There was only darkness, not true darkness, but the type that exists when you close your eyes. The same way you can't remember when a dream started it could not remember when it woke up, it just was, like a light suddenly turning on. No matter how much it tried, however, it could not open its eyes. Like straining against yourself, the instinctive reaction not to move not to…. to...that was a foreign concept, drawing something in and out of oneself. Strange.

Over the next indeterminable amount of time, it drifted in and out of consciousness, never feeling the change between sleep and wakefulness, flipping between the two like a flickering lightbulb. It was only over thousands of awake and not cycles that it noticed the times it spent aware were getting longer, the urge to stay still was lessening.

A leg twitched, it felt so good, just to move that tiny part of its body. It twitched another part of its body, a leg again. This time it flexed something long, a tail. That after some more twitching out it at 4 legs a tail and 2 wings, its neck was also quite long and flexible. It knew instinctively what each of the limbs was for and could feel where they were positioned on its body after a little bit of flexing. With the movement it began to feel the sensation of floating, how had it not noticed before?

It was suspended in liquid, hence the floating sensation. It stretched out its tail tentatively exploring the confines of the liquid, it was not long before it found the containers of the fluid almost round but slightly narrower at one end, by its head. There was not much wiggle room in the container and over the following cycles, space decreased further as did the instinct to move carefully. Eventually, it could no longer feel the instinct to be careful and the space was almost cramped, it was its longest remembered cycle awake and it gained a new desire. Break free.

Its instinct willed it on, reaching out with a front paw it scraped gently against the shell. Then as this did not yield any results it pushed harder, until it was pushing with all its might. There was a crack, then a wet crunch as the shell was broken. First, a forelimb kept pushing at the opening then it retreated and an angular snout pushed at the gap widening it and gradually cracking the edges to make way for the rest of its body. It got stuck more than a few times and after the 4th time, a huge taloned claw passed overhead and gently but with irresistible force tapped the eggshell splintering it apart and freeing its struggling occupant.

The baby dragon fell to the ground with a wet squelch and started heaving up fluid from its lungs and gasping for air. It had not realized how much it had been struggling to break until the egg had been properly broken. The sensation of cool fluid air flowing in and out of its lungs was a new sensation and the baby dragon stood there to process the new sensation for a few minutes. Once it had got over this sensation it focused on the rest of its body, there was an empty feeling that it did not like, it sniffed a pleasant goopy smell coming into its senses. Looking back at its egg now broken into several pieces it walked over and bent its neck down to take a slurp. Savoury and very filling. The yellow was the best and most filling and it consumed the very small amount that was left quickly, the clear fluid was not tasty and it left this alone. With its hunger satisfied it took the time to examine its body, looking with its flexible neck at every inch, subdued red scales covered all of its body and patches of its wings. Stood on four legs with the beginning of study white claws, its wing protrude from its back and were still quite weak, they would strengthen with use over the next weeks. Its tail was about the length of its body and started thick tapering off along towards the end, it was tipped with positively tiny scales but not spikes or spines of any kind. It could not see its head of course but its neck was long and flexible enough to reach over its back and lick any part of its scaled body, including the tail if curled up and moved closer to its head. Its neck was about half the length of its body may be a bit less at a guess. Sharp serrated teeth were discovered in the mouth and a sharp snap resounded when testing the jaw strength. Upon further investigation it looked between its legs and flexed all of the muscles down there, female was the result of this testing.

Now that she knew of the existence of gender not having referred to herself as either was a bit embarrassing. Satisfied with the exploration of her own body she looked around. Other baby dragons were standing around looking at themselves, a few of them were red 4 including herself, there were several brown in the region of 10 and a large amount of green, the was a little swarm a ways away, counting the dragons that kept moving she concluded that nearly 30 of them were running around. Then she noticed one other colour, black was sitting in a corner, like her it was surveying the surroundings, it saw her and looked at its scales then at her. She looked at her own scales, then at him. She instinctively knew that it was a he and that he was different. In the roughly 45 baby dragons around he was the only black.

She raised her head and sniffed the air, most of the egg smells were older than her own, she could tell she was one of the last to hatch, she also realized that the other dragon was clean. She still had residue from the egg coating her, and as much as she did not like the taste of the clear fluid she set about cleaning every inch of her body. This, in the grand scheme of things, did not take long.

After cleaning herself she looked around, then thought to look up. Above them was a dragon, with paws the size of her entire body it looked down at them, and perhaps a glint of pride, even affection was glinting in its eyes. She felt no fear from gazing upon this massive creature, instead a bond, this was her mother.