It had no name.
Its kind had no custom of naming. In the western deserts of the Molten Iron Mountain Range, a young scorpion didn't need a name. All it needed was a shell hard enough, a pair of pincers fast enough, and the instinct to turn and run when it met something bigger.
Its kin had told it that it was seven years old.
In those seven years, it had eaten countless sand lizards, dodged more than a dozen fire-elemental storms, and once fought its own nest-brother for a fat rock rat. It won that fight, but at the cost of a crack in its third left leg that had never fully healed.
Life wasn't good, but it wasn't bad, either.
Its greatest wish was to grow as big as the clan's chieftain.
The chieftain's shell was ten times bigger than its own. Its pincers could snap a rock when they closed. Every time the chieftain crawled out of its burrow and stood on high ground, all kin within a hundred meters would lower their bodies.
'I want that feeling.'
