Kua was bustling, as usual, when the pair got there. The race that Aevan was meant to be attending had of course already been held the day before, and he'd been missed. There were lots of people with lots of money placed on Steeds in that race, not that he dealt with money there. The race was done, but there were so many people left around, it was a wonder that the transport had a place to land. The bright, tall cliffs behind the city were beautiful as ever, but the press of people concerned both siblings. Their eggs were going to hatch. Where could they go, save someone's clinic?

"Beach hut!" Exclaimed Aevan, startling Iva. There was a bright light in the tall man's eyes, "Ksai said something about getting a beach hut! We can find it. It's got to be nice and warm."

Iva stood still, holding her egg (she'd managed to hand the other off to her brother, only barely, and hoped that he didn't squish it to death) and she licked her lips. "What in the world are you talking about? Ksai, you mean Aern's little blue brat with my sort-of-sister Keenae? And a beach hut?"

"Yeah, beach hut. And yeah, that Ksai. Know any other ones?" He looked at a small list of names and numbers, from his pocket e-pad, and nodded to himself. Aevan turned to the street, and hailed them a carriage. "We need to get to the beach, north-west shore, on the outlook."

The cabbie, a burly, burgandy-skinned man nodded. "Of course y'do," he said. He helped them into the cab and took the reins of his grounded Steed again into thick fingers. Snapping the leather against the brown-and-black furred Steed's back, they jolted into motion. The street was more crowded if anything, down by the beach.

"What's going on down there?" Iva asked, her powers working overtime on her. She enjoyed being around people - and the convention proved that - but this was a mob! There were so many! And plus, it was at the beach which was decidedly not Iva's favorite place in the world. Aevan obviously loved it there.

"I'd'a thought y'knew, wantin' t'be down'ere," Said the man, "there's'a contest goin - some kind'a strong-man or enduro-thing." He puffed up a bit, "I'd'a entered m'self, but I've'a job t'do."

They finally managed to pull up near a busy corner, where the street was framed by low-roofed businesses and bars, gambling parlours and altogether too many bikini-wear shops. People had fruity drinks in their hands, towels draped across their shoulders, and smiles upon their faces.

One particularly large smile was across a very dark green-teal skinned man, whose cobalt-blue hair faded into a tangle of pale blue and white strands that draped down to his knees. His brilliant white teeth glimmered in the Kuan afternoon glare, as he postured in front of myriad admirers. On a slight pedestal, wearing nought but a small thong, the man glanced around and suddenly his vibrant blue eyes caught sight of Iva and Aevan.

"Aevan! Auntie!" He yelled, leaping from the stage and through the crowd - who ooed and ahhed him even as he abandoned his post in the contest. He waved his long-nailed hand, and Aevan laughed and jumped a bit to make sure he was headed in the right direction.

"We have altogether too many relatives," Iva muttered.

"We have two of the biggest single families in the world, Iva," Aevan said, grinning, "and neither side of our relatives seem to show any signs of slowing."

Right about then, the object of so many women (and men's) desires came leaping through the crowd at them.

"Ksai!" Aevan yelled, throwing his arms around his younger brother. "Oop - don't want to break this!" He said, handing Iva the egg which was gently bumping from within.

Ksai's eyes narrowed in a greedy but funny way. "Hey - that's an egg. What's in it? Can I have it?"

Iva sighed, nestling the eggs into her shirt again, "no, you may not have it, unless you really want it later."

"We've got dibs," Aevan asserted. "So - where's this beach hut of yours? Mighty big crowd today."

"It is," Ksai said, "I can't let my fans down..."

The eighteen year old son of Aern and Keenae led them through the milling groups, pointing out the winners circle and the group of guys and women who had already participated and were now being rubbed down by a host of Slaves, Bayaran and eager fans of all Status.

"This kind of debauchery went out a century ago," Iva muttered.

