“Long ago, long ago, our world was lush and green. Singers sang and dragons flew, and sorcery and steel were made one…”

In the deepest dark of an ancient metal ruin, eyes of dead glass watched over broken eggs. Lifeless guardians of lifeless wards, eternal in their vigil, they awaited power which would never come. Severed cables wrapped like vines about the metal eggs, cradling their broken shells and the shattered songs within. They would never be heard, never know the sand and seas and skies, never live.

So it had been for ten thousand years, and so it would be forever.

Across the endless centuries, the egg crypt became known to the members of a diminutive and curious people. They took the shape and size of the old masters; tufts of fur upon the tops of their heads, their bodies surfaced softly in pale or tan hues, and possessing four limbs yet standing upright upon one pair and grasping with the other - and none of them were winged. Ignorant, the two-eyes knew little what the ruin once was, and nothing of the egg chamber or its dead machines. They came for salvage, and secrets, but gained little of either - ancient places do not give up such things.

Slowly, even their pestering encroachments became nearly forgotten, swallowed by the sands.

Nearly forgotten, until one of their young returned, pursued by its own kind through the shifting sands. Others fled with it to the ruin, but their pursuers were faster upon the dunes, piloting bounding bipedal machines and plated skimming craft. Only the young one lost its pursuers when it reached the metal fortress, disappearing within the shattered pyramid's depths.

Rushing through the metal halls, it stumbled, fell, crashed, slid, and then lay still.

Crimson fluid pooled from its cracked mask, and poisons leeched in from the toxic air. When its eyes opened again the burning had already begun, the fire, but the shouts of its pursuers sounded from high above. With failing strength it fled deeper into the dark, past shattered eggs and dead glass, through severed cables hanging like vines, and beyond doors overgrown with fungus, until finally it could bear to go no further. It collapsed within a small chamber, quiet and still, beside a large black egg resting in a bed of sand and coiled cables.

The exhausted young creature pulled itself closer to the egg, and sang as it tried to patch its mask. It sang a lullaby taught by its crafter, - its mother - lyricless and soothing, while kneading a ball of repair agent into the cracked ceramic surface of its mask. If it did not finish quickly, then the growing fire within its mind would become an unbearable inferno, and wracked with madness it would perish in the toxic air as so many had before. No mask could reverse the change then.

As the creature's fingers slowed, and the fire in its mind grew too hot, the surface of the egg cracked.

>You are the song. [Hatching Egg]
>You are the singer. [Young Creature]

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Dragon's Cadenza