FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Clawless

A Hatchling's Story

~~~

Chapter One:

Hunger, Danger, and Light

~

He knew that humans were dangerous. The smells of herbs, sweat, and meats both roasted and raw drifted up from the market stalls, tantalizing, invading his mind through his nostrils as easily as it invaded the crevice that swaddled his muddy scales in concealing darkness. His nose insisted that he ignore the warning knowledge. That slowly deepening pain in his belly agreed.

Hungry.

His wings readjusted themselves against his flanks, just as restless as his shuffling feet. Beyond the edge of the little gutter, the world above and below his perch teemed, packed close with beige stone and rippling, roaring crowds. Above him, it stretched impossibly high into a network of bridges and hanging stalls, towering up and up until the sheer magnitude of the distance was so unbelievable that just the thought of what it had looked like when he'd chanced a peek set his empty stomach to nauseous churning. Unimaginably far above the buildings, bridges, and stalls, a ceiling of striking blue, crisp and solid and so very, very distant. With all of that space, the intervening air was somehow absolutely filled. Confusion assaulted him. Arguing humans, barking dogs, and bright, swirling colors, each and all moving endlessly. Laughter here, a fight there. Ear-splitting noise and overwhelming commotion--the din and wealth of bartering humanity--this exchanged for that and the other thing with more squabbling and fuss than any other sort of creature in existence. A human pup wailed somewhere down the crowded street, earning only a sharp rebuke from its mother, no doubt. Humans were dangerous. He worked his jaw, thinking, weighing. Debating crawling back up the gutter until he could reach the broken grate that would let him back down into the much quieter and far less unnerving Lowers.

He hated the upper levels. The lower spaces, the sewers and the cellars, those were full of nice safe shadows to hide him from the endlessly roving Low-Dwells with their jagged knives and starvation-strengthened hands. Up here, the humans in possession of those shiny little disks that they all so seemed to crave dwelled in much greater numbers and apparently greater comfort than the Low-Dwells. Up here, they liked the light. They put it everywhere, in nearly every corner, and light was every bit as dangerous as humans were. Again, he considered giving up and returning to the sewers below, but his eyes closed defensively against the brightness and color, allowing the smells to glide seductively back into his focus.

Here, there was also food.

So much danger and so much food so very near set his every nerve on fire, each sense straining. A brief pang yanked at the ache in his belly, changing it into something sharp and using it to stab him cruelly enough to make him flinch. The powerful muscles of his haunches quivered, yearning to pounce.

So hungry...

Humans and light and closely crowded streets were the height of danger, but hunger was just as dangerous. More purposefully this time, he shifted his body, crouching in the gutter and looking down on the butcher's stall beneath him with drool gathering in his mouth. He chewed the drool and swallowed. His stomach wasn't fooled; it only made him hungrier. A low whimper gurgled up from his chest, startling him. Ears flicked up, broad and rounded beneath a set of horns nowhere near grown out of their hatchling stubbiness--not nearly pointed enough to be of any real use in a struggle. Not that it mattered. If it came to a fight, then he was dead, and he knew that with grim certainty.

Humans hunted dragons, for whatever reason. His mother had taught him that much, in her defeatist style. Yet he snorted defiantly at the thought. She'd also told him again and again how he wouldn't make it any longer than her first or second or third brood had, that he would die inside of his first year.

Another snort, derisive this time. He wasn't sure how long a year was, exactly, but he'd outlived her, if nothing else.

But food... oh how much food the human below him had packed into that little stall, wholly unaware of the hungry young dragon perched above! The man was so many times larger than he was, but he was faster than the man could possibly be.

He shifted his gaze to the sewer drain across the narrow street, barely visible through the shifting bodies, and fixed its location in his mind, setting himself to steer for it immediately, whatever happened.

His stomach gave the tiniest of groans, insisting that he needed food as badly as he needed to escape once he had it. The rats in the sewers weren't enough to sustain him anymore; they were too hard to catch, with his shoulders finally too big to fit into their holes and their population either rapidly dropping or growing substantially wilier. Perhaps he'd just already eaten all of the stupid rats. His recent spurt of rapid growth had kept him hungry almost constantly. Some thirty sleeps ago, he hadn't been much larger than they were, though heavier and more powerful, but now he nigh doubled their size, and they noticed him with much greater ease. The last one he'd eaten had made him sick, at any rate, and he knew somehow that he couldn't afford that again. He still hadn't quite regained his strength since then, and he was starving.

Another whimper slipped up his throat, tasting of a stomach already beginning to eat itself, and he worked his tongue in his mouth, desperately yearning to pounce on one of the hanging bits of meat the human was trading for those round bits of metal. He bunched his muscles, readying...

"Patience."

Words of advice settled him back onto his belly as they rose from memory to cross his thoughts.

"Observe, snuuthling, watch. Know your prey and know its habits. Prey is often as dangerous as you are, or more so, and you may only get one chance."

The remembered sound of her voice stirred both anger and sadness, and so he focused on the words instead. And those words were certainly very true. He'd attempted to steal from the Low-Dwells enough times that he knew better than to just leap down and snatch a tidbit without a good deal of watching, even if his hunger had made him forget. Even if the humans in the uppers were far less ferociously territorial, they were still almost as greedy as he was hungry. They would never leave their things--especially their food--truly unguarded. His only advantage would be that, unlike the Low-Dwells, this human probably wasn't always expecting someone or something to try to steal its meats. Having an easy life had, hopefully, made the meatman stupid and complacent.

Working his gums with his tongue, he extracted the rounded little bone he'd stored there and worried it gently between his teeth to distract himself somewhat from his hunger.

