Noah stood at the edge of the crater and looked at what he'd done to the place.
Torn grass in every direction, roots exposed where his boots had dragged furrows through the dirt. A stretch of a meadow gone entirely, replaced by a hole deep enough that he couldn't see the bottom of it from up here. The stream that used to run clean through the middle of the field had lost its path and was pooling now against a wall of upturned earth, confused about where it was supposed to go.
'This is their home,' he thought, turning slowly to take in the full scope of it. 'Not a training ground. Not a battlefield I get to leave a mess in and walk away from. Home.'
He thought about what it would mean to just leave it like this. To go patch himself up, sleep it off, come back in a week and find the crater still sitting there, the grass still torn, the stream still confused. The hatchlings would learn to route around it eventually. Dragons adapted. That wasn't the point.
