I need help with naming the babydragon, please put suggestions in the comments.
The first part is here:
The egg had been trouble from the moment Ada tore it from Talon’s vault. It had lain chained in star-iron, sealed with Meridian sigils, watched over like a relic too dangerous to touch. She hadn’t stopped to think, only to act. Her constellation tattoos had burned when her hand closed around it, and she had known in that instant that whatever Talon wanted bound was something she was meant to carry free.
For weeks, the thing had pulsed like a second heart aboard the Astrolabe. At first the rhythm was faint, easy to dismiss. Miros had called it cursed cargo and threatened to pitch it into the clouds. Cas muttered old prayers each time he passed, whispering as though faith alone might smother its beat. Zahra lingered most, crouching near the crate with her damp hair falling in her eyes, fingertips resting lightly on the shell as though she heard some distant tide the rest of them could not.
Ada had pretended indifference, but at night she lay awake listening to it, her own pulse betraying her by matching its rhythm. She had told herself she had taken it out of spite, but spite did not explain why the egg’s glow tugged at her bones or why her tattoos shifted each time it stirred.
On the third night of the new moon the rhythm changed. The Astrolabe’s heart stuttered, brass gears whining in protest, lanterns guttering and then flaring in time with the glow rising from the hold. Ada’s cup slid from her hand, rum spilling across her boots, and she pressed her palm flat to the deck. The pulse surged up through her skin until her tattoos burned hot enough to sting. This was no storm warning, no engine fault. It was birth.
By the time she reached the cargo hold the crew had gathered. Miros leaned against the bulkhead, pistol loose in his hand, a sneer stretched thin by unease. Cas gripped his prayer beads until his knuckles whitened, lips moving in litany. Zahra knelt beside the crate, her selkie gaze fixed on the egg’s storm-dark shell. The glow beneath it had become fierce, cracks of emerald fire racing across its surface. Heat rolled out in waves, filling the air with the scent of metal and rain.
“It’s waking,” Zahra whispered, reverent as a priest before an altar.
“Or breaking,” Miros muttered, voice tight. “We should have tossed it overboard the day we found it.”
The egg split with a sharp crack. A shard of shell fell to the straw, glowing faintly as though it still remembered the starlight that had once formed it. Then another, and another, until the hold rang with the sound of thunder breaking apart.
The shell burst and the creature inside struggled free. A narrow head pushed out, slick wings clinging to its sides, claws scrabbling for purchase. Steam curled from its nostrils. Its eyes opened—pale as moonstone, glowing with a strange inner light—and fixed immediately on Ada.
No one spoke. The only sound was the thin hiss rising from the hatchling’s throat, not threat but something closer to recognition.
“Small as a cat,” Miros said at last, though the crack in his voice betrayed him. “But give it a month and it’ll eat us whole.”
“They always do,” Cas said darkly, clutching his beads tighter. “They devour what we burn to live. Let this thing grow and it will starve us, like its kind has starved sailors for centuries.”
Ada ignored them both. She crouched low and steady, her tattoos prickling until she thought her skin might split. The hatchling’s gaze locked onto hers, unblinking, impossibly ancient.
She extended her hand.
The hatchling nosed against her palm, and fire surged up her arm. Visions flared in the back of her mind: the wreckfields glittering with shards consumed and forgotten, skies before chains when constellations moved freely in their patterns, the vast shadow of the Carcass Dragon spiraling in hunger and grief. The weight of ages pressed down on her chest until she thought she might collapse beneath it. Then the visions vanished, leaving only the fragile warmth of the creature pressed into her hand.
Zahra whispered, “Guardians. That’s what they were meant to be. Balance-keepers, not ruin.”
Ada’s throat tightened. She wanted to believe her. She also knew Zahra was right about one thing—this was no accident. Dragons did not simply hatch in pirate holds. They chose their hour.
The hatchling sneezed, sparks scattering into the straw. Miros swore and stomped one out before it could catch. The little creature chirped, a high, piping note that shimmered in the air like starlight caught in glass, then scrambled clumsily from the crate. It tottered across the deck and clambered to the rail.
There it spread its wings. Not dull grey after all, but scales shifting green-gold like sunlight refracted in deep water. Lantern-light caught along its edges until the hatchling seemed wrapped in a halo, small and trembling and yet magnificent against the infinite dark.
For a heartbeat no one breathed. The baby dragon looked less like a predator than a promise.
Miros found his voice first. “So what do we call it, then? Doom? Debt? Dinner?”
Ada’s lips curved. Her heart hammered, her tattoos still burning, but her voice was steady. “We call it ours. Until it decides otherwise.”
The hatchling tilted its head, as if weighing the words. Then it trilled again, a note bright and sweet, and for the first time Ada thought she understood what it meant: not possession, but recognition.
Her hand still tingled where it had touched her. She knew then what she could not tell the others, not yet. They had not claimed it at all.
It had claimed them.
