Arcadia

PROLOGUE
Three Eggs Wash Ashore...


On a gorgeous, sunlit day in the Tsunami Flats, a dragoness walked sedately along the shore. She was not the prettiest of dragons, nor the most robust, nor the wisest or the most skilled. In fact, on all accounts, this nameless dragoness was in her entirety a normal resident of the Sea of a Thousand Currents, no more notable than any other. Her pride was a shattered one, for as a Guardian, she was to seek a charge - and yet, none had ever rang out to her, in all her many years, and time for her was running out.

Turning her great head folornly to the washing waves, she breathed in the ocean's scent and paused. Blinking, she turned her eyes down to the shallow pool at her feet and found a great rush run through her very scales.

There at her feet lay three eggs. The first was a crumbling Earth egg which she quickly pulled from the water and into her arms. The second was letting off steam in the warm pools, and she plucked up the Ice egg before she could think what she was doing. The final egg came along into her claws, and she felt her eyes widen as the porous surface of a Water egg scraped over her palms.

With a great purpose welling in her chest, the nameless dragoness rose with two beats of her great wings and flew, over the seas and out to the islands near either side of the Sea, where she knew the eggs would have to be hatched.

___

Out from the water jutted a pristine, gleaming temple. The land was lush beneath her claws as she landed, and the marble pillars reached up to the sky, carved with elegant designs of sea-life. The temple was home to those nesting mothers whose eggs had failed to gain the elemental blessing of the Tidelord - a case which was becoming all the more common.

Pulling in her wings, the Guardian raced to the door, where a Tundra priestess stood, awaiting visitors. Upon noticing the Guardian's burden, she cried in alarm, "You fool! That egg must be in the water immediately, or it will die!"

The Guardian laid all three eggs into the priestess's waiting claws. Eyes shifting like the ocean, the Guardian declared, "They must hatch together."

"But the egg needs water-" Protested the priestess, already moving to run inside.

"THEY MUST!" The Guardian roared, panting for breath. "They must," she stressed. "Please. Please..."

The two dragonesses met eyes once more. The Tundra blinked, noticing the fading gleam in her eyes - a gleam she knew all too well, from a time before the Tidelord's disappearance, when prophecies were still commonplace. "Okay," she whimpered, nervously wondering how she'd bring the three through together. "Okay."

And, with a sudden look of complete contendedness, the Guardian collapsed.

___

While the Guardian did not survive the night, the eggs miraculously made it through. With gentle care, the priests and priestesses of the temple, devoted ever to seeing through the Tidelord's prophecies (however infrequent they had become), attacked their duty with fervor. The eggs were kept in the same room at all times, and more often than not in the same nest. It was a balancing act between three conditions which had the Tundra priestess run ragged.

While the eggs were of differing ages, the Earth egg laid a full month before the Water, the three eggs did not hatch - it was, in some way, as if they were waiting for their fellows to be ready. For a long two months, the priestess worked with the eggs, and by the end of it, she had stopped hoping they would hatch the next day. It was thus that she was taken by surprise when she awoke to hear the cries of a baby dragon.

Leaping to her feet, the Tundra gazed down upon the hatchling which lay in the nest. The small baby Fae lay in the remains of the Earth Egg, and carefully, the Tundra lifted the child no bigger than her toes into her hand.

In that moment, the Ice Egg cracked, and cool water flowed through the nest as a Tundra hatchling shook off the eggshells. Gathering up both, she laid them down on a mattress nearby, and cautiously watched the Water egg as it shook.

It shifted - creaked - cracked, and there in the water lay a frail but healthy Fae, with eyes as deep as the sea. Cooing softly, the priestess laid the final hatchling on the mattress, between its' two nestmates. She smiled at all three and considered how to name them.

___

The naming, while normally the job of the dragon who first saw the hatchlings, had been taken out of the priestess's grasp by her eager and excited colleagues. The three hatchlings were left in her care as the others bickered and brawled over what names would be given to each hatchling.

It was as night was falling that a fellow healer and priestess joined the Tundra in the hatchling's room that night. "I was in charge of the Guardian's health," she offered soberly, and joined the Tundra in watching the three hatchlings sleep.

"Did she say nothing?" Asked the Tundra, as the moonlight fell over them.

The healer nodded softly. "Only this..."

___

The Guardian, it appeared, had already named all three, before they had even hatched. It was thus that the bickering ended and the Guardian's names were honoured.

The Earth Fae was named Forge; the Ice Tundra, Arcadia; and the final dragon, the sweet Water Fae, was named Destiny. There did the three begin their journey, before they had first opened their eyes.

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