Heart of a Dragon

Part 1

Lunora was the first to spot Reptin soaring above the peaks of the Sombraverde Greatwood. He flew in little spurts like a flat stone skipping across the surface of a deep green pond. Reptin's wings were crenellated with spikes along their undersides that the Sun shadowed black against the dusky orange twilight. Wyn's tiny dragon. He was one of the rare Foxdale Mortigons that never grew much larger than a housecat and that were one of the most reliable methods of delivering messages to remote areas, though if they were to fly near a city, they would quickly become no more than limp flesh nailed above a gentleman's fireplace. Yet the Greatwood was a haven that few could penetrate, a grand expanse of oaks and evergreens, labyrinths of knotted vines that sprawled anew each day, and wildflowers that the queen's jewels would have envied. Scarcely a dozen people knew how to get to the Evolary deep within the Spanish Greatwood, and all those were in the inner circle of Saragio's hatchery.

On spotting the Evolary tower, which peeked above the trees like a frog's domed eye, Reptin dove into a grove of evergreens that stood in vigil before the picketed fence Lunora was standing beside. With any luck, Reptin would be bringing a message from Wyn about some fascinating natural or magical curiosity, or even better, news of a dragon egg.

Lunora held her arm out and Reptin perched upon it, causing her small forearm to drop, but she was used to it and so brought it back up despite Reptin's bronze talons prickling the underside of her arm. Reptin's long face was plumed with a mask of fiery orange feathers, and two tiny bronze-coloured fangs curled out from the corners of his mouth. His eyes bespoke of the Greatwood, its deepest evergreen depths, and his white chest was flanked with orange and red feathers that matched his boney wings.

"Is there another egg?" Lunora asked him as she took the letter from a pouch strapped to his upper chest.

Reptin tilted his head and seemed to grin. Saragio told Lunora that dragons never smiled, but she didn't believe him.

"Is Wyn bringing it?" she asked, starting to amble towards the front doors of the Evolary.

Reptin climbed up to her shoulder and sat with his tiny forelegs grasping Lunora's shirt, and likely making holes in it. Lunora pulled her long waves of red-auburn hair out of reach of Reptin's spiked feather tail, as it had once caught in her hair in a terrible mess.

"Is it Daylan then?" she asked.

Reptin nodded again, and Lunora entered the Evolary to give Saragio the letter. Of course, she could have read the letter herself, but she found reading a stuffy activity that was best avoided like Sconervians, those shadowy dragons that only the mightiest of dark magicians would even think of hatching. But Saragio would hatch any egg for anyone, and although his customers were as rare as the eggs they brought with them, there were always at least a dozen eggs here, each cultivating to be hatched at the time the customer wished. For some, this meant prolonging the hatch for years in the Ice Mews, for others, it meant accelerating the hatch from months to weeks in the Calorimo. Yet Saragio was not only a Dragon Sage who could perform the greatest of the ancient art of hatching rare beasts, but he had created a new method that took the warm Calorimo to a flaming culmination. The Incendiary. A place to hatch eggs within hours, the most dangerous art to the Dragon Sage and infant creature alike, but it was well worth it for some of his dangerous customers.

Inside the Evolary, Lunora ran down the narrow staircase that wound down to the Ice Mews, a good fifteen feet beneath the ground where the stones of the walls were moist with a lacy frost. She ran her fingers along the walls, leaving swirls of warmth where the frost melted beneath her skin. She knew Saragio would be pleased about the egg, though perhaps disappointed that Daylan was bringing it from their house in Boltorna rather than receiving it from one of his illustrious customers. And although she would never admit it, Lunora was the most excited when the dark magicians came, for they were usually the most intriguing. Their payment to Saragio for hatching was often in the form of magical devices such as a quill that could write on anything—ice, water, and even the air—and whose writing was almost impossible to erase. Though after Lunora had written her name in large letters in the air inside Saragio's study, Saragio had sold the quill. For no matter how many times he would leap out of his chair with a new inspiration, the ink proved undiminished in drenching his forehead for weeks before another magician had come to the Evolary and offered to remove it as payment for hatching a Sconervian.