"It's come back in style. Isn't it great?" Ksai laughed. They managed to get down to a nice strip where private guards stood and kept the mass of onlookers away - a private drive to a slice of beach where pebbles and stone dominated the ground on one side and rich fine white sands on the tidal side lay. A series of smallish houses lined the rock strewn side, with carved walkways around the bigger of the boulders. Each house was perhaps the size of Iva's office, at best.

"How much did this set you back, Ksai?" Iva asked, the Membayar in her flairing up. Aern's side of the family just didn't know how to hold on to money - even worse than her father's.

"Oh, it's not much. It's fourteen Units Kua-base, is that a lot?" Ksai said, oblivious to the open stare that Iva was giving him.

"That's... yes, Ksai, that's a lot. I have to imagine that your dream-healing business is actually pulling in that kind of money for you to have been given this." Iva's quick calculation told her that while the place wasn't bigger than her Telva office, it was about forty percent more valuable for the space. Fourteen Units? That?

She looked over the hut, and thought Ksai was out of his mind for wanting to live here even for a moment. But, other urgent things began claiming her attention.

"Aevan, Ksai, the eggs - they're going to hatch." Iva said. She pulled them from her blouse and tried to find a place to put them.

Ksai was a horrid housekeeper, if this little place was an example. There were knicknacks from all around the world - everywhere on every exposed surface. Ksai stepped up and looked at the eggs, and then nodded. He swept out of the room and came back with a plastic bin, large enough for both eggs to hatch and have space for the creatures which came from them to move about. "Hold on," he said to the eggs, as he ran outside with the bucket.

He came back with it filled with hot sand, a moment later. Iva knew that he was as empathic as his brother and she, but also tuned a bit to animals - so he might have some dragon tuned abilities too.

They placed the pair of eggs into the bin, and all three eagerly watched as they cracked. The one, slightly more pale in color than the other, cracked first - its leathery exterior bulging with the effort of the hatchling inside. A small pale-yellow colored foot appeared through one crack, and then its head came out. It continued to squirm and squeeked a bit, while its companion in the darker shell seemed to find a place to actually bite its way out.

"Wait--" Ksai said, suddenly looking at the pair of hatchlings who cheeped and cooed at one another, from their bin. "That ... they have feet. What - desert dragons don't have feet!"

"They're arms, dear," Iva said, picking up both hatchlings and suddenly going all motherly on them. They were hungry - she unconsciously sent a command out to Aevan to get them some meat. "They're arms. Now... I know I can sense them, but I can't distinguish between my human and my dragon sense."

"So ..." Ksai said, sitting down with a bewildered look, "they're half Zekiran, these dragons?"

"Obviously," Aevan said, smugly.

"They might be little people," Iva said. "We'll have to wait and see."

Ksai nodded, slowly, almost seeming hypnotized by the contented sounds coming from the pair.

One was slightly mottled and darker, the other a sleeker shade of yellow. "One's female," Iva announced, "this one," the pale colored one waved its - her - arms in the air a bit. It didn't look even remotely human, but it was certainly responding to things in a human manner.

"Now, they're going to need a lot of attention," Aevan said. "And you know I travel a lot."

"Sounds like you're trying to back out of something," Ksai observed. "You can leave them here with me for a while, I'm on a break anyway. Dream therapy does take a lot out of a person. Specially me. So I work about two months on and take a couple off."

"Must be nice," Iva said. "Our work is never done..."

They relaxed into the evening and watched the two little half-dragons. They were both full of energy, though they seemed to wind down with the setting of the sun. They curled up next to one another in the still-warm sand in their bin, as Iva and Aevan managed to convince Ksai that yes, they would come back and at least check on the little darlings every few days or as they could.

When the sun was almost down, the halflings perked up - both of them stood stiffly up on their well-muscled tails and reached for the edge of the bin. Their amber-colored eyes (their heads were only vaguely humanoid, they had cobra-necks and flat, wedge shaped heads) went wide.

"What are they doing?" Ksai said, worried. "I don't-"

"They're reacting to something. How odd," Iva said, and turned to Aevan. He had his eyes fixed on the window.

