Total pages in book: 132
Estimated words: 126358 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 505(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126358 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 505(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
As for the egg which hadn’t chosen anyone, it would be rolled to the back of the Hatching Sands and the drakeling inside would go into a state of hibernation until the right cadet showed up. The scent of the right candidate would wake a sleeping drakeling and he or she would begin calling mentally.
I knew all that from tales my father had told.
“But it hardly ever happens that way,” he told me and Auren. “Mostly, the eggs just sleep away forever. Drakelings can live on, drowsing in their eggs for hundreds of years, you know. Some of them just don’t want to hatch.”
I wondered how many eggs were “sleeping” in the back of the Hatching Ground and then I wondered why I should care. After all, none of them were ever going to pick me.
In the end, I went to the Hatching Ground only because I knew my friends would ask questions if I didn’t. They would already want to know why I had hung back in the first place, and I wasn’t about to tell them it was because Professor Leesbruck thought I was never going to get a dragon and wanted to tell me to “manage my expectations.”
So I trudged up the many, many, many stairs to the very summit of the Old Drake, until I came to the golden door that guarded the entrance to the most sacred and solemn place in the entire Academy. This was the foundation of the whole place—without their dragons, the riders were nothing. Being here was like stepping on holy ground.
When I pushed the door open, I saw that my class was already gathered at the edge of the sands, which were heated from beneath by the volcanic activity of the mountain.
The sands were a shiny, obsidian black and they covered the floor over most of the huge, cavernous space. There was room for several female queens to lay eggs at once, but that hardly ever happened anymore, at least according to my father.
“Dragons know how many of them are needed,” he told Auren and me once. “With the Madlings gone, we needed fewer dragons and so the females stopped laying as much.”
This clutch of eggs was less than a hundred—the lowest number ever laid. There weren’t even enough for all the cadets who had passed their entrance exam, though three of our original number were gone now. (Two had failed and one had been put on academic probation and had flunked out shortly after, if the Academy’s rumor mill was to be believed.)
“At least one of you will not get a dragon,” we’d been told by several professors. “Be thinking about your future and where you might go if you happen to be that one.”
I was probably going to be that one, I thought as I stared at the clutch of eggs. Each of them was roughly oval in shape and all of them were the size of my torso or bigger. They were many colors—white, pale pink, deep blue, emerald green. There were even some eggs near the back of the cavern that were pure, shimmering gold, but they didn’t seem to be included in this clutch.
Lying to one side was a magnificent turquoise Gold-wing—the Head Master’s dragon who had laid the eggs. She was the most enormous dragon I had ever seen—even bigger than my father’s dragon, F’lorn—and her blue-green scales shimmered with a golden light when she flexed her enormous wings.
Her eyes, golden and half-lidded, were fixed on the group of boys standing on the edge of the black sand as she surveyed them with lazy watchfulness.
I felt deep pride mixed with protectiveness coming from her in waves. Maternal instinct is strong in dragons—they will refuse to leave a clutch of eggs until every last one is either hatched or has refused to choose a rider and is rolled to the back of the Hatching Grounds.
Master Yarsmouth, who took care of the Hatching Grounds, was standing at the front of the group of cadets, lecturing in his dry, quiet voice which I had to strain to hear. He was wearing thick leather boots to keep from burning his feet on the sands and there was a fringe of curls around his shiny, mostly bald pate.
I felt someone tug my elbow and Jorn-o whispered near my ear,
“There you are. What took you so long to get here?”
“Had to use the necessary,” I muttered back, because I certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth. “What did I miss?”
“Mostly a lot about how the egg chooses the rider, not the other way around,” Jorn-o said. “So don’t go trying to choose an egg, because if it doesn’t choose you back, you’ll know it.”
“What happens if a rider chooses an egg that doesn’t want him?” I asked curiously—this was a topic my father had never covered.