Flake

"Packmother," the hatchlings call her, staring up with multi-colored eyes.
"Packmother."
And god, Flake could just laugh.
It's been over three years since her hatchday - three years in a cave in the Wyrmwound, three years with her children, three years forming a family of all the dragons she's met-
and she was torn from her home,
stuffed into a box,
and put up on the Auctionhouse.
The hatchlings don't remember it much, but others - Iskra, Lin, Alta - they know it well.
They are, in essence, breeding tools.
And if one isn't a breeding tool...
one is to be sold.
With that decided, Flake still doesn't know why her world came crashing down.
But starless skies does she remember the Auctionhouse.
A dank place, crammed into too-small crates - Flake's wings were pinned to her side, twisted up in a painful position - the distant cries of hatchlings separated from their mothers, the clattering of money as their supposedly kind tamers walked the rows, the swinging lights of lanterns, the lack of food, water, space, anything their tamers wouldn't spring for - and starve them they would, since soon enough, they wouldn't be their tamer's problem-
Flake had spent three days in that dark hell.
To say nothing of Iskra and Kawatare's child, sent up for twenty-three days.
To say nothing of Zeyus and Nychta's, in the depths of the Auctionhouse since her birth.
But truth be told-
what can Flake do?
Nothing.
She can't do a thing. Flake doesn't recall much of her history from the oldest days.
That is to say- the days before her first nest. There was something, she knows - knows it as surely as she knows that the decay spewing from the Wyrmwound will never end - but she can't quite place it.