Hello and Goodbye
One more dragon fic for the day! This one comes right after The Lizard and the Pearl and was inspired by it. Thanks so much for all your good wishes, I’m having a great day so far! I meant to post something about every two hours today but it took me a little longer to finish this one (and I’m afraid it suffered for being rushed, but that’s the way it goes sometimes), so in about an hour the first chapter of my new project will go up (and it’s not dragon-related) so keep an eye out!
He was born by the sea, lapped by its waves as he struggled from his shell. Even before that, he knew music. The crooning song of his mother, softened by the embrace of the water, and the more guttural, rumbling song of his father, singing love and loneliness from the heights.
He pushed free, tumbled from the egg, and landed on his nose in a puddle of salt water. He reared back and shook himself, and sneezed. He looked up, and up, and knew his mother, looming over him as she curled around the nest, crooning encouragement and welcome to him and his siblings.
Moments later, he felt the shadow of his father pass overhead, and knew him as well, felt a tug deep inside himself that whispered love and welcome and fierce protection. His mother’s head snapped up and she snarled and he was not sure why. He belonged to his father as surely as he belonged to his mother; he felt them both in what he would learn to call his heart.
Mother lowered her head and nuzzled him, leaving a smear of sea slime on his dry scales. “Luka,” she crooned to him. “Luka, my son.”
Luka. He heard his name and he knew it, and chirped back a meep that was not a word but that still meant Mama, and nuzzled her back. Luka turned and looked curiously at the other two eggs in the nest with him, both cracked but neither yet broken.
The shadow passed over again, and Mother’s head snapped up once more, her crest spreading to shield him from view. He tried to look around her, and chirped again, louder. Papa.
Overhead, Father gave a deep booming roar that Luka felt down to his bones. HIs shiver was not fear, however. He had no fear of Father.
Mother did. She reared her head back and screamed a challenge, and Father’s shadow faded with a mournful cry.
Luka looked again at the other eggs. He could hear his clutchmates inside. He went to one and reared back, placing his front feet on the shell, scrabbling at the cracks with his tiny claws, but Mother lowered her head and nosed him away. “Nay, little one. They must find their way to the world on their own.” Luka peeped distress, and Mother carefully took him between her teeth. He obediently went limp, and she lifted him out of the nest and deposited him on the sand of the beach. “Stay near, now,” Mother told him, her head swinging up to look at the sky. She extended one long wing fin in an arc around him, and turned her attention back to encouraging the young ones that had not yet entered the world. Luka poked around, drawn immediately to a tantalizing scent around the base of the nest. He nosed a coin out of the sand there, smelling that lovely scent and also the scent of Father. He peeped, scooping up the coin in his little jaws, feeling the taste of gold on his tongue for the first time. He rolled it around in his mouth, though he felt no desire to eat it. He dropped it on the sand at his feet, purred and pranced for a moment, and then inspected the next until he found a good place to wedge his prize in safely. He continued to explore around the bottom of the nest and found a few other things left there by Father. Luka wedged it all into his little nook and then curled up with his chin on the lovely warm gold, and settled in for a nap.
Luka hissed and nipped when his mother tried to scoop him up and put him back in the nest, and she chuckled as she closed her jaws gently around him. Grudgingly, he went limp and let her put him back in the nest. “No fear, little one,” she told him after she put him down. “I’ll mind your treasures.” Satisfied, Luka relaxed and shook himself and went to greet his siblings. No sooner had he laid eyes on them than he knew he was different. They were lithe and long like Mother, their hides mottled with blue and purple but pale compared to his dark blue-black scales. He was shorter, heavier, his body compact. Their wings were long but shallow where his were broad and deep.
But the blue eyes that blinked at him curiously were familiar, and he felt the same tug in his heart that told him they were family, so he rubbed noses happily, and tried not to crush them in their play tussles as they both ganged up to bowl him tail over claw.
