The pitter patter of the rain grew heavier as he stood before her, her nose still pointed towards the darkened sky as she replied. Her face was damp as she lowered it to look upon him, a sad smile quirking at the edges of her features. If she was sad, why smile? Drogon did not understand, and he simply stared back at her, perplexed by this idea of feeling one thing and doing another. His brilliant garnet eyes watched her as she spoke of how in time she would be alright. Well, then, if she knew that she would be alright, why bother wasting time with not being so? Her life was clearly not in danger; no one had come to remove her from the pack lands, everything seemed perfectly normal. Emotional pain was not something that Drogon comprehended; despite the hollow ache that sometimes knocked within his chest cavity at the thought that he had no father, unlike those girls Embla and Bastille. Slowly the child’s stark black fur became sodden, and the grizzling of russet that ran along his ribs was turned almost as dark as his base coat due to the wetness.

She invited him within her den, to get out of the storm, and as she moved away and into the shelter it offered he simply looked up at the twisting and turning of the clouds. Lightning lit up the sky and a booming thunder clapped in its wake. He was not afraid of the storm, but then he realized that he recognized the name she had introduced herself as. His attention fell back to the alabaster shewolf smudged with her marking of russet. Ceal. His mother had spoken of her before, in telling of the history of their family. And so he moved forward, stepping within the den’s mouth before turning to face outside once more, standing as the wolf who he realized was, unconventionally, his aunt. “Drogon,” he said as she sat down. She went on to ask why he was up so late, whether or not his mother would be worried about him being out in the storm.

Rather than answer her immediately, he leaned forward slightly so that he could better see the way the storm raged outside. Water threatened to creep across the threshold, and a single drop fell from the top of the entrance to splash against his nose. His nose wrinkled and his teeth flashed, snapping at the invisible intruder. Sheathing his puppy fangs once more, he placidly glanced up at Ceal. “The storm,” he answered simply, for it was entirely the reason he was up and out of the den. As for his mother, she never stopped worrying about her wild brood of four miscreants, even though she had ensured that by this age they could look after themselves to at least some extent. Her young dragons, she called them, and oh how they lived up to the moniker. But if any one of them was likely to someday breathe fire, it was certainly Drogon.