What Anna Remembers (And What Three Thousand Years Cannot Fix)
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Anna does not talk about the hatcheries often.
This is a deliberate choice. She has made it for roughly two thousand years, which is long enough that it no longer requires effort. She simply does not go there, the way you learn not to press on a place that has healed over but never quite stopped being tender.
She remembers what they were, though. Before the catastrophe. Before the rules changed and the locked alcoves appeared and the Royal Reds became something you protected behind iron gates rather than something you celebrated in the open rows with the other eggs. She remembers when the Hatchery Annex smelled only of warm volcanic sand and possibility, when a five-year-old could walk the full length of the cradle rows without anything being kept from them.
She remembers when there were more red eggs.
This is not something she says out loud. It is the kind of knowledge that sits in the body rather than the mind, the way grief eventually does when you've carried it long enough. Three thousand years is a long time to carry something. You get used to the weight. You stop noticing it until something shifts it.
Beatrice shifted it.
What the Red Dragon Meant
A Royal Red is not simply a rare dragon. That framing undersells it considerably. A Royal Red is what the hatcheries were built around, what the Choosing Ceremony was designed to honor, what the catastrophe took and left a gap where it had been. When Tupi encountered that egg in the locked alcove — the one she was not supposed to touch, the one that called to her anyway — she did not know what she was walking toward.
Anna did. Anna has known for a very long time what a red dragon returning to the world would mean. She simply did not expect it to end up on Earth.
She has opinions about this. She keeps most of them to herself.
What she will say is that Beatrice's existence is not an accident. The egg was hidden on Earth for reasons that made sense at the time and continued to make sense right up until Sophia found her, at which point sense became somewhat beside the point and necessity took over. Sophia and Beatrice bonded. The bond held. And now there is a red dragon in the world again, bonded to the daughter of a Norse god, and the political implications of this are, to put it mildly, significant.
The Edict of Passage
When Odin and Ve created the Draconic Edict of Passage, Anna read it three times. Then she read it again. Then she sat with it for what she would describe as a reasonable amount of time and thought about all the ways a living magical document written in Old Norse, Draconic script, and crystalline patterns that pulse with the user's heartbeat could go wrong.
She came up with several. She kept them to herself. This is a recurring theme.
The Edict is remarkable, genuinely — a fold in reality, a temporary seam between worlds, leaving behind red-gold light and the faint smell of dragon fire. It was written for Sophia specifically, recognizing her as the Guardian of the Flame, and it works because Sophia and Beatrice are bonded and a bonded pair amplifies the magic tenfold. It has limitations built in, safeguards against misuse, and it continues to evolve as the people who use it change. As living documents go, it is thorough.
What it does not account for, in Anna's view, is the sheer amount of Earth politics that Sophia is now going to have to manage.
This is not a complaint. It is an observation. Sophia is capable. Beatrice is formidable. The Edict holds. But Anna has watched enough history to know that the moment you create a formal mechanism for interdimensional travel, every party with an interest in either dimension develops an opinion about how it should be used, and those opinions do not always align, and someone has to sit in rooms and be diplomatic about it.
Anna has done her share of sitting in rooms. She does not envy Sophia the ones ahead of her.
She also does not doubt her. Not for a moment.
What Three Thousand Years Teaches You
There is a wall at Dragon Academy near the main entrance where graduating Crowns press their bond-symbol into soft volcanic clay. Centuries of them, from ground to roofline, the oldest panels worn smooth by the hands of students passing them every day for generations.
Anna's panel is not there. She did not graduate under circumstances that included a ceremony.
But she has touched the wall. More than once, over the years, when she has found herself at the Academy for one reason or another. She runs her hand along the oldest panels, the ones closest to the ground where the stone has gone featureless with time, and she thinks about the children who made them. What they knew. What they didn't.
What was still possible then, that isn't now.
And then she thinks about Sophia, who has a red dragon and an interdimensional travel document and the blood of a Norse god in her veins, and who is about to walk into rooms that will require every bit of all three.
The hatcheries can't be what they were. That time is gone. But a red dragon is alive in the world, and she is bonded, and the bond held.
Anna considers this sufficient.
— D.L. 🐉