Heart of a Dragon

Part 3

"An Esirin Ongylf," Saragio pronounced with a majesty that well befit the new egg. "Commonly known as gylfs."

Daylan stuck his face up to the Calorimo case that the gylf egg was heating in, a hexagonal compartment of glass laced with diamond along its edges. The egg sat in its scalding throne like a king of Earth and Fire. It was unsurpassed even by the queenly Siren Mortigon egg's pearly surface in a sapphire case on the other wall. The inside of the gylf's case sparkled with orange and white sparks, and the egg's surface danced with orange flickers.

When his cheeks started to redden from the heat, Daylan blinked and stumbled backwards, and Lunora and Saragio laughed. "Gylfs..." Daylan muttered, furrowing his brow as if remembering the page from some cryptic book.

"Not well known, but Magister Illuvinus has written a fair history of them in his The Dragons of Alba, though it is from the Middle Ages," Saragio said. He snuck a grin to Lunora as Daylan nodded pensively, his dark curls falling into his eyes. "Very few have written about them since, and as with all Western Drakes, whether they be only legends, extinct, or still flourishing in secret, is impossible to tell." Saragio rolled up the sleeves of his tunic before donning a pair of extremely heat-resistant black gloves that slipped tight like snakeskin up to his elbows.

"The gylfs," he continued, far too intrigued by the subject to dispense of its history to Lunora and Daylan, "are from the old race of Westerns which have lived since long before the human race has become human as we now know ourselves to be. There were originally only Northern dragons in the frosty realms beyond even Norway and the Northern Shores of Russia. When they descended southwards, they evolved into the beings we now know of as Westerns, yet the Ristingel Alixes are still quite akin to these early beasts of ice and snow."

Finishing pulling on his gloves, Saragio opened a tiny wooden drawer on the wall with a large arched window, around which were drawers of various sizes from the floor to the ceiling a good four feet above Saragio's head. Around the frame of the window were warm-coloured enameled tiles with black glossy images of dragons upon their surfaces so that they created a zodiac of dragons.

"Yet the gylfs have a stranger heritage than simply migrating south," Saragio continued, taking five plump rubies from the drawer before returning to the gylf's case. After handing the rubies to Lunora, he carefully removed the lid. "Illuvinus wrote about a great war between fey creatures and gylfs against Evlin Daers, a dragon race that is now only known in German legends, though they are more creatures of Finland and Sweden than even the Thorns. But dragons are like people, in that one respect, at least. They live with the wind and storms, so that to say that a dragon is from Finland is quite as ridiculous as saying that I am from the dining room. In any case, the war occurred in Alba, which is Scotland, somewhere on a western isle where the fey powers are great, as they are now, for faerie eggs are still found there."

Saragio was now taking the rubies from Lunora in turn and dipping them in a flask of elemi resin. He then carefully placed them on the surface of the gylf's egg. They would retain the heat and transmit it within the egg to accelerate the gylf's development in times that were inconceivable in Nature. Yet these methods always arose from Nature and were never discordant with her ways—the Evolary would accelerate, concentrate, and amplify dozens of processes in a beautiful harmony, such as bathing an egg to be coated in the boiling light of fifty rubies instead of only one within the mother dragon's flame pouches. In dragons, fire is produced by the secretion of oils from pouches just above the dragon's nostrils. These oils drip to the back of their throat when they click their jaws backwards, yet the oil will just drip down their throat unused unless the flame igniter is present. The igniter is a gem called a Pyroya that hangs at the back of their throat. The Pyroya will start to grow after about the first ten years of a dragon's life and will continue until they are hundreds of years old, and even then, many scholars of dragon lore believe that the gems never stop growing. Pyroyas come in various shapes and colours, and Saragio had a collection of ten such gems, which included a crystalline gem in the shape of a star, a black opal pyramid, and a sphere with twists of aquamarine and rose. What created Pyroyas was only speculated about, though it always seemed to be spurred by some dangerous event in the dragon's life.