Years waxed and waned. The blighters quit leaving offerings of food. NooMoahk’s appetite had diminished, but Auron’s increased. He was growing, and no matter how much he ate of a kill, he was hungry before the sun made a quarter of its journey across the sky. He remembered his father’s advice about overhunting his territory and made sweeps through the forests of the south lasting for weeks. He was grateful for the mild winters on the south side of the mountains: there was always game to be had. He never had to resort to eating blighters. The blighters had built a few mud-and-wood communities in the foothills, surrounding them with palisades of sharpened tree trunks Auron didn’t care to challenge, for spears were plunged into the soil before every hut.
The change happened on one of his long hunting trips out, eleven winters after saying good-bye to Hieba. He was resting high on the vine-laden head of an elephant statue dominating a forest ruin, watching the grassy square before the statue. A seep of water still came up through a shattered fountain, pooling among the broken paving-stones. He had found fresh deer droppings in the grass, and decided to wait for the herbivores to reemerge. If he was quick, he might get two before the others bounded off into the forest.
An annoying itch across the stretched skin of his wing cases drove him to distraction. He was trying to remain motionless, a mottled green-and-gray atop the elephant god, fighting a battle against the urge to scratch himself against the cracks in the stone statue.
Antlers emerged from the forest gloom; a black nose sniffed the air of the ruined city-square. A buck stepped forward to stand as still as the elephant god while he took in the land with deep brown eyes.
Auron tensed.
The buck crossed toward the fountain, taking three steps, then standing. Three steps, then standing. His harem followed him out of the forest, immature males to either side, heads swiveling at every birdcall.
Auron shifted his rear legs, ready to leap down among them with claws splayed. He gathered himself for a spring.
A burning sensation shot up his back, followed by an all-consuming itch. He fought a brief battle against raking need. Though he was hungry, he lost his concentration and gave in to instinct, rolling on his side. He found a crack atop the statue and drove his back across it in pained ecstasy.
The deer sprang for the woods, but he hardly noticed. He pushed his burning back across the statue, making for a jagged ear. He felt his grip go, and he was falling through the air, vexed not at the plunge down the side of the statue but at the loss of his scratching surface. He pivoted his long torso and landed with a thud that sent dead leaves flying and mud splattering against the pinkish stone. Auron took a pained breath and backed against the statue, sawing his spine against it. He felt something burst and wet his back. The relief was indescribable. He writhed and sawed the other side of his back against the edge of the statue, with a like result. The side of the statue was coated with blood, pus, and a clear liquid. Auron reversed his neck and looked at his back; his skin hung in shreds on either side of his spine. Knobby projections stood just behind his forelimbs.
Auron went to work with his teeth, rending flesh and working the hole in his skin wider. The clear liquid was hot and bitter on his tongue. He chewed a long furrow down his left side, then his right, along a bony limb working itself out of the wounds.
A bloody wing unfolded, without Auron willing it. It had two joints beyond where it joined his shoulder, one midway along its length and the second near the tip. It rather reminded him of the wings from the bats in his parents’ cave: the skin stretching from his back to the pointed tip had the same leathery, veined look. He lifted it above his head. The skin was thin enough for him to see the sun through it. But there was another to free. Auron savaged the other side until his right wing unfolded. He began to lick his wings clean, despising and at the same time greedy for the taste of the slimy fluid still clinging to the membrane surface. With that done, he returned to the top of the elephant in a quick climb. He wanted wind on his wings to dry them.
He extended them to the sky, feeling newly freed muscles work along his back. He turned himself so the sun shone better on the glistening wings. The gaping wounds at the base of his fleshy fans hardened—the sunshine or the air turned the liquid into a clear extrusion. Pain throbbed along his back, but the relief from the nagging pressure and itch compensated for it.
He flapped his wings experimentally. They made a creaking sound as unused joints aligned themselves. He extended his span as far as he could. Judging from the shadows they cast atop the elephant, his wings were as wide as he was long, though the shadow of his frame seemed tiny compared with the expanse of wing.
It occurred to him that he had seen a dragon fly only once, and that was Father rising in battle from the cave. He flapped again, more vigorously, his wings curving as they went up and down like a skilled oarsman rowing. As dead vegetation flew from the vines, his front feet rose from the surface.
Amazing.