"They've just detected another incursion," he whispered. Moments later, the alarms rang through Kua's streets. Over the water, a quintet of dark, long ships flew ominously closer.

The half-dragon children gave off a keening noise. Iva picked them up, and that seemed to comfort them a bit, but they were intensely focused upon the ships through the window.

"They knew they were coming," Iva said, "amazing."

"That is amazing," Ksai said, "and you got them from a wandering renegade. That's even more amazing. I wonder if the others from his brood do this?"

"He'll have to find that out on his own," Aevan said, "but if they do, White Valley has nothing more to worry about - these aliens would be stupid to stir up a nest of hostile desert dragons."

***

The Kua incursion only lasted as long as it took to bring a sea dragon up from her resting place nearby. Since the aliens had decided to drop through the atmosphere about fifteen miles out over the sea, that gave the dragoness enough time to gather speed.

From the beach hut, the trio and their little charges watched as a gigantic black-green shape soared out of the water, her jet of brine attacking one ship as her long tail fin snapped another out of its trajectory and into the water. The other three ships broke their formation, momentarily distracted by the sudden attack. That of course gave the Sky dragons time to get out there.

From the cliffs near the city, came four massive Sky dragons, their Masters bravely riding them into battle. Or, crazily, as Iva would say. Why lose riders as well as a dragon, if they were to be attacked?

The Sky dragons were green and white, Zerin's colors flying over their sea. "How patriotic," Ksai muttered.

By the time the invaders had broken off their attack on the sea dragon, they were already surrounded by creatures who could almost match their size - not their speed of course, but there were more where they came from waiting to be sent. A pair of the invaders ships were bathed in the bright flames of the dragons, and went into the ocean without hesitation - the last of the fivesome under its own power began to make its way toward the city.

The dragons pursued it, but there were already reinforcements waiting - and apparently this was to be a suicide run for the aliens, because the ship began to nose down toward the city's crowded business district. It took two of the Sky dragons all their strength (Ksai, Aevan and Iva watched now from the doorway of his beach hut) to push it back out to sea. The engines on the machine screamed, waking the pair of half dragons again. One of the Sky dragons was badly injured, when the engine near it's neck blew up - she had to fly with difficulty back to the cliffs. But the other had already done his job, and the sea dragoness yet again took her cue and lept up to make sure that the ship didn't injure anyone else.

"What about the fifth ship?" Aevan asked, "the one that the sea dragon only blasted? It wasn't downed, I didn't see it go down."

"Neither did I," Ksai said.

"I would imagine that the authorities know about it," Iva said. "But we should make sure."

They contacted the local dragon breeders, and did so.

Some day, probably soon, they would be telling the dragon breeders about their little half-dragon warning system. But until they had grown up, they would have to be shown off as a new breed of dragon - and not a splice. Letting that kind of information out to the wrong people would get a lot of dangerous questions asked. Who bred them? When? And where are the parents? Whose dragon was it?

None of those would be good to answer.

***

Osh knocked at Iva's office door and peered inside. His younger sister was fretting about something, but soon enough she'd have something else entirely to worry about. "I've found a place that you need to see," Osh announced, when Iva barely looked up from her communication board. "It's not urgent, but you'll want to see it, really."

"Is this about that investment property you wanted me to buy?" Iva groaned, "I barely have time to maintain what I've got, let alone..."

"No, not really," Osh said, then shrugged. His tall horns appeared to be a bit dull, not shiny like they would be if he'd been doing proper Zekiran work. "Okay, yes, it is sort of - did you buy it?"

"I ... yes, I did," Iva said, thinking about the smallish property out in the middle of darn near nowhere. The scrub hills past their mother's house in Nakani. It wasn't a place that she really wanted to find herself stranded at, there were no decent roads going to the place, and even less in the way of civilized equipment.

"Good!" Osh said, "Get your coat. You'll need it. Aevan's on his way already."

"... what do you mean by that?" Iva asked, her hand hesitating over her coat. "On his way where?"

