Ensio

“Welcome, little ones,” said Layla, reaching out a careful claw to brush away the eggshell from their very first hatchling, newly emerged from the solitary egg they had carefully tended in the nest. “Our little princes.”

“We should name them Ensio,” said Aegir, craning their necks to get a better look at the hatchling, “because it means first.”

“Surely we can come up with something better,” Aegir’s other head disagreed, in answer to which the head that had spoken first snapped his teeth together in annoyance.

“Ensio,” mused Layla. “Yes, they are the first. Our first hatchling. Yes, I like it.”

“I like it too,” Layla’s other head said firmly, and so the matter was settled.

---

As they grew to adulthood, Ensio changed. They spent more and more time travelling to various forests and disappearing into them for a time, only to return quietly in the night as though nothing had happened. Leaves grew in their mane, their wings, their back, spreading further every day. Their heads were often heard to whisper to each other in a language that no one understood. Indeed, sometimes the words did not quite sound like anything that a dragon's tongue should be able to produce.

---

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
-- An excerpt from Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

---

Awakened familiars: Raffles the Jade Troodo, Malachite Gladekeeper, Baskerville the Wraith Hound, Verdant the Aurelian Porcupine