He jumped for the ground with wings extended. It turned into a flight across the old deer-tracked square. He had to tip his wings and swoop in a circle to avoid plunging into the trees, just catching a branch with his tail-tip. He dodged under vines hanging from tree limbs, then found himself slewing to the right. He crashed among the branches, some instinct folding his wings before he struck the ground. He shook his frame clean of mud, vine, and leaf and returned to the square. Mind-pictures of flights handed down from his parents and NooMoahk told his body what to do. He flapped hard and rose.
AuRon felt a strange duality—the part of him that was flying was separate from the part of him that was observing the flight, like a dream where he watched himself. Both halves shared one emotion: exhilaration. The freedom from earth, from shadows, from gravity made anything possible. He felt like one of the Great Spirits of Creation, a lord apart from and above the world.
He was breathing hard, but there was none of the agony of an extended sprint. Unlike running, his body was created for this, from the thick tree-root muscles across his back to the narrow, cablelike sinews of his outer wing. An updraft rose from a depression in the forest set against a cliff, and Auron experimented with it. The trees beneath shrank and foreshortened, and he was among the clouds.
When he tired, he found he could float on the updraft, circling with the least of adjustments at the tips of his wings. Such felicity! Even NooMoahk hadn’t passed mind-pictures of this; the armored dragons were too heavy for these drifting pleasures.
The sun began its descent, and so did he. His new muscles had tired, and he drifted down, down to the elephant’s head again. He landed, striking first with his tail to absorb the impact and slow him, then folded his wings with some awkwardness. His newly used muscles were sore, dreadfully sore. The wounds on his back had opened again in the flight, and he licked the blood oozing from the cracks in the translucent scab material. He knew he was hungry, but fatigue overcame him, and he slept even before it was fully dark.
He awoke to a burning ache across his back. Monkeys hooted from the trees, and another group of baboons stalked through the ruined square, hunting some kind of nocturnal creatures. Auron’s mouth wetted, and he jumped down among them, gobbling three young ones whole in quick succession before chasing another shrieker up a tree to bite it in half. His appetite somewhat assuaged after finishing the two pieces, he drank from the fountain pool and opened his wings again. The effort made him wince. He hadn’t been this tired in years, perhaps since his battle with the Ironriders. He wandered in memory for a moment before curling up to sleep, back pressed against the cool stone of the elephant statue.
He flew again briefly the next day, just long enough to find some wide-horned cattle in a muddy swamp. Without thinking, he folded his wings and dived. The beast did not even know what landed on it; it was dead in an instant. The rest fled splashing as he settled in on his kill.
After dining on liver, heart, and kidneys, AuRon left the carcass to the gars and the crocodiles, and climbed a water-oak with a quarter of the kill. He’d hang it overnight—it would make a fine breakfast.
He was a dragon now, if far from fully grown. Mother would have been thrilled, Father proud. In another decade or so, he’d reach true dragon size and sometime after that reach his adult weight. There were decisions to make. NooMoahk, though he spent most of his time napping, was a consideration. The old dragon could no longer take care of himself. If AuRon left him on his own, he’d either quietly starve in his cave or wander into the woods, with every chance of never seeing his hold again.
AuRon watched a green-brown crocodile swallow the leavings from his kill in gulps as a white bird stood on its back. The twig-legged bird stabbed the croc behind a rear leg, and came up with a glistening leech. AuRon’s position was similar: NooMoahk couldn’t hunt any more than that crocodile could get a leech off its hindquarters, but if the bird wasn’t careful, the crocodile would make a meal of it. Like the bird, AuRon got something out of the relationship, too. In the years with NooMoahk he had gained some perspective on dragons and their place in the world.
If dragons had once ruled the world, they did a poor job of leaving any record of it. Everything the hominids knew of dragons came down through myth and wives’ tales. Sometime, several lives of even ancient dragons like NooMoahk ago, the dragons had taken the three races under their wing, so to speak. They protected them against the dominant hominid of the time, the blighters, and were fed and obeyed for a time. But as the blighter menace faded, dragons were seen as a burden rather than a blessing. The races, each in their way, rebelled or escaped the authority of dragons, and the hunting began. There were exceptions, like the alliance between NooMoahk and Tindairuss. But there was no doubt in AuRon’s mind that the hominids were waxing and the dragons waning.