ORIGIN

A luckier gembound may have had their chrysalis in a better place; Polaris, perhaps, or Eridanus—Tunnel P, at the very least.

This little neonate was not a lucky gembound, in all the ways one could describe their luck.

Unlucky enough to have magic take hold of a gemstone—perhaps a lost competitor’s?—but not lucky enough to have a lesser steal it away or shatter it before the little one could have the misfortune of awakening in such a harsh place; just barely lucky enough to have their developing shell buried under the melting snow of winter Hydra, to emerge from the sands of summer’s heat.

Unlucky, unlucky, unlucky—and here she was, a little chick curled up in a thin shell of yellow-orange amber, ready to hatch under searing heat. Her feathers and down were pressed flat up against the walls of the smooth chrysalis, shoved up against the rock that was just barely covered by the sand—

—and, there, a crackle that mingled with the whistling desert wind, and then another one, steadily growing in intensity as it prepared to break, unable to hold the young gembound inside for much longer.

The crumbling of the gemstone pauses, for a moment. Two, as if the silent beats between the chrysalis’s cracking and actually hatching were a monument to the gembound’s existence in here, of all places.

It breaks abruptly—a sharp crack! can be heard, and then there is movement from the little gembound within.

Cool, comforting amniotic fluid gives way to heat, heat, and more light than even the transparent shell of amber could reveal, and the chick quickly becomes frantic with it. The heat is stifling, unbearably hot, and her first instinct is to try to shuffle back into the safety of her shell.

But her shell is gone—cracked, folded in on itself in a pile of shards. Like it or not, she can’t go back, and the amniotic fluid that stains her feathers is drying fast. Even the air is hot and heavy in a choking way, unbearably dry, and she flaps her wings and jumps around on the sand as it scorches at her feet. It’s so, so hot—she wants cold, more than she wants anything else.
And—to her surprise, as she senses something prickle with energy on the top of her head—the air does cool. Just a few degrees, just a bit; but enough to provide relief. Enough that her head isn’t threatening to spin with the unbearable heat.

She shifts back into what’s left of her chrysalis and blinks, eyes squinting as she tries to see past the blinding light of this place and scan her surroundings. She has the instinct there should be someone around…

A quiet child’s voice speaks her first words in a hushed, fearful voice as her bird’s instinct drives her to search for a potential parent. “Mom-my?”

Nothing; no response. The tumultuous, burning wind is as much a silence as the darkness of the deepest cave; no answer comes to the little chick’s cry. As her eyes slowly adjust to the near-blinding light, her surroundings are revealed to her: a vast expanse of rolling sand dunes, virtually endless to someone so small, sandy and barren of life for as far as the eye can see. Nothing moves except plumes of sand kicked up by the wind; there are glints of something scattered here and there, gleaming as the hot light shines off of it, but, otherwise, nothing.

She goes to try again, softly—”Mo—”

—but she feels something shift beneath her feet, deep, deep below the sand, and her voice is cut off with a sharp spike of instinctive fear. A prey’s instinct when faced with a predator—hide, hide, be still and quiet, do not make any sound and the monsters cannot find you.

She swallows her words in her mouth and trembles; a chill runs down her spine despite the heat slowly creeping its way in, swallowing her once more.

She blinks, vision spinning—why is it so hot? She wants someone to take the heat away…

...but she is quickly learning there is no one. Nobody but the ominous, frightful movement distant below her, nobody but the hot hot light beaming down on her, eye-searingly bright.

She holds her beak shut to force herself not to whimper and takes a shaky step forwards, waiting for the shifting to change.

Nothing; nothing for now, anyways, and the little gembound squeezes her eyes shut, this time focusing on the heat, trying to make it go away…

The relief is immediate; she breathes in and out and in and it’s like all the heat around her is being sucked in with it. The wind swirling around her becomes lighter, in a sense, cool and soothing, a welcome thing in the midst of all this heat. To her surprise, she even feels water beading on her feathers—she twists her head around in surprise and seats herself on the now-cool sand to lick up a couple droplets.

