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You spread your wings out to glide on the warm current carrying you forward, catching the updraft. Thrakaburzum, Darkness-Bringer. That was the name your mother gave you. Your eyes began to burn with the baleful orange light of a dragon before any of your siblings’, and were always that much brighter.
“Like the Dark Lord’s own, which the tales say radiated both intense heat and deadly cold,” she had said.
Eyes, she taught you, hold a deep significance, and for dragons this is especially true for many reasons, chief among them the power of persuasion your kind hold over lesser beings. It is a subtle and difficult power to use, and thus far your success has been limited to the momentary dazzling of the feeble-minded seals that populate the northern wastes, holding them in place long enough for you to leisurely dispatch them by claw or tooth. Against creatures of more rigid will, such as the voracious ice bears with which you competed and occasionally hunted, your hold over them has proven much more tenuous.
Aside from that, she often said that the measure of one’s inner flame may be gauged by the intensity of the light that flowed from their eyes. That was a special point of pride in your youth which you took to mean - and still do - that you were one of the lucky few that would one day become one of the legendary fire-drakes, the greatest members of your species of which lofty figures such as Ancalagon the Black and Glaurung were counted. Surely it could only mean that you would one day join their ranks and add to the spoken annals of draconic history with conquests of your own.
It did, however, strike you as somewhat odd Mother had named you in the tongue known as Black Speech. Whenever she spoke of the Dark Lord, whom she credited with your kind’s very existence, she always did so with an air of reverence. Black Speech, however, was invented by the one who crowned himself as the second dark lord, whom mother showed none of the respect she afforded his old master.
“And why should I,” she had scoffed when you asked her why, “when he has given me nothing in return? By the Dark Lord I was given life, but I owe the usurper of the title nothing.”
So why, then, did she name you in that same usurper’s language, constructed for his servants? Did she simply choose it because the Dark Lord fashioned no script of his own? Did she suddenly have a change of heart regarding the King of the Black Land? Did she have some other motive entirely? You don’t know, and likely never will.
You snort with mirth. Inscrutable motives or no, she also told you that the utterance of Black Speech could cause physical pain in the ears of elves who heard it, and that suited you just fine. If they would fashion themselves as your foes, you would welcome the opportunity to break them by merely announcing yourself.
