• His world was a soft glow, a gentle golden light filtered through the thick clearness surrounding him, broken occasionally by the gradual darkness, or by a sudden shadow, accompanied by a distant thunder of sound, on those occasions his world tilted slightly, yet always resettled quickly.
    He knew not how long he lived in the world of diffuse light and shadows, yet soon enough he grew restless and shifted, driven by a desire, an instinctual need to get out of his world, yet he could not, as something solid, an opalescent barrier prevented him from leaving.
    Opening his jaws in a silent howl of frustration, he scrabbled against the wall with butter soft claws, and hit it with his head, driving towards the outside. This had better results, as soon the barrier began to crack.
    He could see vague shapes, shadows that would touch the boundaries of his world and rock it, the humming rumble would grow louder as his world would rock.
    Driven by this as well, he redoubled his efforts and rammed his muzzle against the translucent wall, causing it to crack further.
    With a final lunge, his world shatters and he falls out of it, only to be assailed by many new sensations. Gone was the warm comfort of the liquid embrace, to be replaced by the biting sting of something he did not understand and the hardness of what he now lay upon.
    A massive blurred form came into his sight, the strange brightness making it hard for him to hold the figure in his sight without blinking rapidly. Glittering eyes gaze down on him as he hears, both in the Speech and in his mind the words he instinctually knew as his mother, saying, "Well done, you are here, and you are loved, little one."
    What may have been said after that was lost to him as he the efforts of his escape finally caught up to him and he fell deeply asleep.
    <TUG>

    He rumbles deeply as his mind awakens from slumber, to once again feel the pull of the wards he had set to warn him of developments on the surface.
    Cracking his eyes open, the sapphire gleam illuminates the darkness surrounding him as he begins to move, stretching each muscle like a cat, and feeling centuries worth of dust turned rock slough off his hide as he gets up.
    Giving a grumble of mild annoyance as his ward once more signalled him, he closes his eyes, seeing within his mind the myrid threads of magic connecting with the things around him, and to the spells he has ongoing.
    Finding the once he wants, he grabs it in a claw and taps into it, then resets the magic of the ward.
    Releasing the thread, he once again opens his eyes, the light spilling over to illuminate the vast chamber he calls his den, casting in alternating light and shadow the many things he has collected over the untold millenia of his waiting, A few gems of power from the age of the elementals, a staff capable of slicing through the boundaries of reality, collected from a templar magus during the age of rebirth were among the items carefully laid out on shelves of rock.
    He shifts his gaze, the blue light sweeping over the many hundreds of books lining many more shelves of rock along one side of the cavern as he slowly moves to a gem embedded in a nearby wall.
    Tapping it lightly with a long silvery talon, he closes his eyes briefly as the ceiling lights up, many panes of crystal glow with daylight, fully lighting his den, even as his gaze once more shifts to another item he had gathered. Two arcing, gracefully carved wings rise from a base of jet streaked alabaster to form an open topped oval which seemed to gather the light around it and radiate it tenfold.
    He still remembers the one he got it from... and the scars he bears still during his fight with the shifter magus, the only time he had let compassion stay his actions...
    He blinks again while shaking his head to free his mind of those thoughts, the magus was dead milennia ago, and his own abilites have grown since then as well.
    Approaching the shining sculture, he closes his eyes, seeing the pulsing theads that wove through the arch created by the wings, and ever so softly he touches first one, then another with a foreclaw, setting up a harmony of pulses within the web, and awakening the magic of the mirror, as it were...
    He opens his eyes in time to see the seeming empty space in the center of the oval shimmer, then darken to an image of the outside, stars fill the sky and the first moon was just rising over the mountain of glowing lights in the distance... He sweeps his gaze elsewhere, then blinks rapidly as his still sleep muzzled mind catches something, and does a double take, A mountain of what appears to be lights...
    He shakes his head, feeling the fog of the many years of sleep finally fade as he considers what the mirror is showing, and mutters to himself in the deep and harsh sounds of his own language as he brings the image into a new focus, a close up of the mountain.
    As the scene shifts, he finally sees that the mountain is really a construct of many things, what the two legged ones he had talked with before called 'buildings'. It was from the many hundreds of small squares in the side of each of those buildings the light was coming from.
    He sits back on his haunches, considering what he is seeing when a motion catches his eye, What appears to be a river of lights, red entering the mountain of buildings, white coming out.
    He shifts the focus of the mirror again, and sees this river closer, now comprised of individual boxlike things, each with two sets of eyes, white in the front, red in the back, and what appears to be some sort of clear material covering a good portion of each, he could not get the mirror to show him what.
    He grumbles again to himself, stretching his wings as he thinks, feeling the slight popping of the muscles and joints within them as they opened for the first time in centuries. the tips of both suddenly hit the ceiling of his den and he blinks again.... Had he grown that much?
    Whuffing in amusement at himself, he flips his wings back down, and settles them across his sides and back as he turns and heads for the entrance to his lair.