The Birthday That Started Everything
Share
The first time Anna poured me tea, I almost knocked it over.
In my defense, the cups were extraordinary. Dark glazed pottery, each one painted with a different dragon — some in flight, some curled around the base like they were sleeping, one with its wings spread so wide it nearly covered the whole side of the cup. The table was the same. Dragon motifs carved into the wood, worn smooth by what I could only imagine was a very long time of elbows and teacups and stories.
Anna noticed me staring. She always notices everything.
Draignatur, she said simply, settling into her chair across from me. The old world. It is everywhere, if you know how to look.
I pushed my glasses up, wrapped both hands around my cup, and tried to look like someone who sits at ancient dragon-carved tables all the time.
I did not succeed.
But Anna just smiled — the kind of smile that has three thousand years of patience behind it — and said: I want to tell you about a little girl named Tupi.
And that was that. I wasn't going anywhere.
---
She was five years old. It was her birthday. And it was hatchery day.
She was out of bed before the sun had finished deciding what it was doing — wild curls, bare feet, and so much excitement she could barely remember what to do with her arms. She spun around her room trying to catch the day in her hands. She fidgeted with her new green shoes. She picked up her small treasures one by one: a feather, a rock threaded with gold, a red scale her mother had given her.
And she waited.
When her grandmother finally appeared in the doorway, Tupi had approximately forty questions ready. Her grandmother sat on the edge of the bed, worked a comb through those wild curls with the patience of someone who had learned to love the long way around things, and told her stories. About great-great-grandmothers and blue dragons. About frozen seas and royal councils. About Vortex — her own desert dragon, silver-grey and, as Tupi informed her with great authority, entirely too talkative.
Then breakfast. Warm bread with honey. Her parents watching her across the table with a look she almost missed — the look of two people watching their child stand at the edge of the rest of her life.
And then, very quietly, a wish.
I hope mine is red.
Her grandmother smiled — the kind of smile that knows things — and said gently: Red eggs seem to prefer the Royals, my dear.
When Anna told me that part, she paused. Just for a moment. And then she looked at me across the dragon table with three thousand years of quiet satisfaction.
She didn't have to say anything else. I already knew how it ended.
The red egg didn't go to a Royal that day.
If you want to know where it went — and what it meant for Dragon World, for Anna, and for a girl named Sophia whose father was a Norse god — the story is waiting for you. Chronicles of Draignatur is on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. The books are on the website.
Start at the beginning. Sit where I sat. Let Anna pour you a cup.
— Lynn