Snowy Dragon

The bitter winter wind blew through the pass, shooting fat snowflakes across the ravine’s craggy peaks. Water seeps from tree roots through the cracks in the rock in icy waterfalls. No creature in its right mind would be out in the flurry. Instead, they nestle in small caves, nooks, and crannies, anywhere shielded from the cold. Inside the snow-wreathed mouth of a small cave lays a creature upon a bed of gold. She is long and slender with a white-scaled body protectively wrapped around a pile of gold. Her stomach growls; she has not eaten in days, but will not budge. She cannot make the same mistake she made last year.

She lifts her membranous wings with great effort, shaking off the frost and revealing a clutch of milky-white eggs. Sweeping the pile of gold tighter around them and turning them to ensure they are consistently warmed, some of the coins are worn flat by the pressure of her body. She had been on the nest for a long time, but the eggs would hatch soon, she reassured herself. She can hear her brood scratching and moving within, she thought she even heard some pipping. Satisfied with this knowledge, she curls back up and tightens her wings, wistfully thinking of all the tender morsels she will share with them once they hatch, the next generation of snow dragons. She needed to keep them safe and warm, to grow up big and strong, for the good of their kind.