Chapter 27 Raven #2
My talons slice through the broken bases, the stone parting like wet clay beneath the razor edges.
Shards scatter across the sandy island, and I spit a small stream of acid onto the remaining jagged pieces.
The hiss and sizzle fills the air, acrid smoke curling upward as the acid eats through rock, flattening the surface into something smooth.
Something safe. The bitter chemical taste coats my tongue, familiar and grounding.
The interior of my nest is shaped like a shallow bowl, the sand still warm from the geothermal heat beneath.
I curl into it, my massive body filling the space, scales scraping against the fine grains as I settle.
Each granule presses into the softer hide of my underbelly—countless tiny points of pressure, oddly comforting.
I turn myself so my horned head faces the opening, my neck curved, my eyes fixed on the only entrance.
This place. This hidden sanctuary.
I found it myself. I’d been exploring the network of tunnels that honeycomb beneath our territory when I felt it—the faintest tremor through the stone, a vibration that whispered of moving water somewhere beyond the solid rock face.
Something called to me. Something ancient and instinctual that I couldn’t name.
I pressed my palm against the cool stone in the egg chamber and felt the warmth bleeding through from the other side, sensing the hollow space waiting in the darkness.
So I melted my way in.
The memory surfaces unbidden—the heat building in my chest, the acid rising in my throat, the first spray of corrosive liquid hitting the rock face.
Steam erupted in a blinding cloud as stone dissolved like sugar in rain.
The stone screamed as it melted, high-pitched hisses and pops that echoed through the empty tunnels.
The sight that greeted me stole my breath.
A hidden hot spring, untouched for millennia. An island of black volcanic sand rising from water that glowed with bioluminescent algae. A perfect, secret sanctuary that had been waiting—just for me.
This was a black dragon’s instinct manifesting—the drive to find safe places, hidden places, spaces where we could retreat when the world demanded too much.
No one else knows this nest exists. Not my mates. Not my father’s court. This is mine, and mine alone.
The volcanic sand shifts beneath my weight, conforming to the curves of my body like a living thing.
Heat radiates up from the Earth’s core far below, seeping through the dark grains, warming me from the outside in.
The sand is ancient—ground down over millennia from volcanic rock, each grain smooth and fine as powder, black as my own scales.
It smells of deep earth and fire long dormant, of something older than memory.
Something that existed before dragons took to the skies.
The warmth sinks into my muscles, my bones, the very marrow of me.
It soothes something I didn’t know was raw—something ancient and powerful that unfurls in my chest like a sleeping serpent finally given permission to rest. My dragoness sighs within me, a sound of bone-deep relief.
This type of sand has cradled countless black dragons before me—I know this now with a certainty that transcends logic.
Queens and warriors. Mothers and daughters.
Their essence has seeped into every grain, and I feel them now like whispers against my scales.
A lineage of strength. Of survival. Of fierce, unrelenting love for the lives they protected.
Perhaps they called to me through the stone. Perhaps they guided me here when I needed a sanctuary most.
I belong here. In this moment, in this place, I am exactly where I’m meant to be.
The natural rock formation rises around me like a fortress—solid, unyielding, eternal.
Millions of years of geological pressure created these walls, layer upon layer of volcanic rock compressed into something harder than steel.
I press my flank against the curved interior and feel the stone’s cool solidity, an anchor against the chaos churning in my mind.
The walls arch overhead, forming a dome that blocks out the bioluminescent glow of the outer cavern.
No light penetrates here. Not a single photon breaches this darkness.
The black is absolute. Complete. Perfect.
My scales—already the color of a moonless night—disappear entirely in the shadows. I hold up one massive, clawed hand and see nothing. Not the gleam of keratin, not the subtle iridescence that plays across my hide in the light. I am invisible. I am shadow given form. I am the darkness itself.
Only my face remains visible.
The white bone plates of my skull gleam faintly in the void—the pale mask that marks me as my father’s daughter.
In the absolute darkness of the nest, my face floats disembodied, a specter hovering in the black.
I know what I look like. I’ve seen the ancient paintings in my father’s private archives, the ones that predate written history.
Black dragons curled in dark places, their bodies invisible, only the ghostly white of their skulls visible to any creature foolish enough to peer inside.
The skull dragons, we were called. The death bringers. The ancient ones.
It’s a hunting technique passed down through bloodlines older than civilization.
Our white faces mimic the sun-bleached skulls of dragons long dead, scattered in caves and mountain crevices across the world.
Prey animals learned to fear those skulls, learned to avoid the places where dragon bones lay.
