He is born in Pangea, in a narrow canyon with a floor made of sand and smooth shells and the bones of little fish. It sticks to him, this sand and detritus. That is one of the first things he actually knows, that he is sticky, mucky and wet. His mother stares at him with her very bright pink and blue eyes. She is not surprised by his appearance but doesn’t seem to know what to do with him now that he has arrived. Instinctual behavior does not come to her “instinctually”, as it were, and it takes her a long time to decide that she will clean his face and most of the rest of him.

“You don’t look like me” observes the mother, Morgayne, her dark face tilted as she continues to stare at him. At his dark coat with its indistinct pink markings, and the liquid black eyes that stare unblinking right back. She stands, and he does too, unfolding himself and rising up. His mother blinks, takes several steps away. On her face there is an expression he will soon recognize as her own brand of morbid curiosity.
He walks collectedly across the mealy sand and bites down on her pretty pink flank.

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He grows in Pangea, and his mother calls him Bonebone because it amuses her. He has a strange slinky leanness made more apparent by the way his pink markings stand out from his mud-black hide and highlight the distinct edges of bone beneath his tight skin.

The hard earth is furrowed from the passage of water, carved and smoothed and now baked into a strange solid topography. A canyon for small crawlers. Bonebone steps over the gullies and balances on the sandstone ridges of this miniature Pangea. Cocking his head in a smooth, odd way, he observes one of its miniature occupants. A very large stag beetle marches along, it’s segmented legs moving in a slow, deliberate, indifferent way.

He has misplaced his mother, or she has misplaced him. They are much the same in their carelessness, forgetting to look for one another for long periods of time as they go about their separate entertainments. He has not met his father yet, but knows his name is Draco and that he’ll probably see him at some point. Morgayne had told him this absently when he had asked how he came to be, she had been finishing the work of healing a break in his foreleg and is never talkative when at her work.

The beetle tips off the edge of the mesa it has been walking across, landing on its back and pinwheeling its legs around as it tries to buck itself back onto its feet. Bonebone blinks, cocks his head in the other direction. “Oh dear.” Says the boy in his smooth, refined voice.