The Hatchling

The Hatchings

The Hatchings are a difficult time for any coven. A week where all the babies conceived in the past year are born. My mother says that it's one of the hardest things to go through, and that's why parents only have one brood in their entire life.

Dragon-shifter children are...unique one could say. We are all conceived in the same date, but we can have one of seven birthdays depending on what day in the Hatchings we're born on. We're born as dragons, neatly tucked inside an egg the size of a basketball, and kept inside a flame that burns non-stop for a year. If the flames go out, the infant dies, so parents keep a constant vigil on their egg.

Certainly a high-stakes situation.
The baby is born reptilian, but by the time it's a year old, it can shift in and out of a dragon form on whim. Temper tantrums can be pretty nasty when you have a thirty-pound fire breathing child to deal with, especially around feeding time. Our fire fighters were constantly at work.

My mother says I was an easy baby compared to the rest. I was quiet, calm, and observant. Yet, she says, I was stubborn too. I didn't shift until I was almost two. The doctors said I was perfectly capable, I had weekly checkups, but I was adamant on being a spit-fire for as long as possible I assume.

When I did shift, my mother said it wasn't long before I shifted right back.
Our coven, the Creed, are one of the five largest covens on the continent.
We have produced the highest quality of soldier, boy or girl, in the past century, so there's a lot weighing down on a Creed hatchling like myself.

We are to be strong, clever, and nimble all at once.

One of my earliest memories was lifting up boulders, to my mothers dismay, as a toddler. Her panicked face permanently etched into my mind as I recall her snatching the rock from me and giving me a stern lecture. Ah, what innocent and lovely times, unlike now.

I was trapped inside this asylum, constantly dealing with imbeciles. This asylum being school of course. Even we shifters were forced to endure the rigorous, hellish institution that was general education.

The eighteenth Hatchings since I had hatched myself all those years ago were coming up, and that meant that my days here at this mundane establishment were limited. Freedom was on the horizon for me and my peers.

"What do you think the purpose is Emira?" Mr. Barrat asked me as I dreamily stared out the window at some nearby clouds.

I jumped in my seat, startled by his nasally, sour voice. "What?" I blurted. His eyes narrowed at me. "I mean, excuse me?" I corrected myself disdainfully. He had always been a stickler for manners.

Mr. Barrat straighted his back and pointed to the diagram of a dragon's anatomy. "I asked what you thought the purpose was for the spines on our backs." He jabbed his grubby, plump finger on the picture and looked at me with an annoyed expectant face.

"For defense against other dragons," I guess lazily with a roll of my eyes, a laugh hitching in my throat. This man had been vying for my participation in his class for the past four years. I wondered why he thought it would begin now.

"No. Incorrect," he huffed, seeming pleased I didn't know. "It's for the stream line you have in air. While some breeds of dragon's spines can appear menacing, they're merely there to help cut through the air and help maintain a constant fluid motion while in flight!"

Flying. My favorite pastime. The humans were truly missing out. The brand of freedom brought upon by simply soaring on the wind was incomparable to any other thrill. I could practically feel the air licking at my scales and buffeting underneath my wings as I zoned out Mr. Barrat's monotonous voice and stared at the clouds again.

As school let out, I lingered at the front, awaiting my friends. Halli and Micah were already side-by-side as they came out the doors, both smiling when they saw me.

"Two more days!" Halli squealed with glee, doing small claps with her hands "And then off to training!"

"You're actually excited about that?" Micah whimpered impishly. He combed his fingers through his ashy brown hair and frowned. "We most likely won't be in the same squad."

Halli put her hands on her hips and blew a puff of air out of her small mouth, blowing a red curl from her face. "You're such a downer sometimes. You act like we won't ever see each other. Training is only a year. Then, we get selected for our specialties, and then two years from then we're free." She skipped down the marble steps of the school and we both followed her closely.

"C'mon Emira," Micah lamented to me with big brown doe eyes, pleading to me to side with him. "Tell me you're not excited either."

Before I could get a word out of my mouth, Halli leaped between Micah and I and laughed.

"Do you even know who you're talking to? Lady here is probably chomping at the bit, aren't you Emira? You've been such a fighter since we were kids!"

I shrugged, grinning at Micah. "She's right," I mumbled. "I'm with her. I'm excited. We'll get to see each other during meals, large-scale training exercises, and the exams, so it won't be too bad."

I began crouching, readying myself to shift to fly back home. "Don't worry about it so much Micah. That worrying is going to be the death of you one day."

My spine popped out as my body morphed. I could hear my joints cracking and my skin stretching as it was replaced with coal black scales.

"Easy for you to say! Fighting is in your bloodline! My parents are hunters!" I heard him shout weakly into the darkness as I temporarily lost my vision.

My father was a special forces squad captain and my mother was a special forces medic, so both were seasoned soldiers.

My father was a tower of a dragon, standing at an astounding fifty seven feet. My mother was a mere forty three feet, but she packed quite the punch so her fellow squad mates said.
As humans, my father was still tall. He had light brown, always buzzed hair, and amber eyes.

My mother was still shorter with dirty blonde hair and warm brown eyes.

I resembled her mostly, but as a dragon, I resembled no one.
A sudden drop of temperature when I was in the egg lead to the loss of my pigmentation development, so my scales remained ink black.

Everyone else was adorned with gorgeous colors from every side of the spectrum and I was merely a shadow, but I didn't mind. It made night flying much more private when no one could see you.

Halli perfectly embodied herself as a human as she did a dragon. She had rich yellow and orange scales. Micah had muted lichen and mossy green scales that matched his worrisome attitude about everything.

They were truly themselves as dragons.

As my body finished morphing, I stretched out my wings and felt the breeze passing by. Beside me, Halli and Micah were finishing shifting themselves. When they were done, we all beat out wings and took flight, slowly cruising through the air as we headed home.

Two days. That's all I could think of.
In two days I would be a soldier in training and a mature dragon-shifter. In two days I would be gone from my parents and everything I knew for a year.

In two days I would be on my way to being one of the best soldiers of all
time, and I was chomping at the bit for it all to begin.