[[NASFA has been granted limited permission to publish this.
Signed: PED - Draco Quondam, Draco Futurus (the Once and Future Dragon)]
Parts 1 thru 20 are now in hardcopy, in the NASFA Shuttle.]
Seven millenia ago, and sixteen-score years and four, he cracked the shell. It was High Summer, and the period of the Long Days when the sun made a great circle to shine on all sides of the mountaintops.
His monstrous mother had been waiting. She fed him fire, and then brought fish. There was air above him, and earth beneath him.
In that earth were volcanic fires, and enormous chambers of magma.
Rivers of glacier-melt ran over the surface.
The ocean surrounded all. All Elements came together in his birth place; and, something more. The nest of his first century lay within what would much later be called Almannagj�: "Everymans Gorge"; where the Eurasian plate and the North American plate were dividing.
He was Fire and Air, Earth and Water, American and Eurasian.
The mother was obviously a sea-monster, with a peculiar power of flight.
He was different, and yet more familiar. He was dragon.
Man would not set foot on the island for many thousands of years. The Elves, Trolls, and Giants had been keeping a wary eye upon the monster and her nest...from a distance. Only Elves dared to send naming-gifts: highly-spiced pies of bear-, bil-, and crow-berries. (The Rowan tree berries being not yet in season.) The Jotuns sent nought but curses, having noted vague, ill portents for them in this Hatching.
Two hundred million years earlier, a cosmic dart had pierced the Earth there. The ALLWINTER cloud it raised chilled the planet. The continents were still moving apart from the shock of that impact. Energies of primal creation, trapped within the Earth from the beginning, used this path to slowly leak outward.
Vikings would later call the place: "Iceland", but that was part of a real-estate scam to lure settlers to "Greenland".
His magic grew slowly, as did he himself. He swam to catch his own fish.
He learned to fly. He flew further and further, then began the great meander. He still preferred fish, but sometimes ate walrus, seal, smaller cetaceans, caribou, reindeer, musk ox, bison, yak, buffalo, polar bear, rhinoceros, camel, giraffe, hippopotamus, horse, moose and aurochs. Man was usually too dirty. He rarely stayed more than a century in any one place. He also had a special fondness for spicy herbs, especially peppers.