Divalian Shell

Becoming is a long process, warm and dreamy inside the egg. The whim drinks its dam's stories and drowses.

Foreign body-warmth between the seven of them. A vibration of approaching—voices.

Calm wholeness in one voice, tense want in the other. Is it time to turn becoming into being? The whim becomes something with a tympanum to listen.

"Petra."

"My queen."

Hard to understand the words under the want. "Enough of watching our sisters go through this torture, three weeks at a time," it says, and, "never crack it," though the whim is perfectly capable of cracking its own egg if it feels like it—and then, grief layered over a wish wide enough to feed even the whim's hungry sire: "My lady, there will never be a final loop."

Longing! Deep longing! The tense voice wants something outside the world-that-is. Half-formed claws scratch impotently at the inner curve of shell. For the first time, the whim feels hunger.

"What would you suggest?"

Fear, confusion, trust. "Here, my lady? Now? In front of—them?"

An egg tooth suits the whim's need.

"Here and now. In front of them." The stone voice. It wants nothing, not even one little whim.

"…The only answer I can see is to pull everyone out, get them to the Tangled Shore," says the other being, in coruscations of doubt and the-world-that-isn't-yet. The egg tooth isn't strong enough; it wants denseness, bone, ivory, steel. "But—how, with Riven and Dûl Incaru's curse alive?"

The caul of dam-stories and sire-vows breaks between gemstone teeth. Eggshell scatters.

Two beings among the whim's lazy still-egged sibs: unwanting and watching, wanting and braced.

Perfect. Aiming for its first meal, the whim leaps free.