Wistala, how strong you are! Mother thought.
The smell also meant death. She saw a red-scaled hatchling lying dead on its side, blood still trickling from its torn throat and stomach, brief life over already.
She knocked an empty broken egg out of her way, freed one hind leg. She could see more of the cavern now. Her mother rested on a ledge halfway up the side of the highest part; the rest was like a dragon’s muzzle, narrowing with teeth in the form of dripping stones meeting, though in a haphazard fashion when compared with a dragon’s regular rows.
Something moved at the edge of the precipice, and it took her a moment to recognize it as another hatchling. With its head down over the edge and its gray, black-shadowed skin, her sibling resembled a heap of oddly shaped stone.
It had no scales. A moment later she got a mind-picture of a mighty grown gray dragon flying over a mountain that hugged ice between its vast arms—some dream out of the past or from her brother’s future?
Her sibling turned on her, baleful red eyes under his shieldlike eye crest wild and staring. He cocked his head at her and tested the air with his tongue. With that, he strode up to the corpse as though he owned the shelf and dug at the succulent fresh flesh.
The fire left his eyes.
If he thought anything of, or at, her, she could not tell.
Help, Momma, please help, her sister thought.
Wistala wanted a mouthful of that feast, but suppose the gray hatchling objected? She looked behind, saw her sister still struggling against her egg. Jizara had managed to get her head and neck out, thanks to the sharp prong on her snout—why, I have one, too—but hadn’t so much as cracked through with her back.
Too hard!
Wistala turned, slipped on the drogue still attached to her belly, and pushed herself clumsily sideways, still learning what her legs could and couldn’t do, until she stood alongside her sister.
Come, Jizara, come with me to the blood-smell! A fine feast is disappearing down our brother’s throat.
Jizara gave a dispirited peep, managed to break a little more eggshell with her neck. At this rate, nothing would be left!
Wistala felt her tail whipping back and forth, seemingly in a nasty mood of its own. She redirected it, and struck the side of her sister’s egg—hard.
The egg cracked.
After that first opening, it was easy. Three sharp blows, and the whole side of the egg clung together, thanks only to a thin translucent membrane beneath. Her sister broke free, lay gasping and squeaking with the effort.
I see what you mean about the smell, her sister thought.
Jizara slunk forward, unable even to raise her forequarters and neck off the ground. The mass of broken egg still wrapped half her scrawny long-necked body.
Can you open your mouth?
Yes, her sister thought back.
Then hang on to my tail.
She felt the prick of tiny sharp teeth biting through the hardly-there scales. Using her forelegs and the untangled rear, Wistala pulled her sister free and toward the meal.
Her brother raised a blood-smeared snout, egg horn trailing bits of viscera, and cocked his head in that funny way of his. He let out a satisfied gassy noise that echoed off the egg shelf wall and trotted down to a trickle of water running down the side of the cavern wall. Wistala followed its musical path to a pool at the base, which was rimmed with thick growths of blue-green lichen. The lichen glowed like her brother’s eyes, but in a far more soothing fashion.
But he left the feast to them.
Wistala tore into it. Better than any dream of flying, the smells and tastes and textures of meat transmitted by her own buds and nerves made the confusion of her hatching fade. The odd sensation of rended flesh sliding down her throat and the pleasant sensation of a filling belly mattered.
A coppery flash and blazing eyes landed atop the corpse. This hatchling held a bleeding forelimb tight to its narrow chest.
Wistala slid next to her sister, tripping on the cursed thing hanging from her belly, and the closing jaws of the copper just missed the air where her nose had been a moment ago.
She flattened herself against the rock, instinctively covering her vulnerable spots. The copper hatchling pounced on her sister, claws and teeth searing as it tried to drive her away from the meal Jizara was too weak to abandon.
Help, Mother! Wistala didn’t know if the call came from one, both, or all three of them.