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Zaeiz
"I am Zaeiz. Zaeiz, of your blood!"
"You are no one."
The first words he ever said, the announcement of his existence and his blood right, were met with denial. He was no one. Serberiss declared it so, and the black female's word was law.
Maranouss, his mother and Serberiss' bond, sheltered him as best she could. She was loud and fiercely opinionated, but she would not oppose his bondmate. And Maranouss was half-crippled, her right foreleg mangled by a deep, puckered scar. His mother could not fight to save him.
He ate but little in those first few years. His clutchsibs and clutchmates-Khaness, Kethtaz, Cortez, Apraiz, Amyss, and Feliss-avoided him for the most part. If Serberiss caught any of her brood consorting with him, she laid into them with horn and tooth. Kethtaz, of Maranouss' brood, eagerly copied her, and as he was the biggest and the strongest, the rest followed his example. Feliss and Amyss were quiet sorts, not inclined to shows of rebellion. Cortez was oblivious to anything outside of his own sphere, and Khaness…Khaness was in enough trouble as it was. Without any other population support, there was no trainer, no teacher of hatchlings. So Zaeiz swam alone.
When he was grown, and dared venture out into the dangerous waters beyond the Cove, he began to look for a home.
Zaeiz panted with the effort of drawing himself along the surface of the water. The waves provided a different sort of friction than the fathoms below. Out in the open water, the waves were tall, and white-capped, and they threatened to swallow him down.
He stopped as he felt the water stir near his nose. It was a drawing pull, and the snaky seadragon pulled hastily away, sidewinding across the waves. "The Ysglyfi Current," he hissed to himself. This is what he'd come to find.
Down many fathoms, and fifty feet away from the hungry Ysglyfi, he found a smooth, almost level sea bed, floored in black sand, as bare as any beach. Intrigued, he swam on. The pressure bit at him, pressed at his first-lids. He could feel it crushing down on his skull like a vise. Yet still the seabed dropped, at first gradually, and then a crack appeared. From there, Zaeiz sensed a pit that might as well have been endless. As far as he could tell, it was a canyon, a split in the seafloor a mile across.
Then this is the Ymrwyng Trench. The land near it was useless to him, plagued by drafty, uncertain currents so cold as to make his bones ache. But the higher end of the level ground…
A few miles out, he found cliffs entirely under water. Above, he could see a greenish light, and the faint waving strands of tawny kelp growing on the verge. It was very dim at this depth, but the cliffs were of some smooth-grained stone with volcanic sediment in a drippy crust over it. As he followed the cliffs, Zaeiz noted that they made a rough arc. When the line of cliffs ended, he was back at the gaping maw of the Ymrwyng. Across the gulf, he thought he could see a continuation of the curve.
A circle…hmm. Impact crater? I wonder what hit this place so hard… I can't look across the Trench, the Ysglyfi'd take me out of Gwynllaith territory. This must be near where Braez died. Where my sire pined away. He blinked as something occurred to him.
The Cairn… That should be close by. But he was running out of breath; with a lash of his serpentine body, he propelled himself upward. Unlike his clutchsibs, he had no hind legs to push off the bottom.
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