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The hatchlings smelled Father first, so quietly did he approach the egg shelf. The air around Mother smelled oily but comforting. Father’s scent had a harder point as it went into the nostrils.
Wistala listened to the scrape of his scales and realized he was approaching the egg shelf in a back-and-forth manner, as though inspecting the cavern. She caught a gleam as he passed a thick growth of cave moss hanging from a crack in the ceiling.
Dwarves’-eye, Mother had called it.
Then she saw her father’s head, six horns, bronze scales a blend of liquid gold and blood. So wide, even with wings folded tight against his spine, he made Mother look like a drakka. He walked oddly, limping, holding one leg up against his chest. Had he been maimed in his youth like her copper brother?
“AuRel, meet your hatchlings,” Mother said, inclining her head. “Auron, Wistala, and Jizara, out of their eggs in that order.”
Next to her, Auron quivered when Father gave a snort as he sniffed the hatchlings. He barely acknowledged her or her sister. He ground his upper and lower jaw, setting his teeth clattering.
“Wistala is speaking already,” Mother said.
“Which is she, again? The thick one?”
Thick one? Yes, she was bulkier than Jizara, who was all neck and tail.
“Greet your Father, hatchlings.”
Auron extended his neck and peeped, a bit clumsily in his twitchiness.
“Hello, Father,” Wistala said.
“Wel’ome home, Faszer,” Jizara added.
“Was your hunt successful?” Mother asked, to break the silence.
“Not very. A sheep and a tired goat. I’m going to have to try in the foothills east.”
“That means men,” Mother said.
“I remember,” Father said.
He reached out with his foreleg and dropped the carcasses. “You have the sheep, Irelia. The hatchlings can divide the goat.”
“I’m full up on slugs,” Mother said. Wistala only remembered Mother eating one slug, the slimy creatures that ate the cave moss, bat droppings, even dragon waste. “Let them eat. Eat, you three.”
The hungry hatchlings tore into the bled-out feast. Not a trace of warmth was left, but their appetites were such that it didn’t matter.
“I’m for sleep,” Father said, winding himself around a towering stalagmite. But his tail still thrashed and his teeth ground.
“What’s the matter?” Mother asked. “I’ve no appetite, honestly.”
“It’s not that.”
“What, then?”
“There weren’t any grays on my side of the family,” Father grumbled.
With that they fell into an argument over Auron’s merits.
Wistala couldn’t think of many, unless being a nuisance counted as a merit. Mother changed his mood by praising him for siring two males—the skulking copper counted, as he seemed to be surviving on his own somewhere in the cavern. As Wistala understood it, all the males fought after their hatching until one became the champion of the nest. She and her sister were afterthoughts.
Auron finished his gorge and then, hearing the copper at the base of the egg shelf, jumped down to chase him off.
Perhaps Mother read her mind. She brought her head close to Father’s, began to clean him behind his griff, the armored fans that descended from his horn-crest.
“Oh, of course,” Father said. With that he disappeared into the darkness beyond the moss light. When he returned, he had a bulge in the side of his cheek.
