>>5790785The endless ice fields of the Northern Waste are far behind you now, the ground beneath you patchy with exposed rock and hardy shrubs protruding from the freeze. The odd copse of pine dots the landscape’s more habitable patches, oases of life among the stone and snow. And before you in the distance, growing ever larger as you approach, is a long row of jagged grey peaks topped with thousands of years of snow and ice. Though you had never seen them before these past few days, your mother’s voice is clear in your mind even now, telling you of the warm lands to the south and the vast mountain range that sheltered them from the worst of the endless winter. These must be the Grey Mountains.
You think back to the last time you saw her. Only a day ago you and your siblings, still lived in the great lair your mother had carved into a great glacier decades ago, wrestling with one another and gorging yourselves on seals and the horned whales that swam up and down the channels in the ice. This was how you had spent all the years of your life as you grew and matured, and though the lair never felt quite big enough no matter how deeply you burrowed or how many additional chambers were carved, it was home.
Then one day your mother summoned you into her treasury with a great roar, and when all her children had assembled she looked you over with one burning, orange, heavy-lidded eye as she lied upon her hoard.
“My children,” she rumbled in her deep, old way. “You are grown now. For nineteen full years I have fed you, and sheltered you from harm, and taught you the history and ways of dragonkind. When you hatched from your eggs you were feeble things with soft skins and bleary eyes, no longer than my foreclaw.”
She shook her great neck then, sending loose folds of skin rolling and dancing. “But now I see before me four drakes of the very highest quality. Four you were, and four you remain in spite of snow and scarcity. Your talons are long and sharp, your hides are dense with iron scales. You have outgrown the frailty of your youth and emerged as proper dragons.”
You and your clutchmates preened under the praise. So preoccupied were you all that none noticed the pointed gaze she fixed upon you.
“And now, upon the eve of the twentieth year of your lives, I see that you have also outgrown this lair.”
That brought the jubilation to an abrupt end, and replaced it with a din of clashing voices demanding to know what she meant and what she intended and for one to stop stepping on another’s tail and this and that, until what little patience she was afforded as a dragon failed.
