The Hatchling

White Knuckles

"You always aim to bite with your back teeth. They're your strongest and give you a better grip. The most lethal places to bite are the neck, face, wings, and hips. All are heavy bleeding spots," Beck explained quickly as he started stirring some liquid in a cup.

Where were we? A lab? This place was just next door to the place Aiden took us to test our strength. White walls, floors, and counters almost blinded a person when they first walked in.

Beck added in a few drops of a violet liquid into the concoction as he continued talking. "A way to increase your biting strength is to get a maw pad. A maw pad is something extremely hard, but not impossible to bite through. There's certain difficulty levels for them on how hard they are to bite through, but the whole point is to not stop biting down until you bite through it. You'll do the same difficulty one day, and then increase it the next. It really works your jaw muscles."

"What're you making?" I asked.

"A mouth numbing injection so your jaw and gums don't feel sore while you exercise them for the first time."

He pulled out a syringe and sucked some of the vile looking liquid into the base.

With surgeon like precision, he pulled my skin tight on my jaw and carefully inserted the needle. I could barely feel a thing on either side of my face as he did so, making me wonder if he did it at all.

"Alright, I'll grab the right pad and you'll continuously bite on it the rest of the day until you bite through it. Until then, we're going for a jog."

Outside in the artificial air field, several other squads were training. Beck and I had shifted and he handed me the pad to put in my mouth. It fit like a retainer and was barely soft on the exterior to allow me teeth to get secure.

When I bit down, that was another question. It was like squeezing a bar of steel and expecting it to become a wet noodle.

"Cmon. Let's run," Beck hooted loudly, nudging me forward with a tap of his tail on my back.

I couldn't reply with the device in my mouth, so I just followed him. He was going fast, especially for me. Dragons weren't meant to run. We weren't made for it. It felt awkward, uncomfortable, and unnatural.

My body swayed side to side like a snake despite my best efforts to keep it straight, and my tail dragged on the ground behind me. I kept feeling my wings fight to stay at my side as we jogged. Everything about running was wrong to me.

Not to mention the arduous task of continually biting down on the terrible thing in my mouth. I couldn't feel it, but I also couldn't concentrate on biting down. I was constantly mentally reminding myself it was there and to bite.

"When do we stop?" I groaned, my voice muffled by the plate in my teeth.

Beck kept jogging, not even slowing to speak to me. "When you break that pad."

I could feel my teeth halfway through, but it had already been at least two hours of jogging. That's what it felt like anyways.

Tightening my jaw, I dug into it as hard as I possibly could and continued running.

The squads soaring and breathing fire above us occasionally stopped and stared at us. I could imagine why. We were the only ones running.

It started becoming easier. My body learned to bend like a bow and launch forward instead of clumsily swaying side to side like before. My talons knew how to dig into the turf and pull me forward, and my neck stayed level and low. I was becoming accustom to the foreign feeling in my legs.

For brief moment, when all my legs were off the ground, I felt like I was flying.

My body was simply a wet noodle by the time my teeth had gone through the pad. Lights had been dimmed and exhaustion was already clawing me into sleep.