Note: Fern

This dragon is the head engineer and mage in charge of warding and defense. He will work on other projects, but his true calling is to find ways to create spaces of safety for the meek and good, which also function or could be triggered to connect to some kind of traps or prison for hostile pursuit or approach.

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Hatchling Letters

#1
Greetings from RufousBloodstone,

I have been thinking lately.

I know that some think that Gaoler dragons are odd. That we know, from first shellbreak that there will be work to do, that the shade will return. Sometimes I think that I dreamt of it even before I broke shell. Sometimes I think that no one can understand.

Then something like this happens.

Well, let me go back. Matriarch Moonrun, like most Tundras is a dragon of few words. In fact the entire time I have been here, I don’t think I’ve heard her say more than 15 words total. She has her philosophical, wordy and cynical First Consort WitCloud for verbiage. The main thing she implies and he articulates is welcome. To, well, everyone (okay there are a few dead harpies who would object, but I find harpies quite objectionable).

So this lair is as eclectic a collection of elders, hatchlings and intermittent visitors, and as there are constant new arrivals (hatchlings, immigrants and adoptees) it’s not always clear who is who. Recently I ran across three hatchlings playing together. Two Fae that had to be nest-mates, and a nocturne so new he was still shiny from the egg. He was calling them “momma” and they were taking turns reviewing letters from a book they all shared. I was curious and asked who his “real” mother was, and if looks could kill – well from these hatchlings it would hardly be more than a firm tail swipe – but I’d offended all of them.

Apparently the two Fae sisters had found his egg in a library, he’d hatched right there in front of him, and they adopted him on the spot. There was some acknowledgement that their father “helped”, but the two took parental responsibilities quite seriously. One of them talked to me later and explained that when someone hatches right in front of you, well you don’t walk away. Not if you are any kind of decent dragon. So they didn’t, and they won’t and he has two mothers and an extremely doting grandfather.

I might have expected that seriousness from a Gaoler. Maybe from a Guardian. But from two Fae barely more than hatchlings themselves? This is what Moonrun and WitCloud are creating. I will stay a part of it.