front pair, allowed him to leap clean to the egg shelf from the floor of the cavern. The black stripes descending from his backbone were more pronounced now, and his gray had deepened everywhere except his underside, still pale as slugmeat. His leathery skin gave him the ability to wriggle into cracks even his undersize brother could not reach. He and his brother crossed each other’s trails in their endless explorations, and sometimes he caught a flash of copper as the cripple dived into the lake at the base of the waterfall.
The slug trail disappeared into a crack in the floor. The aperture was festooned with dried fungus, full of dormant spores awaiting the trickle’s return. Auron circled the exit and saw that if he shifted a boulder, he could pursue the slug.
He wiggled under one end of the boulder and pressed his backbone hard against the rock. He strained to no effect. He gathered himself for a real shove—and heaved until his vision went red. The rock did not move. His tail whipsawed in his petulance as he came out from under the shelf.
“Pogt!” he swore, using a Dwarvish curse his mother taught him by accident in one of her mind-stories. He brought up his neck in an intimidating arc. He felt something gurgle behind his breastbone, his neck muscles stiffened, and he vomited a thin stream of yellowish liquid at the rock.
Amazing.
He tasted the air around the expectorate. The odor singed his smell buds on his tongue and nasal membrane. He snorted in disgust and turned to find Mother. She would be able to move the rock. He scrambled to the egg shelf.
“Mother, the rock, Mother. A slug went down a hole and a rock is in the way!”
Mother opened an eye. She had grown perceptibly thinner, eating only the leavings from her hungry brood. She closed it again.
“Mother! I need a rock moved. I can get a slug if you move it!” he insisted.
“Quiet, Auron. You’ll drop the bats from the ceiling, you’re making so much noise.” His sisters, waking from their nap, glared at him in agreement.
“It will only take you moments, Mother! Please, I’m so hungry!”
“A rock over a dry trickle, Auron?”
