Egras
| Species | Dragon |
|---|---|
| Home | Hatched in the core of Alakyer |
| Companions | Barnaby Britto, Mauz, Alpin Loomin, Piercio |
| Status | Alive |
| First appearance | Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened |
Egras is the baby dragon Barnaby Britto hatched in the lava of Alakyer's core and travelled with to Morgaedion.[1][2] She was the last of a clutch of three whose mother died on her way back into the mountain, and she is the only dragon the books give a name to.[3]
Appearance
Egras came out of the lava donkey-sized.[1] By the time she is asked to carry passengers she is still young, her horns still stubby, her scaled back the length of a hay cart and broad enough for three of them to perch on if they do not mind being very close.[2] Her wings snap fully open with a leathery crack, her tail is spiked, and her jaws will strip a suit of armour off a body.[1][2]
Her scales are cold. Climbing onto her back, Barnaby finds them surprisingly cold, smooth in some places and ridged and rough like tree bark in others, and on the beach at Morgaedion he puts a hand on her side and finds her icy cold to the touch.[2] A short while later, inside the prison, she opens her mouth and lights a torch for him.[2] Both are stated in the same chapter and neither is explained. See below.
Personality
Egras behaves like a cat, which Barnaby notices and cannot account for, never having met a dragon outside a book. She purrs instead of croaking, clings to his back the way Mauz sticks to his head, and rubs her head across his chest when he pulls webbing off her mouth.[2][4] Told to fly, she gives him a flat, disinterested stare and yawns.[2]
She understands what is said to her, at least in part. She nods when she has grasped an instruction, sniffs on command, hovers when asked to hold still, shuffles her feet when she is told her landings need work, and chirps and pitter-patters her feet when she hears herself included in a plan.[2][4][5] Waiting outside a doorway too small for her, she sits down on her bottom and picks at the loose rocks on the floor.[6]
The one word she reliably answers to is Peppersnakes, which is Barnaby's curse rather than a command. She takes off on it, lands on it, and flies out of a spider's lair on it.[2][4]
Background
Her mother died on her way back to the core of Alakyer carrying her clutch. Vendalis, a troll living on the mountain, found the eggs while scavenging in a lull in a storm; two were lost and she carried the last home. It was green-speckled, stood a head taller than Barnaby, weighed about twice what he and his toad weighed together, and had been trying to hatch for moons on a wooden pedestal by her fire.[3]
Dragon eggs hatch only in the core of Alakyer, the one place in Eslura hot enough to break a shell, and the egg has to go into the lava for the fire to melt it open. Barnaby took the errand on over Alpin Loomin's objection and hauled the egg up the mountain in a spiked-wheeled wagon Vendalis built for it.[3][7] The egg picked the route itself: offered each of the three tunnels at the mountain's mouth in turn, it shook hardest at the third.[7]
Story
Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened
Barnaby tipped the egg into the magma pool at the core while Piercio, Alpin and Mauz kept two Nelazgian guards busy, then knelt at the edge convinced he had lost it. Two eyes came up out of the lava and blinked at him.[1]
Her first act was to save the party. Barnaby yelped Peppersnakes when he twisted his ankle, and the dragon cocked her head, flew over to the Nelazgians, swept both off their feet with one blow of her spiked tail, battered them with her hind claws the way a cat bunny-kicks its prey, tore their armour off with her jaws and threw it halfway across the mountain core.[1]
She followed the party out of the core without any trouble, and Barnaby named her on the ledge outside after the first grey and white gully Pemadee ever brought home to Tide Tale Alley Books, because she had the same aloofness about her.[2] With the climb down the summit impassable, she flew all three of them and the toad across the water to Morgaedion, dropped off the cliff like a thrown stone before catching the air, and came down hard enough on the black sand to scatter them across a shore covered in the bodies of the Sacred Guard.[2]
Inside the prison Barnaby held up a broken pillar of wood and asked "Can you help us light the way?". She lit it, and the room showed five paths leading off into the dark.[2] She was too big to follow Mavis into the passage behind the wall, so she sat outside it while Barnaby met the Olphins hiding in the walls.[6]
Barnaby took her rather than his friends after Relagatra, the prison's giant spider, on the grounds that they had a dragon and this was what she was for.[6] It went badly at first: the spider knocked them both down in the dark and cocooned her, and Barnaby found her by feel and pulled the webbing off her mouth. She then hovered under him while he sawed Monagan free of the ceiling, and carried both of them out.[4]
She is still with the party on the ground block when Barnaby decides to go down after Lumikki Otsby and the Nelazgians. Alpin's objection is that "Egras isn't full grown and us two aren't exactly giants", which is the last assessment of her the books give.[5]
Relationships
Barnaby Britto hatched her, named her and is the one she follows. He had never met a dragon before her and worked out how to ride her by accident.[2]
Mauz took to sitting on her head, which Barnaby admits stung a little.[2]
Vendalis kept her egg alive on the mountain and never saw her hatch.[3][1]
Behind the scenes
Egras is cold and she breathes fire, and both are stated within a few pages of each other in Book 2, Ch. 18 without comment.[2] This article records both and reconciles neither.
They also sit oddly against the state of the other dragons. When Demise tore the Heart out of the Book of Fire, the dragons of Galecrest lost the fire that came to them from the Book: Millennium Loftwind found them huddled in their nests and said "They've lost their flame. They're as cold as stone".[8] They were still grounded and fireless a book later, walking home from the border because they could not fly.[9] Egras hatched after all of that, is described in the same terms of cold that were used for the grounded dragons, and produces fire on request anyway. The Nelazgians' own dragons are likewise unaffected, and the captain of the Galecrest riders cannot explain that either.[9]
The pronunciation guide at the back of Book 2 gives her name as Egg-ras. She does not appear in Book 1 and is not in its guide.[10]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Book 2, Ch. 14.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 Book 2, Ch. 18.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Book 2, Ch. 6.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Book 2, Ch. 24.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Book 2, Ch. 27.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Book 2, Ch. 21.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Book 2, Ch. 11.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 5.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Book 2, Ch. 3.
- ↑ Book 2.