Candleglass

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Small and young, Candleglass was hatched into a clan of philosophers with a heart prone to action. Never content to observe, she burned with the desire to participate – to experience, to explore.

It was on those explorations that she very nearly ended up a meal.

Young and quick, Candleglass was out one night in avid twilight pursuit of her favorite delicacy – fireflies -- when she found herself suddenly snared in the broad, sharp talons of the strongest, mot sharp-toothed guardian dragon she had ever encountered. He snared her from midair, caging her in with talons fine and sharp enough to cut glass, Candleglass felt her proud heart tremble in utter terror. As Shadowclaw’s luminous eyes blinked down at her she did all that she could think to do – and held out the wriggling captured firefly she held tightly again her chest.

“You may share my dinner,” she informed Shadowclaw, her small voice imperious.

When his jaw unhinged it was only to laugh.

Friendship bloomed, unlikely enough – Shadowclaw was taciturn and snarled more often than he spoke, while Candleglass tended towards sarcasm and graceful observations, all delivered in a tone often wry and sharp.

Even so, Candleglass struggled with the philosophical nature of her fellows in the Light flight -- “What is thought without action?” she would ask Shadowclaw, sprawling atop his long ear-fins out in the rough at the edge of the ruins. “What use is a philosophy without trajectory?”

He merely snorted, tipping his head in a silent request for gentle claw-scritches.

“So much for the ferocious Guardian,” Candleglass hummed, tracing words against his spine.

The day they found the firefly-circled sleeping wallows, sandy floors stretching beneath the toppled, vine-clad piles of columns, was the day Candleglass rose to mate. Soon the glittering gold of a tundra hoard filled to the corners of in the half-collapsed atrium, shining like spiderwebs in the afternoon sun.

When the eggs were settled and Shadowclaw had assumed a new role as self-appointed sentry at the entrance to their sunlit ruin, Candleglass decided upon her trajectory.

“A clan of our own,” she hummed, and for once Shadowclaw did not snort or huff or laugh at her.

He merely pressed his nose against her claws and grinned.

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