The Journey Begins

They could not go to the mountains that afternoon. They were twelve years old and it was a Wednesday and there were parents to think about.

But they could plan. And they could read the notebook. And they could sit in Ivy's room with the dragon curled between them on the bed, its scales warming the duvet, and work out what came next.

The notebook was extraordinary. Ivy's grandmother had spent thirty years gathering information, writing it all down in her small careful script. She had found old stories about dragons in the northern mountains, legends from villages that most maps did not show. She had found descriptions of the creatures themselves, their habits, their sounds, what they ate, how they lived. She had drawn maps of the mountain range, marking paths and passes and places she thought might matter.

At the back of the notebook, on the last written page, was a short paragraph that was clearly meant for whoever was reading it.

Ivy read it out loud. "I am sorry I could not do this myself. The egg waited longer than I expected and I ran out of time. But I believe the dragon knows the way home, or some part of it does. Follow it when it is ready to go. Trust what it shows you. The mountains are difficult but not impossible for someone young and determined. And the family it came from will be looking for it. They have been looking for a very long time."

The room was quiet when she finished reading.

"A very long time," Maya said. "How long is a very long time for a dragon?"

"I do not know," Ivy said. "Long, I think."

The dragon had lifted its head while Ivy was reading. Now it was looking at the window, at the sky beyond it, in the direction of north. Its wings shifted slightly against its sides, restless.

"It understood," Maya said.

"I think it always understood," Ivy said. "I think it has been waiting too."

She thought about her grandmother again. Thirty years of keeping the egg safe and warm and secret, waiting for the right time, waiting for someone else to carry it forward. She felt the weight of that, not as a burden but as something handed to her carefully, with both hands.

She looked at Maya. "Will you come? When we go?"

Maya looked at her as if this were a deeply unnecessary question. "Obviously," she said. "You are not going to the mountains alone with a baby dragon. That would be completely irresponsible."

Ivy smiled. The dragon looked at them both and made its low rough sound, which by now had started to feel less like a sound and more like a word that they were slowly learning to understand.

Outside the window the sky had gone a deep blue, the last of the evening light fading in the north. Somewhere up there, in the high cold mountains that Ivy had never seen and her grandmother had never reached, something was waiting.

Ivy closed the notebook carefully and held it in her lap. Her grandmother had never told her any of this. Had kept it completely separate, locked behind a cellar door. And yet here it was, all of it written down and left for her, as if her grandmother had always known exactly whose hands it would end up in.

The egg had hatched. The long wait was ending.

The journey home was just beginning.

***The End***