A further ways up the same river, a small brown puppy was busy cleaning her fur in the water.

This was a regular routine, quickly established when Eden had figured out two things about living in the nearby gardens: that playing in and among the flowers and smelling their sweet petals meant those petals and dirt and other things ended up dirtying her fur, and that she didn't like it when her fur was dirty. She wanted to be like the deer who she saw grazing at the grass sometimes: pristine and fancy and moving so slow and gently they were like flowers swaying in the breeze.

So, she sat in the gentle stream, splashing in it with her paws and wagging her tiny tail and generally getting herself quite wet, but only in an elegant way. Like the deer.

Her focus on this task was quickly interrupted by the sight of movement some ways downriver. She turned her head to see something—well, something quite bright, was her first thought. Eden had never seen that shade of orange before. Certainly he looked nothing like the deer, much bigger, but the voidlight shined beautifully on him. Her soft splashing in the river quickly ceased as she padded over to the nearby bank and sat herself down, watching.

She didn't dare to get too close, of course. There was something about creatures so much larger than her that made her feel like it was better to keep her distance. (And as a little, new-hatched puppy, many things were much bigger than her.) But she admired him from afar.

There are many lessons a child must learn as they grow. Lessons taught from parents, from elders; lessons borne of experience, whether personal or witnessed second-hand.

The lesson Eden learns as she sits by the stream and watches the dragon come to a strangely still stop is this: the lesson of predation.

Of course she is not innocent to the thought of swallowing down little creatures for her next meal. But that was a distant, small thing, hardly bloody except for the occasional smear on the muzzle. She'd spent time staring into this very river, looking for small silvered shadows of fish to catch. But there is a difference, between the little minnows and the elegant, shining swans she'd admired from afar just as much as the dragon himself.

The difference is this: the swans fight.

She'd thought the birds sweet, pretty. She liked how their eyes glow, little fireflies (did she know what a firefly was?) in the voidlight.

It all happens so quickly. The dragon spreads his large, leathery wings and takes flight, for a moment a small tapestry against the sky. She stares—

—and finds she cannot stop staring, as so suddenly he pitches downward and there is a bird in his claws and the swans, the pretty, soft little swans are screaming.

They cry out—they cry out, marring the gentle, quiet sounds of Cepheus—marring their bodies as necks split open and she finds herself rooted to the ground in surprise, shock, (awe?) as the dragon turns in the air and drags one of the flock up with him.

There are no words for her, watching. She doesn't know any. Her fur bristles on end and every little-pup instinct in her body is screaming run, hide, flee but she can't move.

She can only watch as the dragon's wings beat against the sky and bear witness to the question of whether or not he'll manage to outfly the pretty, pretty alabaster-soft birds with their pretty, pretty, razor-sharp fangs.

She didn't think such big birds would be able to fly like that.

She didn't think anyone would ever be able to outfly a screeching crowd of feather and fang like that, not when they all seem so insistently out for the dragon's blood. Not when they all seem so angry. She'd never call a lesser angry before, not before now, but with their screams ringing in her ears all she can think about is their anger.

And the single one of their flock hanging from the dragon's claws, tooth-lined neck held tight so the bird can do nothing more but flail, ivory wings beating without effect. Even in the talons of a predator, it still looks so beautiful.

As quickly as it'd happened, the dragon is gone, with only the sounds of the bird's vicious calls in the distance to mark that it had happened at all.

Eden sits there for a while, shaken, but eventually finds it in her to stand up. The river's soft bubbling nearby suddenly doesn't seem very appealing.

I'd like to go home now, she thinks, distantly. It's not that she's scared, not really—it all happened so fast, and so far away, and nobody involved really even looked at her.

It's just. It's just that it was a lot, is all. She doesn't know how to feel about it; her little, precious world turned on its head by the idea of. Everything that just happened.

With a tiny, shaky breath, she makes herself turn away from the river and walk back to the gardens.