Thorn

my first gene project what what

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The egg was half-melted when Fen found it, instead of frozen in the way that ice eggs were meant to be. It was covered in scratches and dents. There was broken earth around it, but not much- though a distance away, Fen had seen a clan at war.

She tried to yell after the ice clan who should have been taking care of the egg, but they didn't respond, didn't speak, didn't take it. They simply turned, stared, and vanished again.

There was something dreadfully wrong, but there was nothing Fen could do. There was some kind of darkness here, but Fen couldn't change that, either, so she lifted the egg, barely holding it up correctly due to its weight, and took the egg back to her own clan. It was only once she was there that she noticed the blackness crawling up it.

She swallowed, and decided to ignore that blackness.

It was a child.

And she and Mousey collected lost children, in their own way.

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They named him Thorn when he hatched. His white eyes had something swirling in them that was hard to describe, and when he batted one of his claws up at Mousey, darkness swirled and hardened on Mousey's skin. It didn't make sense. He was an ice dragon. There was something terribly wrong here.

But then Thorn smiled at them, and Fen and Mousey and Glacier and Mulberry- the smiled back. The clan's ruling family decided they didn't care. They'd take the small mirror in as one of their own. They'd survive.

Whatever was wrong, they'd figure it out. They were all a little screwed up, anyway.