Seeing Wings of Green

Chapter 8: A Day in the Life of a Mini Dragon

When I landed back at my original bathing site, the heat haze of the "hidden" lone Kymari from earlier was gone and her scent was faint enough for me to feel like she wouldn't be coming back anytime soon; about fifteen minutes old or so. As I picked up where I had left off, another green Dragonet had arrived for her own 'spa day'. While the other green dragonets had forest green scales with gold fringes on their wing tips, the scales of this green female were more of a dark hunter green and she had amber-colored fringes on her wing tips instead of gold.

"Mind if I join you?" She chirped happily.

I paused in my second round of exfoliation and shook my head 'no' before I scooped up a handful of damp sand, reared up on my hind legs, and smeared it over the scale plates on my underside. After she had scrubbed herself with the damp sand, the dark green dragonet offered to scrub the scales in the places I couldn't reach myself; namely the spots between my wing arms and shoulder blades, and I happily returned the favor. Much like birds or other social animals, we took great joy in grooming one another; as it was one way that we built and reinforced our social bonds.

The other Dragonet and I rinsed the sand from our scales in the gentile flow of the creek then made our way over to a stack of large, flat rocks on the shoreline to dry off. I hopped onto the closest rock and climbed my way up to the rock on the very top of the artificially stacked pile of (most likely) imported granite. Once I was on the topmost rock, I circled around for a bit before I allowed my scale plates of my stomach to touch the sun-warmed rock. While a rock surface obviously didn't require kneading before I laid down on it, kneading before laying down was a habit that I had developed after I had moved into my tree hollow. I spread my wings out to their full span in order to collect the sun's warmth as the sun re-emerged from behind a small cloud, and I closed my eyes and let out a small hum with content. I could hear the movement of the dark green Dragonet as she settled down on one of the rocks below mine.

Despite being reptilian in appearance, we weren't like snakes or lizards that were slowed or crippled by cold temperatures. We could very easily maintain our body temperature, but most of us preferred the outside temperature to be above the freezing mark. Luckily for us, we didn't even have to worry about being cold; as this place with its humid subtropical climate never had temperatures below 66°F, which was nice. I had always preferred the outside temperature to be at the warmer end of the thermometer; even while I was Human.

~~~

Movement from my left told me that the other green Dragonet had finished sunbathing and with a friendly "See you later!" to me over a private link, she took off and was off to her next activity of the day- whether it was feeding and caring for young, meeting up with friends, foraging for food, spending time with a mate, or Kymari-watching- I didn't know.

After an extra ten minutes of snoozing in the sun, I was ready to get on with my day. Feeling rested and re-energized, I stood up, rocked myself back in a cat-like stretch with a yawn, and flapped my wings a few times to get the blood flowing in them again. Once the pins-and-needles feeling disappeared from my wings and limbs, I pushed myself into the air and began to beat my wings down in powerful downstrokes to carry myself higher into the tree tops. I kept my flight mostly out of sight from the Kymari, which wasn't hard to do thanks to my superb sense of smell and vision that could rival that of a bird-of-prey. However, I did find joy in flying over some of the main paths in brief intervals in order to Kymari-watch; if only for a brief amount of time.

A patch of light red by one of the many small creeks immediately caught my attention and I decided to land to investigate. The bush- a member of one of the plant species that the Kymari had brought with them- had tiny, spoon-shaped, light red leaves with small flowers that were either dark red or dark grey. They grew silver, juicy, grape-like fruits that were bitter at first, then took on the taste of vanilla. The Blood Memories told me that the name of this plant was Carduus Laevis and was relatively common and grew near running water; however, I just took to calling it the Common Vanilla Bittersweet. The other Dragonets didn't particularly like the fruit from this bush, but I did. Oh well, more for me! I plucked one of the ripe silver fruits from one of the branches and listened in the conversations that took place between my flock-mates over the general mind link as I nibbled away at the soft, elliptical-shaped fruit between my forepaws.