Hathor was growing up every day, her young puppy body stretching through awkward dimensions on its long, clumsy way to adulthood. She still carried her puppy fat, which rounded and softened her silhouette; she still wore a puppy’s fluffy coat - and a chick’s fluffy down, delicate as snowflakes bundled around her tiny frame. Although the gryphon did not have a regular wolf’s ungainly huge paws, her vicious bird-talons still appeared too large for the stilts they were attached to: pudgy toes ending in wicked, wicked talons that sometimes tripped up the eaglet when she ran too fast. And Hathor was always - for adventure would not wait for slow, cowardly pups.

If a word existed that could not, would not stick to Hathor, it was “coward.”

Where her mutant siblings bemoaned their bizarre appearances, the warm cream-colored lass embraced hers - openly, ruthlessly, loudly, greeting each day with a raptor’s shriek and toiling the afternoon away learning how to fight with her mismatched physiology. She barely reached her warrior mother’s tough-muscled shoulder, and yet Hathor pushed herself like an apprentice twice her size, forever crashing beyond her limits with teeth bared. Hathor did not miss the way her distant father frowned at her, how intently he studied her practice… the bird-blessed creature knew disapproval when she saw it and that only forced her to race toward her goals harder. Athene had told her litter that they would eventually settle on their “one purpose.” The mini gryphon understood, with such certainty her chest swelled with it, that she would become the very best at everything... but wear the mantle of soldier.

Sunlight cast a white halo over the pale fuzz that blanketed Hathor’s body from the back of her ears clear down her back - a full cape that would one day be a dazzling array of golden and ivory feathers. Winter made the air crisp and delicious; she tasted the briskness of frost in the air, although the day promised clarity without a hint of snowfall. She’d been following her mother’s scent, hoping to show Athene a few new moves she’d perfected… and when Hathor realized that her dam’s trail lingered toward the ocean, she pranced quickly to the beach. Once her claws touched the hard, cold sand, her gait took on a nearly antelope quality, a rhythmic series of small bounces that worked better for her given that she had eagle’s talons rather than puppy paws. Ahead, she could see the brindled coat of Athene, drawing closer to a ginger-pelted stranger that Hathor had not yet met. The gryphon smelled fish and salt and sand and the lizard-stink of the gigantic lizards that called this place home, their lairs deep underground where the chill of the season could not reach them.

“MOTHER!” Hathor’s voice yipped out on the tail-end of an avian screech. She hopped rapidly toward the pair of she-wolves, her eyes - one dark as pitch with flecks of gold, one autumn-amber with flashes of yellow - brilliant with excitement. “Watch me. Watch what I can do.” With a daring glance at the long-legged, fox-colored woman, Hathor darted into the frigid waves. She stared hard at the crystalline current ebbing between her sunny-scaled limbs. Waited for one of the big, lazy fish that sometimes skirted the shallows to swim close enough…

With a victorious bark, Hathor speared a silvery animal with her curved claws, the sharp tips piercing straight through the flesh. Then she bounced back to the beach, her limb holding the fish held in front of her, a wide smile on her childish maw. She peered from Athene to the stranger, tail wagging furiously. “Did you see me do that? It was good, huh?” Away from their gathering, beyond the black rocks that hid them from the view of the dragons, Hathor knew that the dragons feasted upon leftovers of their own. Graciously, she offered the fish - no bigger than the length of her foreleg - to her mother and the stranger.