Even in her mother’s womb she could taste the pain of the war, and it was exquisite. She could hear the cries of those trenched deep in bloodlust, feel the heavy brush of ill magic that coursed through her mother as she rained down on those below her – those beneath her. Volaire heard every croon her mother sang as she poured out her power, Evrae had never been modest in her wieldings of great power, but then again, why the fuck would she?

 

But then, suddenly, the wamth and the magic were gone and she felt suffocated and alone. Her mother’s heat was emptily replaced by the cold rigidity of a shell that curled her long legs up beneath her and left her with a smothering instinct to get out.

 

The girl shifted within the tall, sunshine scaled egg that had been laid atop the tallest knoll in the Valley. A hiss of breath filled her lungs with fluid and so at once her hooves became talons and her milk teeth chiseled exquisitely into predator’s sharpness. Her taloned-wings burst out easily against the thin walls of the egg, the small golden dragon screeching loudly as she thrashed the shell apart and breathed her first breath. A breath filled with smoke and blood.

 


The sunshine dragon squealed as she scrambled from the wet, broken shell. Bright eyes searching eagerly for the power of warmth already missed from her mother’s belly. But there was no one to greet the shrieking child as unfamiliar grass tickled her scaled stomach and a shadow pup ventured to her side. A low growl reverberated in her throat as it came close to the Valley-born girl.

But it’s company was not enough and the dragon girl screeched again, heart beating wildly in her fire-chest as another’s song answers her cry – a dragon’s song. Volaire grips the grass with heavy nails as she rakes herself across Valley ground, her pearlescent eyes catching the one who sang to her.

And so she went to the golden dragon, with teeth and claws like hers.