Read this first:
They gathered on the quarter-deck under a sky stripped bare of clouds. The stars were raw tonight, flaring bright enough to bleach the horizon, their light spilling silver across the brass fittings of the Astrolabe. Even the ship’s heart hummed lower, as if listening.
The hatchling crouched near the rail, scales glimmering with shifting green-gold, wings spread wide to catch every gleam. Its eyes were fixed upward, pale as moonstone, unblinking. The crew stood in a loose half-circle, rum forgotten in their hands, uncertain of the weight of what they were about to do.
Miros broke the silence first, though his voice was rough. “If we’re fool enough to keep a dragon aboard, we’d best give it a name. Can’t call to something without one.”
Ada stepped forward, her tattoos prickling in the starlight. The patterns along her arms had shifted again, faint outlines of constellations she remembered only dimly from her mother’s songs. She felt the Wanderer pulsing in the ship’s heart below, restless, insistent, as if urging her to speak.
“In Ivirua,” she said, her voice carrying across the deck, “to name is to bind. But it is also to honor. We cannot own this creature. We can only acknowledge what it already is.”
Zahra inclined her head, selkie eyes catching the silver gleam. “Then speak what you feel, Captain.”
Ada looked at the hatchling, small against the sea of stars. She remembered her mother’s stories, told beside dying fires when the sea seemed endless. Stories of the Astrals, the great guardians who kept watch over light.
“There were two,” Ada murmured, half to herself, half to the listening dark. “Lithrunthi, who watched the lights of the deep. And Lithrundei, who kept the lights of the heavens. Both born of starlight, both protectors.”
The crew shifted, listening. Miros’s smirk softened; even Cas stilled his beads. The hatchling tilted its head, as if it too was waiting.
Ada drew a breath. “We cannot know yet whether this one belongs to the deep or the heavens. But we know it carries starlight in its veins. We will call it Or Lithrunthi—the child of the Astral who guarded the lights below. When it spreads its wings to the stars, if it chooses, it may earn the name Lithrundei.”
She stepped closer, placing her palm gently on the hatchling’s brow. Heat flared beneath her skin, a rhythm matching the Astrolabe’s heart and the Wanderer’s pulse. The tattoos along her arms glowed faintly, silver threads shifting into new patterns, weaving the name into her flesh.
“Or Lithrunthi,” she said clearly. “Starlight given form. Our companion, not our chain.”
The hatchling trilled, a clear, piercing note that rang against the masts. The sails bellied once as if a sudden wind had caught them, then settled again.
Cas bowed his head, murmuring in awe. “It has accepted.”
Ada lifted her hand away, her throat tight. She had not expected the name to feel like a promise. Yet as the crew repeated it softly—Lithrunthi, Lithrunthi—the sound wove itself into the wood of the deck, into the breath of the ship, into the beating of her own heart.
And above them, the stars blazed brighter, as though some ancient covenant had been remembered.
This ceremony makes Or Lithrunthi the child-name: a title of reverence, but also a recognition that the dragon may yet grow into Lithrundei, guardian of the heavens.
Had to come back and read this second chapter about the dragon egg, haha. Lithrunthi (and Lithrunlei) is a beautiful name. Do they have any origin story for you personally?