Dragon’s Crown — Chapter 3: The Hatching

The cave was exactly as he had left it — predator corpse cooling on the stone floor, egg nested in volcanic fiber, the air still thick with the smell of blood and sulfur. Kael did not hesitate. He wrapped his arms around the egg and lifted it, staggering under the weight. It was heavier than it looked, dense with the life growing inside it, and the warmth of it pressed against his chest like a second heartbeat.

He was halfway back when he felt it stir.

The egg pulsed once, hard, like a drumbeat that missed a step. Kael stopped, holding the egg against his body, feeling the shell contract under his fingers. Inside, something was awake. Something that knew it was being carried away from the only home it had ever known.

I am sorry, he thought, not knowing if the thing inside could hear. I am doing what someone told me to do. I do not know if it is the right thing. But I am doing it anyway.

The egg pulsed again. Smaller this time. Almost like acknowledgment.

He ran.

Verath was waiting, positioned exactly as before, the ancient body arranged with deliberate dignity as though dying were simply another form of ceremony. But the mismatched eyes tracked the egg in Kael’s arms with something that looked almost like hunger.

Put it here, Verath said, gesturing with one enormous claw to a flat space of volcanic glass beside her. Kael set the egg down gently. The bronze shell was warm and smooth, and he could see faint patterns moving beneath the surface — veins of deeper color shifting like thoughts in a dream.

You found it in a nest, Verath said. Not a natural nest. A nest of bones and fiber that something built to hide it.

Yes.

The mother is dead. Verath’s voice was flat, clinical. I can smell it — old death, old violence. Someone killed the mother and left the egg. Probably expecting to come back for it later and finding the Red Zone had already claimed them.

Kael felt cold despite the ambient heat. Who would kill a dragon?

The same people who have been trying to kill me for two hundred years. Verath’s broken wing shifted against the ground. The Iron Priests. They do not want dragons to exist. They want the mountains to themselves, and they have spent centuries finding ways to reduce our numbers without triggering a war they cannot win.

Kael looked at the egg. The patterns beneath the shell were moving faster now, swirling like a storm building behind glass. What does this egg have to do with that?

Everything. Verath lowered her great head until she was level with the egg, one golden eye and one silver eye studying the bronze surface. This is not a normal dragon. I can feel it from here — the resonance is wrong, or perhaps it is more right than anything I have felt in decades. Whoever the mother was, she was not just any dragon. She was something older. Something the Iron Priests feared enough to kill her for.

The egg cracked.

A single fissure appeared, running from the top of the shell to the bottom, and from inside came a sound that was not a roar and not a cry but something in between — a note, a frequency, that made Kael’s bones vibrate and the air around them shimmer with heat.

The cracking continued. One line became three. Three became a web. And then, with a sound like a small thunderclap, the egg fell apart in Kael’s hands.

The creature inside was the size of a large dog. Scales of deep bronze, almost copper in certain lights, with eyes that were the color of molten gold and a ridge of smaller scales running down its spine like a Mohawk of fire. When it looked at Kael, it made a sound — a chirping, questioning note — that was utterly incongruous with the ancient power slowly unfurling around them.

It should not exist, Verath said quietly. I have not seen a hatchling of this bloodline in two hundred years. The line was thought extinct.

The hatchling chirped again and stumbled toward Kael, its newly-formed wings too weak to lift it, its legs uncertain. It smelled of warmth and something sweet, like honey and smoke. It pressed its head against Kael’s hand and made a sound that meant I am hungry and I am scared and I do not know what anything is but I want you to be here.

Kael looked at Verath. What do I do?

You keep it alive, Verath said. You teach it everything I teach you. And when the Iron Priests come looking for it — and they will come — you make sure they regret every step of the journey.

Kael picked up the hatchling. It weighed almost nothing, all wings and scales and not-yet-fully-formed bones, and when it wrapped its tail around his arm, he felt something click into place in his chest that he had not known was missing.

I will, he said.

The hatchling chirped.

Above them, on a ridge of volcanic glass too distant to see clearly, a figure in grey robes set down a looking glass and began writing a report that would, within forty-eight hours, reach the desk of the Iron Priest who had ordered the death of its mother. The report was brief.

Bloodline confirmed. Location confirmed. Extraction team authorized.

And far below, in the Red Zone, Kael held a dragon that should not have existed and prepared to fight a war he did not understand.