Chapter 105 — What Fire Cannot Teach

After Morton's funeral, Arlan handed most routine petitions to Rodrick and the military reports to Cade. For three evenings he disappeared instead into the secure chamber beneath the lord's house, where Vaelora's dragon egg waited on a stone table under steady lamplight.

The old letters gave him history, warnings, and frustratingly little that resembled a method; whatever dragonlore House Belaerys once possessed had not crossed the sea intact with one refugee woman generations before Aegon's Conquest. Vaelora herself had apparently preferred preserving the egg to experimenting upon it, while Arlan had more information than her descendants and trusted very little of it.

In Michael Watson's previous life, he remembered Daenerys Targaryen walking into a funeral pyre with three eggs and leaving it with dragons. He also remembered Summerhall ending in fire and death, along with generations of Targaryens who possessed eggs without finding a dependable way to hatch them after the dragons dwindled.

One spectacular success surrounded by repeated failure was not a recipe, and the histories made that plain enough. Targaryen kings had placed eggs in cradles, carried them through courts, heated them, prayed over them, and eventually attempted increasingly desperate rites. Summerhall proved only that enough fire and ambition could kill princes as easily as hatch dragons.

Daenerys's pyre contained too many variables to isolate: three eggs, a dead khal, a living maegi, blood magic already performed, an enormous fire, and Daenerys herself walking into it. Treating that as a simple instruction to burn an egg would be superstition dressed as analysis.

So Arlan wrote questions instead of answers: bloodline, heat, duration, the condition of the egg, whether sacrifice mattered and why, and whether a bond between rider and dragon began before hatching or only after the shell broke.

The egg reacted weakly whenever he wore Vaelora's ring and touched the crimson seams. A pinprick of his blood produced a stronger response, warming the shell for nearly an hour before it cooled again. No crack formed, no discoloration appeared, and nothing suggested the egg had been harmed.

Arlan recorded how long the warmth lasted. One response gave him little to judge by. The egg had survived centuries; Morton's last trust deserved more than an impatient guess.

By the third night, the parchment beside him carried more cautions than conclusions, so he opened the Myriad Realms Forging Group.

[Myriad Realms Forging Group — Lv. 2]

[Stable Low-Magic Plane Channel: Available]

The author's official page publishes this chapter, while this copy was reproduced without consent; readers support the creator through that posting.

[Custom Forging: Available]

[Technology Transfer: Available]

[Artisan Employment: Available]

[Group Warehouse: Available]

Arlan ignored the common listings and opened a private exchange with Gloin Ironfoot. The rune master answered quickly.

Gloin Ironfoot: You normally come to me when you want something that survives being struck. What are you trying not to break this time?

Arlan considered the wording, then answered with the truth stripped of everything unnecessary.

Arlan Ashenblade: A dragon egg.

The pause that followed was longer than usual.

Gloin Ironfoot: That is a considerably more expensive thing to break.

Arlan Ashenblade: Which is why I am asking before I put it in a furnace.

Gloin's next messages came in quick succession. Dwarven records contained observations on dragon eggs, old nesting grounds, hatchlings, heat chambers, and the treatment of shells recovered from abandoned lairs. Some knowledge had been copied from elven texts; some came from dwarves who had survived dragons occupying their halls.

The material was not free: Gloin asked for ten barrels of Red Sun Flame and one complete set of FireStorm's finest clear-glass drinking ware. Arlan accepted before the dwarf decided he had underpriced the exchange.

[Trade Confirmed]

[10 barrels — Red Sun Flame]

[1 clear-glass drinking set]

[Exchange: Dragon Husbandry and Egg-Awakening Records]

The goods vanished from the Group Warehouse allocation reserved for completed trades. Moments later, a stack of hide-bound volumes appeared upon the stone table, smelling of smoke, old leather, and mineral dust.

Arlan opened the first book and spent the rest of the night separating observation from folklore, because the records concerned several kinds of dragons from several planes. Some laid eggs, some did not, and a few were described as intelligent enough to bargain with kings. Arlan discarded every passage that could not safely be mapped onto the creature sleeping inside Vaelora's egg.

What remained was narrower, but far more useful. Old eggs often failed when shocked by sudden temperature changes. Stable warmth mattered before extreme heat. Blood-linked handling could provoke measurable reactions in some species. Most importantly, a viable embryo should show increasing internal heat and movement before any final attempt to break the shell.

Fire was not the beginning; repeatedly, the records warned against forcing a dormant egg directly into hatching heat. An old egg first had to be awakened gradually, then maintained in a controlled warm environment while whatever slept inside recovered enough strength to survive the final stage.

Arlan leaned back from the table and looked at the black shell crossed by crimson veins. His first notes had placed extreme fire far too early, and had he trusted memory instead of evidence, he might have cooked Vaelora's legacy inside its own shell. He crossed out an entire section of parchment and began again. Bloodline resonance where such a bond existed. Stable warmth. Careful observation. Only after signs of internal life became unmistakable would he consider sustained flame.

The dwarf texts did not give him certainty, but by dawn they had given him something better than a remembered scene from another life: a procedure he could test without gambling the egg in a single night. Now he needed to know whether FireStorm could actually perform it.