The Night It Cracked

They kept the egg in Ivy's room that night.

Her parents came home late, tired and sad, and did not come upstairs. Ivy lay in her bed and Maya lay in the sleeping bag on the floor and the egg sat on Ivy's desk under the lamp, which they had left on because neither of them wanted to be in the dark with it.

The room felt different with the egg in it. It was hard to say exactly how. The air felt slightly warmer than usual and there was something at the edge of hearing, not quite a sound but not quite silence either, that made the back of Ivy's neck prickle.

"Are you asleep?" Maya whispered at some point after midnight.

"No," Ivy said.

"Me neither." A pause. "The lines on it are moving."

Ivy sat up. In the lamplight the dark lines on the egg's surface were spreading slowly, branching out from the centre like cracks in ice, except they were not cracks. They glowed very faintly, the same dark grey as the rest of the surface but somehow lit from within.

Both girls got up and stood on either side of the desk looking at it.

The warmth coming off the egg was stronger now. Not uncomfortable, but definite, like standing close to a radiator. And the sound that was almost not a sound had gotten slightly louder. Ivy realised after a moment that it was rhythmic. Regular. Like a very slow heartbeat.

"Should we do something?" Maya asked.

"I do not know," Ivy said. "What do you do when something is hatching?"

"You leave it alone, usually," Maya said. "Birds and things. You are not supposed to touch them."

"This is not a bird," Ivy said.

"No," Maya agreed. "It is really not."

The first crack came at two in the morning. Not a loud crack, more like the sound of a knuckle popping, small and sharp. A thin line appeared across the top of the egg, real this time, a true break in the surface. Through it came a light, deep amber, warm as firelight.

Ivy reached out without thinking and put her hand on the egg.

The warmth went through her palm and up her arm like sunlight. And for just a moment, half a second maybe, she felt something. Not words and not images but something simpler than both, a feeling, clear and direct and unmistakable.

It was the feeling of waking up.

She pulled her hand back. She looked at Maya.

"Did you feel that?" Maya whispered.

"I felt something," Ivy said.

The crack spread slowly across the surface of the egg through the night, branching and joining, the amber light growing stronger as it went. By the time the sky outside the window began to get light, the egg was held together by almost nothing, its surface a mosaic of cracks, glowing.

By four in the morning the cracks covered the entire surface. The egg gave off enough light now that they had turned the lamp off and it made no difference. The amber glow reached every corner of the room.

Then it fell apart all at once.

Not explosively. Gently, the pieces coming away from each other and falling onto the desk like thick grey leaves. And in the middle of the pieces, blinking in the lamplight with eyes the colour of copper, was the smallest dragon either of them had ever imagined.

It was about the size of a large cat. Its scales were the same dark grey as the egg had been but they caught the light differently, not dull but deep, like polished slate. Its wings were folded against its sides, still damp. Its tail curled around itself once.

It looked at Ivy.

Ivy looked back at it.

"Hello," she said, which was not a very impressive first thing to say to a dragon but was the best she could manage.

The dragon blinked its copper eyes slowly. Then it made a sound. Not a roar, nothing close to a roar. A small sound, low and rough, like a cat's purr heard through a wall.

"I think it just answered you," Maya said from behind her.