For three days Adrian came back to the barn and sat with the egg. He still did not know if there was anything (or anyone) inside, but he sat and watched it anyway. For hours on end he would wait with it, putting his ear to it, listening for something inside. Nothing moved. Not a sound, not a sniff, not one single sniggly snap! Toward the end of the third day, he began to wonder if anything was in there at all! He grew tired of waiting and went outside for two turns of running through the fields.

He came back to check on things just before Momma called everyone in for dinner, and the egg had hatched! But no one was there! Momma kept calling to come in, so he didn’t have time to search very long. Nervously he peaked behind a few haystacks, but he saw nothing. He was worried, but Momma was still calling and he had to go inside for dinner.

Around the dinner table he tried to act normal, pretending nothing unusual was going on. After dinner time, no one went outside, but everyone had to go to bed. That night he didn’t sleep so well. He kept thinking about the egg and what may have hatched from it! What would he do? What if the creature escaped and went back to the Dark Forest? What would he tell Momma about the cracked egg in the barn?

After breakfast in the morning he hurried out to the barn to see what he could find. Back to the hay bales and the cracked egg, looking for a sign… something… anything. And then he heard it. Scratch! Shuffle! Skit! But where was it? The sound came from the far corner of the barn, where there was very little light. He thought he could almost see something moving… And then he heard it again — Scratch! Shuffle! Skit!

He tip-toed closer and closer, and then something caught his eye from the corner stack of hay bales… it was something looking back at him from around the corner of a hay bale. It slowly moved out into the light and he knew right away what it was. He stopped in his tracks while it came creeping out in front of him. With shiny, black lizard-like scales, four legs with long, sharp claws, and a long tail with a red stripe down the middle, it kept moving toward him… a baby dragon! And, just like that, with a sudden burst of speed, it jumped right at him!

Once his feet reached the bridge, he tip-toed across it with the excitement that you might have if you knew you were doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing. He remembered that Momma had warned him of the dangers that lay across the bridge, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself from crossing. — Creak — creak —  went the boards on the Old Wooden Bridge, as he softly walked to the other side, and then scurried along the outer edge of the wild grass field, until he came to the edge of The Dark Forest.

He stood there for a few brief minutes, though it felt much longer to him. He was still thinking about his mother’s warning voice and all the times she had gone over the rules with him:

“You are never to cross that bridge, or go near that field, or ever enter that forest, do you understand?” she would say.

“Yes, Mommy,” he would reply, because he did know the rules (though he did not always believe the stories).

That day, however, he disobeyed, as his curiosity had gotten the better of him. With thoughts of his mother’s words trailing off in the back of his mind, and the sun still at an afternoon high in the sky, he took his first step into The Dark Forest. Nothing changed right away, and it didn’t even seem very dark, so he kept moving, slowly and carefully through the tall plants and trees. There were trees as far as he could see ahead of him, so far that the forest seemed as though it might never end. But very far in the distance, he saw the colors of the forest change, and something darker up ahead.

He came nearer and nearer to the place where the colors of the forest changed, only to find that what he saw was not part of the forest at all, but a great range of hills that ran as far as he could see. The hills were too steep and high to climb over, so instead he walked along the bottom to see where they might lead. Suddenly he came upon a cave in the side a hill. He waited to hear any noise from the cave, but nothing made a sound, so he stepped into the front of the cave and waited for his eyes to adjust to the lighting.

There, as he moved along the cave wall toward the back of the opening, he saw a large egg on a small pile of straw. It was quite unlike any egg he had ever seen. Chicken eggs were much smaller than this one. In fact, this egg might have been the size of a full-grown chicken!

Why was it out here all alone in this cave? He wondered what might be in the egg and why it had been left by itself. He figured the best thing to do was to help out, so he quickly decided to grab the egg and head back the way he came, tracing his footsteps back through the forest and around the edge of the field, back across the Old Wooden Bridge, all the way to the barn. Just as the sun was setting, he quietly opened the little barn door and found a place to hide the egg…

Once upon a time on a great far-away island there lived a boy named Adrian. It was a large island, and a very old island. It was the kind of island that people told bedtime stories about to their children and grandchildren. Those children and grandchildren would listen with wide eyes, amazed at what they heard. This is one of those stories.

Adrian was 4 years old, the youngest of three brothers. He had blondish-brown hair, blue eyes, and generally dirty fingernails. Since he was much younger than his brothers and couldn’t do the heavy chores on the farm, he often spent his days playing alone. He would  wander across the farm catching bugs or would run along the banks of the creek looking for frogs and snakes. On other days he would fritter his time away in the barn among the dusty bales of hay and secret corners of the loft, finding good places to nap or run his toy tractors along the old rafters. Sometimes, when he had quite run out of ideas, he would leap from haystack to haystack, pretending the floor was molten lava.

Now the farm was large enough that Adrian could play all day and never quite travel all of it. But there were some playtime rules. He was not allowed across the street, or across the driveway, or onto the neighbor’s farm next door. And he most certainly, most definitely, and double bubble emphatically was not permitted to cross the old wooden bridge which led to the wild grass field and the Dark Forest.

His mother had told him stories of the dangers in the wild grass field and in the Dark Forest. She told him over and over that many adventurers had traveled across the field and into the forest and were never heard from again. But what she didn’t know was that each time she told him these stories, it made him want to visit the Forest all the more. You can’t tell a playful little boy about the dangers of a place without expecting him to think about those dangers, and what it might be like to discover more about those dangers. And so it happened that one day, after playing his heart out that Adrian began to think about The Dark Forest, and he found himself walking in the direction of the Old Wooden Bridge.