Despite his differences Luka only knew love from his family as time passed. He played in the shallows of the lagoon while his sister Leika and brother Kinka explored in the deeper water, bringing back shiny things they found rooting in the sand; pretty enough, when they would let Luka inspect them, but not of the same worth as his precious coin. At first Mother had helped him hollow out a corner of the nest, the safest place he knew, for his little treasures and precious coin. Every night he curled on top of his tiny hoard to sleep, his siblings plopped on top of him. However, time passed, and they all grew, and they all began seeking out their own places to sleep at night; Leika and Kinka in the water, and Luka on the rocky part of the shore. He relocated his treasures there and slept on them every night, making sure they were well hidden before he left his little den in the morning. He spent at least part of the day investigating the beach, rooting through the sand and sniffing around the edge of the forest, to see if Father had left him any gifts.
This was how he knew his father loved him, though he kept to the heights and never came down to the beach while he could be seen. There were things about this that Luka didn’t understand, but the tug in his heart and the treasures Father left him told him that he was loved.
Mother didn’t give gifts, but she taught him many things, and so he knew she loved him too. Sometimes she wrapped him up in her long body and crooned over him, a sad song that Luka didn’t quite get, and nuzzled and groomed him, and held him tighter than he really liked. He was covered with slime when she released him, but she didn’t mind.
“Do you ever wonder,” he asked Leika one day, “Why Father never comes down here?”
“No,” Leika snorted from where she was lounging in the shallows, and she took in a gulp of water and squirted him in the face.
Luka snorted and shook his head, and then slammed one wing into the water, sending a wave of water towards his sister, following it up with a burst of fire safely over her head, just close enough for the heat to make her cringe. “No fair,” she whined, and Luka laughed.
He watched, though, as father stood guard over them from the heights.
“Luka,” Mother called in alarm. “Get down from there, ye fool child!”
Luka bent his long neck backwards to look at her with a sigh. “I’m fine, Ma,” he yelled back, and had to duck as his mother’s water cannon hit the rocks beside him.
“Down!” she bellowed, and Luka sighed, rolling his eyes.
He wasn’t thinking when he did it. He was thinking about how annoyed he was and how he’d nearly reached the top of this pile. He was definitely not thinking of launching himself off the rock wall he was clinging to, twisting his body in midair, and snapping his wings out, nor the precise angle at which he would need to hold them to bring him over the lagoon to glide down on the beach.
It all happened so fast he didn’t register his mother’s terrified screech until he was nearly at the beach, and his landing in the sand was...inelegant to say the least.
Luka rolled to his feet, shaking the sand from his crest and flicking his forked tongue in distaste at the grit in his mouth, when a wave washed over him, knocking him off his feet and back face first into the sand. He forgot about that though has his neck was soon his mother’s jaw and she was shaking him violently—not enough to hurt, but enough to let him know he had scared the salt out of her.
“Idiot,” she grumbled around her clamped jaws as he went obediently limp. “Little—argh.” She dropped him and raised her head, bellowing up at he cliffs. “Did ye see that, ye overgrown lizard?”
“I saw, Pearl,” the laughing reply came down, and Luka looked up, wide eyed, to see his father leap from a shadow in one of the crags and come to soar over them. “Well done, my boy!”
“Don’t push your luck, Jagged,” Mother snapped up at him, and the big sky dragon just laughed, soaring back up to the cliffs.
It took some time and a lot of embarrassing practice (practice that set his water-bound siblings laughing at him) before he finally flapped his way up the cliffs where his father was waiting. Father chuckled as the young dragon slid to a precarious landing on the rock slab where he was waiting. “Well, well. Finally came to visit the old man?”
Luka shrank into himself a little, suddenly feeling a little shy, but Father got up and met him with a friendly headbutt and nuzzle. “Been waiting to meet you, son.”
Luka relaxed and headbutted him back. “Same.”
“Luka!” came the familiar, exasperated call from the sea below.
