Moonborn

Marvin

Evelyn sucked in a breath. Though she didn't know how they hatched, she had heard the ghostly tales of dark dragons. The only thing they had in common with Wing dragons was their appearance and abilities, but their personality and disposition was that of a vicious killing machine, with a cruel intelligence. Deprived of the gift of life-giving sunshine, it was said they sought to relieve their pain by killing the Wings.

But they had been just rumors; tales of spooky must that would dissolve with one touch of sunlight. Now they were real.

She glanced back at the egg through the doorway; it was rocking more frantically now, but there wasn't anything sinister about it.

"How? How could they hatch one?"

"Well, dragon eggs are always kept in the sunlight because they need it like other eggs need heat. The idea would be to get the egg away from the light from the moment of being laid. Preferably by burying it. Anyway, the clinch would be to make sure it hatched in total darkness too, so that there could be no doubt of it being a dark dragon. Nobody knows what would happen if the dragon is only partly dark, which might be the case with this one."

"But why in my backyard?" she asked, amazed at what seemed like a coincidence.

"For now, I'd like to focus on getting the egg safe more than how it had gotten there, but without the diamond covering of the hatchery to stop it, it's quite possible that the dragon developed its teleportation powers early and felt your magical aura, so that it teleported to be near you. We'll have to do more research later. "

"Has there ever been a dark dragon before?" she said, going through the list of questions in her head. "And what will we do if it is one?"

"Yes, there have, but centuries ago, when we had the knowledge of how to stop them. But after the building of the hatchery, another egg was never lost. " His face darkened. "Until now, that is. And as for what we'll do with it...it'll have to die."

"No!" she shouted, startled and horrified for reasons she didn't know. "Y-you c-can't!"

"'Lyn!" he exclaimed, surprised. "It could be a formidable danger to the Wings and everything we stand for! I don't want to take a chance on turning something like that against our enemies when it could very well be plotting to destroy us."

"I don't care!" she cried out, her heart contracting painfully. "You can't just kill her!"

"Her?" Aldebar said, puzzlement on his face. "I thought it hadn't hatched yet."

"No she-it-hasn't," she stuttered, suddenly just as confused. "I meant it." There was no way to tell what gender a dragon was before it hatched; where she had gotten "she" from, Evelyn had no idea.    

"Anyway, I told Marvin to come by the back door, so just be ready for that."

Perhaps he saw the panic in her face as he said Marvin's name, for he hurriedly continued."I've got to go now, but he should be here soon. Oh, and take anything with you that you might need. If the egg is traced back to your house, we want to make sure you aren't there anymore." Then the mirror went clear again, leaving Evelyn staring at her own anxious reflection.

She had assumed she would never go back to the Wings' compound, that she would just drop off the egg and be left to grieve alone. Out here on earth, she was just the lady that never went farther than her backyard, but with the Wings, she was the Rider who'd lost her dragon, the full-time recipient of whispered pity. But the worst part was seeing Marvin again.

They had been lovers, right up until the point Indigo had died, and the pressures and memories of the compound had driven her to seek a stationary position on her home world. She knew she had hurt him badly by leaving, but the pain had been too much, and at least he still had his dragon to help him through his pain. Did she feel guilty? Of course, but she consoled herself with the fact that he would no longer need to share her heartache.

She shook her head in despair, and caught the light of the dying sun in her eye. It was already ducking under the horizon, and there couldn't have been more than half-an-hour left of light in the sky. Glancing back at the egg, she saw that it was still at least two hours away from hatching. Startled into action, she forgot her misery briefly and grabbed a backpack from the closet to carry the egg in. She didn't need much else, she decided after some thought, and nothing valuable that wasn't too big to carry. Anything else that she could possibly need would be in her old room.

There was a knock at the back door just as she'd fitted the egg into the bag. Her mouth went dry and her heart stopped when she opened the door to find Marvin waiting, tall and dark and with a grim expression, but he never said a thing as they walked hurriedly away from the houses and into the woods that surrounded the neighborhood.

Seraphine waited there, her scales the color of the noontime sky with a few errant wisps of fluffy cloud across her back. She huffed a bit of air in Evelyn's direction, saying softly, "Nice to see you again, Evelyn."

There was nothing in her voice other than a slight sadness, and Evelyn felt her shoulders relax a bit as some of the tension in the air alleviated.

"N-nice to see you t-too," she stammered out as Seraphine crouched to let them on.

Seraphine looked amused. "Marvin's being a grouch again?" she jested gently, looking back at her partner, who was sitting in the saddle with what could only be called a stiff expression.

He grunted in annoyance, but otherwise remained silent as Evelyn prepared to launch herself from Seraphine's outstretched foreleg into the passenger saddle placed in front of Marvin's.

It had been a while since she had done this, though, and the added weight of the egg behind her, though little, off-balanced her enough that she came up far too short and waited anxiously for the hard slam of Seraphine's scales against her face . . .

Marvin caught her around the waist, pulled her up into the saddle effortlessly, and had strapped her legs in before she could even blink.

"Thank you," she murmured, and got a grunt in response, though it seemed a bit less hostile than before.

She shifted around the backpack so that it nestled against her stomach and wrapped her arms around it protectively. Then Seraphine opened the portal.