"What?" Roxanna stared at him in disbelief. She instinctively moved closer, unable to ignore the word alone. The thought of him facing everything by himself made her chest ache. "What happened?"
Zeir lowered his head for a moment before finally looking back at her. "My kind has been hunted since the beginning of time," he said in a low voice. "People wanted every part of our bodies because they believed they could benefit from them."
He paused before continuing. "No matter how strong a group is, it's impossible to survive forever when the entire world keeps hunting you. That's why... my mother hid me deep inside a cave beneath the river, where no one would ever find me."
When Zeir was still just an egg, he wasn't wrapped in the warmth of his mother's embrace. Instead, he was surrounded by freezing cold water.
And when he finally hatched, the first thing he had to do was struggle to swim to the surface just to take his first breath.