“You’re worrying your Ma,” Father said, shouldering Luka back to the edge of the platform. “Go on now. We’ll have time later, I promise. You should spend as much time with your Ma as you can, while you can.”
Luka didn’t really understand, but he nuzzled father and turned to go. He balked a little at the height as he approached the ledge, but Father just chuckled.
“Go on now. No need to fear the sky. Your body knows what to do. Just leap, and trust it.”
He visited his father regularly from then on. At first, he only stayed a short time before his mother got worried and began anxiously calling for him, but as time went on, she seemed to relax, and he spent more and more time with his father.
Luka could feel the change in himself as well as in his clutchmates. The more he looked to the sky, the more they looked to the sea, and his mother began to seem distressed.
Finally, the day came when his father came down from the heights to land on the beach, a respectable distance from the water.
“Anarka,” he rumbled in his booming voice. “You know it’s time. You need to go.”
“Don’t tell me what I need to do,” Mother snarled, curling her wingfins protectively in front of Leika and Kinka at her sides. Luka had gone forward to greet his father but stopped at his mother’s hiss.
“You can’t take him,” Father said, and there were many feelings in it that Luka could not understand. “Look at him, Anarka. He can’t follow you, and even if you find a way to take him, he’ll pine. He needs his family. He needs the sky, and you can’t give it to him, Pearl.”
“I am his family,” Mother shot back sulkily, and there was silence for a moment before she said. “But ye are right, lizard. Fate meant this one for ye. Perhaps to ease yer heart after we go. Luka.”
Luka turned, and went back to his mother, wading into the shallows. She lowered her head and pressed it to his. “I’ve done all I can for ye, lad. It’s time for me and yer brother and sister to return to the sea, but ye were not made for our life. Ye must go with your Da and let him teach ya the ways of yer kind. I will always love ye, my son, but this is how it must be.”
“I understand,” sighed Luka. He nuzzled his mother one last time, and then each of his siblings in turn. Then he went back slowly up onto the beach to stand with his father.
“Goodbye, lizard,” Mother said.
“Until next time, Pearl,” Father chuckled, and ducked the stream of water she sent at him. “All right, I’m going, I’m going. Come on, Luka.”
He opened his great gold wings, and Luka did the same, following him up onto the cliffs. From there, they watched his mother and clutchmates strike out of the lagoon into the open ocean, all three of them leaping with eager excitement.
“She will always be your Ma,” Father told him. “But she must be what she is, as we must be what we are. We can’t change her, nor can we go against our own nature. But we’ll see her again, no fear. You can feel it, can’t you? In here.” He shoved his head against Luka’s chest.
Luka nodded slowly.
“She feels it too, though not as strong as we do. But she’ll know, if you need her, and she’ll come. Now, come on. It’s time you learned to hunt proper meat. We’ll put a bit more meat on your bones and stamina in your wings, and then I’ll take you to see the world.”
Luka spared one more look out to sea, but he couldn’t see the rest of his family anymore. He felt them though, in his heart, and he was content.
Jagged did show him the world, but Luka never acquired the taste for it that his father did. He preferred to linger near the sea, and once he was grown, he bid farewell to his father and struck out for his own place. It was a long time before he returned to the island of his birth. It surprised him, when he felt his father’s call, but he sealed up his treasures and obeyed, following the tug and feeling something new alongside it.
He didn’t understand the new pull, until he angled down to land in his father’s crag and found him with a small, sleek black dragon with flashes of purple in her scales and Jagged’s lightning in her eyes.
“Luka,” Jagged greeted him, prancing and bubbling over with enthusiasm. “Come and meet your sister. This is Juleka.”
“Juleka,” Luka said, lowering his head to look at her. “I’m glad to meet you.” He bent forward to bump his head along hers, but she grunted and Luka jerked his head back with a startled snort as a spark zapped him right in the nose.
“She’s adorable,” he said dryly, sitting back on his haunches as Jagged laughed uproariously.