Fryff

Fryff pushed out of his egg in the middle of a ravaged pumpkin patch, a patch of broken shell capping his head and soft, baby horns. He peered around the area with bright, curious eyes. Instinct murmured to stay quiet, to wait for his parents to return or for his siblings to push out of their eggs. Right now, he was alone, and a baby dragon alone in the wilderness (even wilderness as peaceful as a pumpkin patch) made the hatchling deeply uneasy.
The goo from his egg cooled on his scales as the sun sailed across the sky. He looked skyward, wondering as the sky turned from blue to orange. He wondered if the sun was breathing fire into the sky in its wake, setting it aflame and then blackening into ashes as night fell. As the sun sank beneath the horizon and Fryff's belly began to rumble, the two eggs beside him began twitching. He looked at them, excitement making him feel fizzy down to the ends of his claws, and backed away to give the two other eggs enough space to hatch and give him someone to talk to.
The first hatchling to shove out of her egg was smaller than him, with yellow, brown, and blue scales turned dull like glass held to a flame too long. Fryff thought she was beautiful as she met his gaze with eyes as green as his own. She grinned a mouthful of sharp teeth and flexed her crumpled wings as if anxious to take off.
Together, they watched the third egg quiver and crack. The second hatchling to flop onto the ground had orange wings and a sparkly belly, which she promptly presented to the sky as she rolled, staring at her two siblings upside down. She blinked slowly and the other hatchling, his first playmate, approached her and nudged her onto her feet with a sharp nudge from a sharper nose. She squeaked in protest and Fryff wandered around her, reaching out curious baby claws to peel egg slime away from her face.

When they were old enough to speak and no older dragon came to collect them, the three hatchlings chose their own names according to their own preferences.
The first to leap into any kind of leader role called herself Gryfira because it reminded her of a name she'd heard their mother repeat many times while she was still hidden in her egg.
The quickest to give them away with a giggle called herself Baera because it reminded her of a mighty creature she'd heard a group of traveling dragons talk of around their campfires, which the hatchlings had spied on from where the orange light met the black shadows of the field.
The hatchling most up for anything his sisters cooked up decided to call himself Fryff, because he liked the sound it made when it rolled off his tongue.

Fryff romped with Gryfira and Baera for days that bled into weeks, learning how to hunt and fight and compromise, until the three siblings gained a better perspective on the world enough to realize what the wreckage around their pumpkin patch implied. There were ragged scraps of clothes, weapons, and dented armor that the wildlife swallowed soon enough. Birds turned the rags into padding for their nests, vines coiled around the weapons and dragged them into the ground, and moss fuzzed over the sharp edges of the armor.
The three hatchlings understood war as a concept, not as a practice, and that was not enough to keep the three from clambering over the hollow husks of armor with curiosity and boldness in equal measure. Baera was convinced the further they trekked into the pumpkin field, the more likely it was that they'd find the dragon who laid their eggs, but Gryfira was more skeptical. Fryff was simply happy to go along for the ride, climbing the densest logs only to slip on the fungus at the top and come tumbling back down.

Their idyllic, war-edged childhood was interrupted with the arrival of a group of two adult dragons and their prisoners: five of the tiniest dragons Fryff had ever seen, trapped between them. Their eyes were huge in their fan-framed faces, their bodies small and ropey, and their impossibly delicate wings at least three times the size of the rest of them.
Gryfira was wary, Baera intrigued, and Fryff utterly fascinated.
Against Gryfira's furious dissent and the warning in Baera's round eyes, Fryff crept closer in a rare act of defiance, the underside of the brush petting the top of his spine as he slinked within earshot. He peered through the long grass at the trio of dragons, all shifting large feet around the group of five fairy-like dragons in the middle.
"-need to be trained," one of the larger dragons was saying to another. Fryff's eyes flittered between them. He didn't recognize any of these breeds, but he knew they must be dragons. There was too much similarity amid so much difference.
The speaker was very blue, startling against the greenery of the landscape like a drop of paint on a blank canvas. She was dressed in sturdy, dusty clothes and there was a shock of dark, glittering black down her chin and belly like a streak of tar. Even the single, shiny horn rising from her snout was the same thick, dark color. A rapier hung at her side, probably largely decorative, and most curious of all, there was a large, round pearl clutched in her grip.
Intrigued, Fryff's gaze moved from her to the dragon she was addressing. A shock rippled through him, making his very toes tingle.
The dragon had sharper, craggier features than his companion, although he was dressed similarly to her. His bat-like wings were large and spotty, but Fryff barely noticed the other parts of his appearance, because he had dozens of eyes dotting down the line of his body. They had to be fake. Surely. But they roved everywhere, large and pink and staring. It was a bit grotesque, but Fryff couldn't stop staring. Fryff realized after a moment that more eyes meant he would probably be noticed that much more quickly, so he shifted backward carefully, the days of hunting and roughhousing with his sisters teaching his body how to conceal himself seamlessly into the undergrowth. He wrenched his eyes away from the strange sight of the male dragon and looked to the huddle of dragons between them, wondering vaguely if these were their children, but that couldn't be possible. They looked nothing like the dragons flanking them. Plus, they were bound together, as if against their will.
When Fryff looked closer, he received his second jolt of the day.
The bindings that tied the dragons together was not rope, or metal, or any of the things he'd expect to restrain someone else. It was another dragon, this one long and slender, with wings seemingly every other inch. It breathed and blinked, and Fryff's mouth grew dry.
What was this?

3/15/22