Dragon's Cradle

Something was not right with her forest.

A sound-loud, incessant-danced between tree branches, caught by the air to lazily drop into the concave ear of the last forest serpent.

Where the forest hummed a symphony of sounds, blended seamlessly by her meticulous authoritative claw, this sound disrupted the euphony.

Nothing but the green foliage was permitted to live within her large domain that spanned miles, nothing that could disrupt her corpse once her final sleep began.

Her dragon's death would trigger the end of the heavens dominance she and her family had spearheaded for decades, allowing her to return to her people. All that was left for her was to die.

But this sound.

Heaving her heavy body up, the trees bowed out of the way, brushes shrinking to allow her excellence an unperturbed walk through her forest. Too many of their children had felt the careless trample of her kin over the centuries and quickly learned to prostrate to her kind knowing that, death willing, they could feast on her rotted corpse in due time.

This would be the last serpent they would bow down to.

The dragon, ignorant of their plotting, focused on tracing the thing that kept her from finally reuniting with her kin..

There.

Nestled in the tall grass that shook at her approach, bundled and fussing in its covering, laid the baby of the human kin.

Even closer, the sound displeased her ears. Flattening them to close out the sound, she drew closer, peeling back the cloth carefully with a taloned hand to reveal a brown ball of fat and rolls.

Her tongue, extended to taste its scent, touched the creature slightly causing the wailing to pause as two big shiny eyes turned to stare up at her.

For a long pregnant silence, the two stared at each other taking in each other's foreign form.

The dragon traced its round pudgy face, noting the softness of its flesh, watching its chest rise and fall with each small breath.

The child, barely skimming one moon, looked at the giant that towered over it that sprouted too many teeth and much too many eyes. Not a moment opened its mouth and let out a wail that penetrated even through the dragon's fortified ear folds.

If the binding magic put on her had been any weaker, she would have punctured the child with a tooth and silenced the painful assault on her body. The pact saved the brown child from a death too quick and a lineage snuffed too soon.

But the pact was not weak. It pumped through the dragon's body, igniting the written inscription on her heart, extinguishing any power she could draw from.

Declawed and pacified she stared down at the crying form, her claws flexing in the spell's hold.

The child continued its cries, oblivious to the pact that kept it safe and the serpent that looked down at it, docile.

Annoyed, the serpent ripped through her memories of humankin finding her memory broken. Her decay was already here. If she did not die soon, she risked becoming a necromancer's toy but obliged by the pact, something must be done to ease the distress of the little one before her.

Her rudimentary understanding of living beings likely meant it needed food and warmth to be comfortable.

But her need for cool weather had led to her chasing the sun away and coaxing the clouds into a permanent stay in her domain.

This was not a proper land for a warm blooded creature, let alone one small and humankin.

Death was beginning its call. The necromancers that occasionally touched on the edges of her sanity, waiting for the chance to take it over, would soon begin their assault.

The only thing warm was her. The only sustenance that could keep the little one safe was her.

The decision was made.

She reached out to the brown child, piercing its forehead, pouring her mind into its developing brain.

The child, blinded by the light of dragon's magic being summoned, would look back at the memory and touch the scar and weep from milky eyes in thanks to her mother.

Though her body would break down, the living instinct all dragons were bequeathed at birth would now urge the child towards survival.

Satisfied, the pact released its hold bringing back her strength.

Finally, death was hers.

With her last power, the serpent named Ilna-thi-nal carved into her chest, creating space for the child inside her body.

The pain was fleeting as death encroached. Rearranging her insides she created a cradle near her heart and lungs just big enough for the child.

Scoping the humankin up, she carefully nestled it deep into her body where the warmth of her insides would last at least a decade, keeping the child safe from the cold.

The child, driven by the Dragons' living instinct, immediately reached for her large artery and began suckling, drinking her blood greedily.

She chuckled softly, thinking back to her time inside her mother and how strange that she, Ilna the childless, was finally given a child to nurse to adulthood.

Sighing one last time, Ilna, daughter of Thi-nal the skies ruler and heavens messenger, last of the dragonkin, passed in her forest. A greedy, brown child, nestled deep into her chest suckling from her veins.