But they also learned that skulls meant the predator was gone.
Dead.
No longer a threat.
They never learned to fear the skulls that blinked.
A dragon hunting in darkness becomes invisible, nothing but scales and shadow and patience. Only the skull shows, pale and still as death, and anything that wanders close sees only the remains of a predator past. A relic. A warning that danger once lived here but lives no longer.
By the time they realize the skull is attached to a living, breathing hunter, it’s already too late.
My mother told me stories of the ancient black dragons who would wait in caves for weeks, motionless, their white faces the only thing visible in the dark.
Entire herds would shelter in those caves during storms, believing them empty save for old bones.
The dragons would wait until the herd settled.
Until they slept. And then the skulls would move, and the darkness would come alive with teeth and fire.
Now I use the same ancient camouflage not to hunt, but to hide.
My wing unfurls and drapes over my stomach, the membrane thin enough to feel the warmth radiating from my body. Beneath the leathery fold, I sense it—that small, dense weight low in my belly. Warm and undeniable.
The implant failed.
I feel the egg forming within me. There’s only one, from what I can sense—a single sphere of developing life, no larger than my dragon’s clenched fist but growing with each passing hour.
The shell hasn’t hardened yet; I feel it shifting, malleable, still taking shape around the precious life inside.
It could belong to any of my five mates.
The thought should terrify me. Instead, my dragoness purrs contentedly in the back of my mind, the vibration resonating through my chest, rattling loose stones near my head. She’s quite pleased with herself.
I wasn’t ready for this. I thought I had more time.
My mother has my brothers and sisters due to hatch in the coming weeks. How am I supposed to help protect her and the hatchlings when I have one of my own, months behind hers? The weight of it presses down on me, heavier than my own scales.
I reach for the bonds with my mates—those golden threads of connection I feel constantly, pulsing with their emotions, their presence—and I dampen them.
One by one, I wrap each bond in shadow, muffling the warmth until they’re barely whispers at the edge of my awareness.
The silence that follows is deafening. Lonely. But necessary.
They can’t know where I am. Not yet. Not until the egg is laid and I can think clearly again.
From what my father told me, a black dragoness guarding a clutch—or even a single egg—is the most dangerous creature in existence.
I believe him now. The protective instinct doesn’t feel like an emotion.
It feels like a second skeleton beneath my scales, iron-hard and immovable.
It feels like madness wrapped in purpose.
I close my eyes and breathe in deeply, expanding my ribs until they ache, drawing the warm, humid air deep into my lungs. I search inward, trying to sense how many eggs I carry. The awareness settles like a stone dropping into still water.
One.
One is more than I wanted at this point in my life. But everything happens for a reason, and I will love my hatchling fiercely. Savagely. With every drop of acid in my blood.
Three days.
That’s how long it will be before I lay my egg.
I know this the same way I know how to breathe, how to fly, how to kill.
The knowledge is instinctual, branded into my very DNA.
Three days of the egg forming, hardening, preparing to enter the world.
Three days of my body redirecting every ounce of energy toward the life growing inside me.
Three days of hiding.
I will not move from this nest. I will not eat.
I will not drink. The volcanic sand will keep me warm; the darkness will keep me hidden, and the stone walls will keep me safe.
Anyone who tries to enter will face a skull in the shadows—ancient, patient, and very much alive.
Anyone foolish enough to come closer will learn why black dragons were once called death incarnate.
The warmth seeps deeper into my bones. The sand molds to my body like an embrace.
The absolute darkness wraps around me like a cocoon, and I let myself sink into it, become part of it.
In this moment, I am not Raven. I am not a daughter or a mate or a sister.
I am something far older. Something primal.
I am a black dragoness preparing to bring new life into the world, and nothing—nothing—will threaten what is mine.
I exhale slowly; the breath leaving me in a long, low rumble that stirs the sand around my snout. Then I raise my scales.
Every single one lifts from my hide, each sharp point standing on edge like a thousand black blades.
The sensation prickles across my entire body—a full-body shiver that doesn’t stop, every nerve ending alive and waiting.
Nothing can touch me now without being shredded.
Nothing can reach my egg without going through an armor of razors.
In the darkness, I am invisible.
Only my skull floats in the void, white and still and waiting.
My dragoness’s voice echoes in my mind, no longer a whisper but a relentless beat. A war drum pounding in the dark.
Protect…
Protect…
Protect…
The word becomes my heartbeat. My breath. My entire existence narrows to this single, primal truth.
I am a black dragoness.
I am a skull in the shadows.
And for the next three days, I am death itself to anything that comes near.