"Small dragons who think only of their belly when they hunt often find it spilled by the claws of would-be prey."

A shudder passed down his spine at the involuntarily imagined pain of being gutted. That settled his hunger quite nicely, even as the taste of bile burned in his throat. He tongued the bit of bone back up into his gums and forced his gaze from the meat to the human that owned it.

...Just in time to pull his head back into the shadow as the fat man turned around and cast a disconcerted glance at the hatchling's gutter. For a terrible instant, the human seemed to stare into his eyes, but, thankfully, it made a dismissive grunt and scratched its paunch with a hefty paw... not paw... what was the gripping forelimb of an upright called again? Hand. It scratched its paunch with a hefty hand. Something about the dull, absent look in the man's gaze seemed untrue as it took a shank of meat down from a rack on the side of the stall and faced the street again to argue with another, equally stupid-looking human... probably about how much metal the shank was worth. It might have held itself with extra tension.

Had he been noticed? His eyes drifted to the flat, heavy cutting tool (was it an axe, or a knife?) that the human used to chop the meats, noting just how close the meatman's right hand rested to the tool's handle.

The idea of the axe-knife cleaving through his own flanks frightened the hatchling into a momentary freeze, managing to scare even his hunger into hiding. Still, he was far too desperate to give up now, not with so much food so painfully close. Heart hammering, he relaxed with incredible slowness and resolved to heed the remembered advice.

His tailtip twitched from side to side as he studied, waiting. Moments stretched themselves into agonizingly stacked eternities as he watched and waited, observing the ebb and swell of the crowds on the narrow street until he discovered a vague pattern and determined how the behaviors of the meatman changed in relation to it. Even then, spurned by a healthy fear of injury and pain, he kept watching the meatman until he had memorized even the arrangement of the sparse hairs on the sweaty dome of its head and the thin, sickly looking mane that ringed the dome after the manner of older human males. It came to be, in fact, that the image of that dome was burned into his eyes, so that he saw it when he blinked.

Finally, he could take it no more. Hunger drove him closer and closer to chewing the insides of his cheeks, having crunched and swallowed the bit of bone from his gums already. The crowd surged, once again in the height of its swell, and several humans gathered outside the meat stall, all squabbling with the meatman so that it was quite thoroughly distracted. His stomach clenched. Cold certainty spread through his mind: if he missed this chance, he wouldn't have enough energy to try again. Ever.

Food.

The word bounced around inside of his head, echoing and amplifying until it had morphed into a feral shriek of desperation. Struggling to keep his thoughts clear, he bunched his muscles and steeled himself, forcing himself to wait a moment more. Watching the flow of the crowd. Timing his leap. And leaping, so suddenly that for an instant even he was unaware that he had moved, aiming for a side of meat that hung two feet in front of him and three below. Hungry teeth snagged the meat and yanked sharply to the side, snapping the cord that held it up. Falling, half-gliding, a darting blur, he cleared the table at the front of the stall, passing neatly over the shoulders of two gathered humans. All flinched back, too startled to take a swing. Someone shouted just as his forepaws met the hard street with a shoulder-jarring impact, claws neatly retracted so that they wouldn't break on the unforgiving stone. Warm light on the scales of his back, strangely pleasant, teased at his awareness.

Sunlight...

And then he fled, bounding around the stall and through the legs of the crowd with what he hoped was lightning speed--whatever lightning was. The humans all shrieked or hollered, but none of them managed to touch him before he dove safely through the drain and sprinted down the pipe. Surrounded by the familiar dark and dank of the sewer, he slowed and stopped and stood once he'd gone a fair distance, ears up and pivoting, muscles buzzing and body practically vibrating with ecstatic life from the adrenal thrill of success. Whatever final reserve of energy he had tapped to make the catch held out against threatening exhaustion, fueling his elation with an illusory sense of strength.

Human voices carried hollowly to him through the pipe, shouting a long way off in their harsh, halting tongue. He snorted again. What a hideous language! Dragon-speak sounded much smoother and had a beautiful rhythm and flow to it, like the sleek curves of his mother's flanks, rippling with power and grace.

A twinge of sorrow at that thought. How proud, perhaps, he might have made her with that daring snatch! How proud she would have been...

Once again, he snorted. She would have called him foolish and taken his prize for herself.

Biting back a deep pain in his chest that he knew wasn't hunger, he trotted over to a familiar little alcove, barely visible in the dark, sniffed it until he was satisfied that it was still empty and unoccupied, and settled down on his belly within it to eat. Although the humans had managed to ruin the meat quite a bit by draining it mostly of blood, it was still food, and it was filling.

He forced himself as he ate not to remember that she would have set aside the tenderest cut for him, or how she would have helped him get at the juicy marrow in the bones when the rest was gone. He cracked the bones himself and extracted what he could with his tongue before giving up and simply eating them. Bones weren't so easy to swallow. Neither was grief. Both stuck painfully in the throat, refusing to go down and stay.

With a hacking cough, a fragment of bone launched from his mouth. He crunched it smaller and tried again, tonguing the most rounded bit of it up into his gums as an afterthought. His throat ached, not entirely from the bone.

How long was a year anyway?

Finally exhausted, he pulled himself as far back into the alcove as he could and sighed as he laid his head down. How long was a year? How long was a day? Hadn't it been twelve now? Twelve sleeps... It felt like so much longer.

When would the smell of her blood finally rinse from his nose?

He sighed again and closed his eyes. With stone and brick pressing comfortingly close all around, he felt safe. His full belly warmed away the dank chill and dragged at his eyelids with a leaden weight. So, in spite of his sadness, sleep came easily, and it seemed to the hatchling that he dreamed a year's worth of dreams.

~~~