2024-07-12 - [5.3] Aerology

Hiss and rush and scrape.

The first time he hears it, Courth wonders if the world is shaking again, and his tremor starts up once more in response. There had been so much roaring during the quake, as sand rolled against shell and reverberated, and so different from the calming, orientating rumble of warm-mother turning him over. This is different too and he hisses at it in return.

’Which way is up?! Or out! Are we going out again? Hello! Which way is out!’ In hindsight it’s probably a good thing no one responds to his first panicked wail.

The strange-human-minds don’t care, the world does not upend, and the scraping…Becomes normal. Wind. Blowing sand, rather than warm-mother turning him in it. How strange. What causes it? Where does it come from? Does the directionality mean anything? The dragon-minds around him sigh and lean into it when it’s at its strongest, remembering long flights and sunny mornings. It’s the memories of it at even stronger than Courth latches on to, snatches of theory and strategy and how it treats thread. Is this a predictable thing? He cannot stop thinking about it, drawing diagrams in his mind that echo the lines on his shell and mean…nothing, probably, but everything to him about how he thinks wind looks.

Except when the sun goes.

Court doesn’t notice the absence of the sands heat most of the time, but when the tent walls close again and the sun disappears and the wind, that awful wind, starts beating at the sides like it wants to get in at them…

Little rivets form around his shell each morning, the only proof he spends those nights trying to wriggle his egg back under a layer of protective sand. Away from the scraping wind.