Book One: Onnu and Pannu

The Nomad

He never admitted to being who she thought. As she said, it didn't matter anymore. And, like her, he couldn't even remember what his name used to be.
   They would later learn that nobody remembered what their Earth name had been. In fact, they could pinpoint exactly when they forgot:
   When they chose (or were given) their name on this planet.
   They were born anew, when they woke in this place. It only made sense that they would forget what they no longer needed to know. Once they accepted a new name, the old one faded away, to make room in their minds for more relevant things.
   Even those who hatched from the Hundred Little Eggs lost their former names. With their new names, they also lost much of the trauma from their human lives, as they embraced the new world and its ways.
   This was the way of things across the world, and on to the next one over. Whichever the next one over was, when the nomadic dragon made the trip to their world. He knew he might never find it again, but he hadn't arrived with littles to care for. He'd awoken instead with a burning desire to explore, so he'd done just that. When he'd explored all of his world, he'd hopped to the next one, through the space between their worlds. This would later be shortened to "Between".
   Their littles had many questions for the Traveler. How many Charons were there? What was on his world that wasn't on theirs? How long could a dragon stay Between? Had he mapped the system yet?
   He laughed, and tried to answer as best he could.
   "In order: Three. Nothing yet, but I only got here a week ago. I don't know. Nope. That's why I decided to break atmo."
   When she later heard that there were three Charon, Onnu got a chill down her spine. There are three of us, and three of them. That doesn't seem like a coincidence.
   She supposed creatures as large as they were would need some sort of check and balance system in place. It wasn't likely that any of them would go rogue, she thought, but that was entirely based on her own mind. She knew nothing of the other two. That bothered her a bit.
   She did wonder if the nomadic Traveler was one of the Triplets, as she was calling them, but he didn't stop by Egg Hold, so she couldn't ask. She had just as many questions as everyone else, and couldn't ask a single one.
   She called them the Triplets, even though they weren't related (as far as she knew), because "triad" sounded very mafia, and she was steering very, very far away from "trinity". She had enough problems with deification as it was! Adding that little detail would seal her fate as a heretic, over her own repeated protests.
   She did consider "trilogy", but there was no guarantee that they would all three reproduce, so she couldn't say that any of them besides herself were a series (that made sense in her head, but anyone else would have pointed out that trilogies didn't have series, they were a series). It did make her chuckle to consider, though. So did "tri-force". She didn't think of herself as a force of nature, but she had played one of the Zelda games.
   Pannu picked up tidbits about her here and there, as she did him. They found that sometimes, the words they used told more than stories would. For example, the fact that she knew characters from one series and he didn't, or that he had been to a regional restaurant chain that she hadn't. Hints of accents peeked through sometimes, when they were feeling a certain way. 
   They learned each other's favorite color, and the crystals in Egg Hold changed to those colors. Their home Hold didn't, but Egg Hold began to show hints of purple and green through the crystal cover.
   They'd mention family members in passing, and then have to explain their family trees. Over the years, the names faded away, but they came to know who the other dragon was talking about, in time. Onnu was quite certain that she knew who Pannu was, by their first Turn.
   Not that they knew when a Turn had passed, but the term had been agreed on. The methodology hadn't quite been established, but the word had. They were thinking that it might be the time it took a dragon to hatch, since everything seemed to revolve around the dragons. They relied on the life cycles of the kin to gauge the passage of time, as it was. They loosely used the word "month" to mean thirty times a Charon passed over. Nobody knew how long it actually was, of course, but they had to use something to mark the temporal flow!
   They did eventually find something to start fire with, but it wasn't easy to come by. They had made candles from animal fat and a series of experimental wicks, which could now be lit without dragonfire.
   The only thing they'd found that could create a spark was a pair of bones inside the throat of a vulrhin (vulture and rhino was the closest they could guess, and no, it couldn't fly). The theory was that they functioned similar to stones in a gizzard, but they hadn't had time to fully dissect it before Charon passed over. A quick peek at the throat arrangement was all they got.
   They'd also only encountered two vulrhin, to date. Luckily, it had been one of the gryphons who was trying to eat that part of the second one, because she was able to feel them on her tongue and spit them out. They were a bit charred from cooking, but that only seemed to affect their color.
   It was when she threw them on the grass that they saw the spark. The nearest craftsman was on it in a flash. If she hadn't been standing near the clay ovens at the time, the grasses would've been tall enough to be a fire hazard, but they'd begun gathering at the ovens at mealtimes.
   The Nomad made note of the phenomenon before he left. They clamored for him to wait until their dragons returned, but he said he had to move on. He was powerful restless. They did, however, convince him to return before he left the planet.
   "You're the only dragon we've met that's as big as Onnu," they pleaded. "She's just got to meet you!"