Book One: Onnu and Pannu

Egg-citement

Pannu wasn't exactly thrilled to learn that there was a male dragon bigger than him, but Onnu gently reminded him that there were probably at least a hundred dragons they hadn't met yet.
   "But Amber didn't see one, and she flew through the entire city!"
   She clucked her tongue. "I doubt she was able to check every single Hold in the city. After a while, she would've flown on as soon as she saw any sign of activity. If their dragon wasn't home at the time, it is entirely possible that there are other large dragons out there.
   "That's not even counting the other planets in the system--which is where he came from, if you'll remember."
   It didn't really help his sulk, but he did appreciate the effort.
   What brought him out of his funk was when Onnu went into labor.
   It wasn't dramatic, but it was more noticeable than when she laid the Hundred Little Eggs. Considering her change in size this time, it was bound to be more visible when she began having contractions. This being her second egg-laying in this body, it didn't drag on, as firsts are wont to do. He learned what Mira already knew, which was that dragons went into a sort of trance when they laid eggs. She hadn't before, but those hadn't been dragon eggs, either.
   The average dragon clutch size was three, and Onnu was no different. It confused Mira, when she arrived, to see that her eggs were not as large as she expected, in relation to the other two dragons' eggs. Since she was easily twice the size of Amber, they expected her eggs to also be twice as big. Instead, they were one and a half times their size.
   "But her abdomen was distended as much as theirs were. How..?"
   She didn't have long to speculate, as a dozen smaller eggs rushed out to join their siblings.
   Mira gaped at the relatively tiny eggs, stunned absolutely speechless. They had no precedent for this. What was she supposed to do? Did they settle the tiny eggs into the space between the huge trio of dragon eggs?
   "Is that all, or are there more? How long do we wait?" Pannu asked, pacing side to side.
   "I... don't know."
   Onnu came out of the trance shortly after, which answered the question for them. She was just as confused as the rest, when she saw her odd little clutch of eggs. Her head cocked to the side, and she squinted.
   "Are... all of those mine, or are we watching someone else's?"
   Pannu laughed. He couldn't have said why, but he pictured dragons babysitting, and it was so absurd, he couldn't contain it. Luckily, Onnu thought it equally funny, when he told her. One didn't want to make a nesting dragon angry.
   Of course, everyone wanted to see her eggs. The winged ones, and later Marla, were kept very busy ferrying little kin back and forth. It was endearing how excited most of them were. Some were merely curious, of course, but the general level of excitement was high.
   The sleeping niches were filled to the brim sometimes, and other nights were empty. They'd candle tested the eggs, and as suspected, only the three largest eggs held dragons. The others held the usual assortment of kin.
   No one could say how long the eggs took to hatch, without some sort of calendar. The dragonkith estimated twelve months, but they didn't all consistently mark and store the hash marks for each day {given the limited durability of papygrass). Even Tandy couldn't always keep an accurate count, because her assistants were too busy copying other records to remember to copy the day counts. If they could've written it in stone, they would've had more durable records, but their current system was frustratingly impermanent.
   They did, however, know for certain when it had been a full, twisty rotation round the stars system. The equivalent of a year seemed to be permanently imprinted on Onnu's bones.
   When she woke from her Charon slumber, coiled round her children, her entire skeleton felt like it was... glowing? She soon learned that this glow was quite visible--in her eyes. Not only did they shine with the colors of her emotions, as all dragons' did, but they also lit electric blue, precisely once a year. For the entire day.
   Unlike the emotional lights, however, this glow eclipsed her pupils.
   She theorized that the other two Triplets would also glow this day, but unless they came to her doorstep, she feared she would never know if she met one. She did know that if that were the case, neither was in her little community, but that made sense. You'd want them spread as far apart as possible, to do... whatever it was they were supposed to do... as wide-spread as possible.
   She couldn't help but note that it would be in His best interest, in that case, to drive one of the Triplets to travel as widely as they could. Best if you wrote it into his DNA, so he woke up with said drive.
   Two to bring in lost souls from Tribulations, one to bring His Word. The logic was so strong, she couldn't see why He wouldn't have done it that way.
   Unless the other two are male.

   She didn't like the thought of being the only one who could ferry lost souls to their worlds. Sure, there were the souls that likely inhabited the babies born in the beginning of the worlds, but who, then, was in her eggs?
   No, she decided. It would be foolish to have only one ferry dragon. The other Triplet must be a woman. You need a redundancy. With the Charon, we aren't infallible. One wrong move, and I could be lunch. If I were Him, I'd have two ferrywomen.
   But she didn't know. She didn't know for sure that the Nomad was one of the Triplets. She didn't know anything about the other two at all. And at this point, she didn't know how much longer she would have to wait for her eggs to hatch.
   The twelve smaller eggs had hatched two months ago, yielding the same quiet, easily startled kin as the Hundred Little Eggs. These kin, however, had opted to stay close to their foster mother, as she would be called. She was large enough to protect them from the things that haunted them. Things they didn't fully remember, but kept them awake at night.
   Before she took a name and forgot, one elf said that they were horrible creatures that were made of spheres strung impossibly together, that shouldn't have been able to move on their own. Their bodies, or frames, were something between metal and insect. She didn't remember what was in the spheres, but they weren't glass. They were... organic.
   The elf promptly vomited, and chose the first name she could think of, just to forget what she'd seen before she died on Earth-that-was.