"To this place! Come on!" Osh said, and to Iva's eyes he seemed very excited about something. When Iva got outside, she halted at the door to the clinic. Osh's dragon, brown Wimkukith, was standing there. He was almost like a Sky dragon, but he had four legs instead of two, and he was from another world. Ryslen's sands had been kind to Zekira.

"This is about dragons, isn't it?" Iva said. The word about her little half-dragons had spread among family members but as they all valued their brothers and sisters (and aunties, uncles, neices etc) they kept it only with their family.

"Yeah - I've found a place that has a beautiful pair of black-golds parenting. It's called Twin Moon, it's just exactly as cool as it sounds..."

"But since when do I need to be at a ..." Iva blinked at her older brother. "You want me to stand for one of these?" She indicated Wim, who tossed his head and snorted proudly.

"Of course I do. Aevan and you are both Tuned, right?" Osh asked, and Iva nodded mutely. "Then there you go. One of these dragons will be with you forever, not like the others here. And I want to know if a bonded rider like me could also become a dragon master of other types here."

"I would think so," Iva said, absently. She pulled on her heavy coat. "Now, where did you say we were going?"

"Twin Moon, and we're to meet Aevan and T'shen on the way." Osh helped his sister up to the dragon's wide back, where she held on to him and watched for his horns.

"How can we meet on the way? There isn't anything on the way to -" Iva's breath was taken from her as they rose into the air with a big lurch. Moments later, they were soaring over the Telva coastline, making people below pause and admire the great brown.

And as they entered the Nexus, over the sea, Iva knew what her brother had meant about meeting along the way. The Nexus was between worlds, but there was more than just a dark teleporting nothingness there. Spirits of the dead, dragon and rider alike, flew everywhere. From them, a shape seemed to emerge. T'shen on a beautiful blue, with Aevan sitting happily behind him.

The blue rider was not Zekiran, but he was quite handsome, with brilliant red hair, strong yellow-tan skin, and mysterious yellow eyes. He was also one of the more intensely telepathic members of the Kshau Protectorate, and he announced that they were nearing their destination.

When they emerged from the Nexus it was over a beautiful night time locale, a foresty world that was filled with life. Dragons flew around even in the darkness. T'shen landed first, Osh following with his bigger brown.

Several people came to greet the riders, and one was obviously a bit more important than the rest. She was a red-furred fox patterned woman, that T'shen introduced as the Causear BrierFox. She explained that there was indeed a small clutch of eggs on the sands - her own Noire had been caught by a stunning flame-black/gold male. Two gold and blacks could only mean that there would be good results from this mating.

Iva was a bit less comfortable with all this than her half brother. Aevan of course jumped right in to everything, he apparently had a bit more warning than Iva had. "Why is it that we were chosen, above anyone else?" Iva asked absently.

"Because you show promise," the Causear replied, taking them to view the eggs, "you are good with dragons and people already, so that is a plus."

"I suppose," Iva said. When she saw the eggs on the sands, her senses flared up again. They were brilliantly alive, and certainly far more sentient than the half-zekiran creatures who were still in the care of Ksai. Iva turned to Aevan, "what about Ksai, he'll be left alone with the hatchlings." There was worry on her voice, but Aevan calmed her.

"We can go back and forth, and from what T'shen has told me, we can do that through time as well as space. So the moment we're able to, we can zip back and see. Or, we could bring them here. How long do you think they'll take to mature?" Aevan asked, as they were led to their cavern.

"It could be years, if they're as human as they seemed. But I would guess more like months. Their lifespan can't be as long as a true Zekiran's." Iva sighed. "Desert dragons only live a couple decades at best, don't they?"

Aevan nodded, somewhat sadly. "They don't have names, yet, either." He said glumly. "But we can flip back there and decide unless Ksai's already done that. Which he probably has..."

Eventually they settled into the routine of life at Twin Moon. They would wait for others to arrive, and at last, for the eggs to hatch...

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