She can make the heat go away, she realizes. She—she doesn’t know how she’s doing it, except by focusing really hard, but she can do it.

The name comes to her in a sudden burst of understanding—’magic.’

’Ma-gic’, she mouths, still unwilling to speak lest the sound draw something to her but momentarily enraptured by the feeling of safety the coolness brings.

Magic—what a word.

With this realization of what she can do; this realization that she has a bit of control, at least, with this, some semblance of safety from the monsters lurking beneath her feet, suddenly, the world doesn’t seem so scary. There’s nobody else around, sure, and she feels… sad about that, and a little lonely, but she has magic. That’ll be enough, right?

Magic can be her friend!

She feels the cold beginning to fade again, and focuses to keep it up, partially because she wants to keep the heat at bay for as long as possible, wants to keep that sweet relief surrounding her, and partially because now that she realizes what she can do, she wants to use it as much as she can.

A glint in the distance catches her eye, and she blinks and looks up, the magic quickly forgotten and its thread disappearing back to where it came as she has to swallow a startled chirp. What is—

—oh. Just a shiny thing, glimmering in the distance. Nothing to be worried about. She lets go of a tense breath and considers trying to lower the temperature again, but... her focus is still on that shiny thing.

Even though her instincts are telling her it's a bad idea to wander around for no reason, that she should be focusing on finding other things like—like food, maybe—she can't help but wonder what the glimmer several feet away is, exactly. Her curiosity is piqued.

She sets off carefully, slowly; each step forward is done with a certain awareness of the strange shifting beneath her, an instinctive awareness that she has to be as quiet as possible or else. It's slow going, and she finds that the heat around her is slowly but gradually coming back in, the temperature raising higher with every step.

By the time she's reached the strange glint in the sand, she's panting, breathing heavily in and out in an attempt to vent some of the heat. It is so, so hot; her body is screaming at her for some relief, and so she pauses to try to pull the heat down again before really examining whatever she's found.

She breathes a sigh of relief as she manages to cool the air around her once more. Ah… that’s way better.

But this cast, she notices, also comes with a strange sort of strain at her core; an innate sense of energy, a warning that if she keeps going like this, she’ll tire herself out before long.

She needs shelter, then; something to hide her from the heat until she’s recovered, or, at the very least, a little bit of shade. The light in the sky, hot and arid and blinding even without factoring in its natural heat, seems to glare down at her—she finds herself disliking it. No, no, no, she doesn’t like the light here, not one bit.

Her attention turns to the shiny thing that she has found; even up close, she still can’t say what it is. It’s made out of some strange, shiny material that’s been broken to bits—as she shifts closer to examine it, she sees punctures within the material and wonders what hurt it.

Maybe the monsters below did it? It’s a terrifying thought to the little bird—the thought that she could be punctured and ripped open by some sort of monster with little regard, snatched up or bitten by their large, pointy teeth…

...she doesn’t know what they look like, but she thinks they have teeth. Teeth are scary.

But there’s enough of the… shell, she thinks?—it’s rounded enough to be a shell of some kind, maybe belonging to an equally scary but more unlucky beast—that she can fit herself under it, away from the light…

...bad idea. As it turns out, the inside of the shell is somehow hotter than the outside, even with her magic; it’s at least tolerable since she’s taken the heat away, but she gets the impression that if she had crawled in here to hide from the light, she wouldn’t have liked it very much.

Okay, no hiding in the shiny shells, then. The shiny shells make heat stronger; she keeps that in mind for later. Shiny shells are bad.

With this in mind, she continues to wander, her black form a tiny speck against the vastness of the sand dunes. She wants food—she doesn’t know why, being so young and new to the caves, but she needs to find something to eat. Her mouth waters; food is important.

And so with this in mind she wanders off into the distance, little bird feet pattering gently against the sand before the winds sweep her footprints away, leaving no trail, no sign that she was ever here.