In the year 308 of the Common Calendar, it was another deep winter of swirling snow, just as it had been when the light and shadow began. Only the Dragon Egg's location, eighty-one years later, was already far from where it had originally been.
Heavy snow buried the Dragon Egg once again. Deep in the uninhabited woods, the snowfall was exceptionally fierce.
Yet a wild wolf searching for food amid the vast snowfall dug it out of the snow. Perhaps one of its Ancestors had done something similar as well.
The Dragon Egg had not changed in size since the beginning, though its surface was somewhat pale. Grandma Cassandra had just now said that this was a sign that the egg was about to crack.
The wolf tried biting it several times, but could not break the Dragon Egg, which was even more ancient than the wolf itself. It then tried to smash the egg by charging into it. The impact sent it wobbling and rolling several times through the snow.
The wolf trudged across the snow to inspect the result of its attempt, but the egg suddenly shook violently, frightening it into fleeing with its tail between its legs.
The egg really was trembling on its own in the snow. It probably sensed that it no longer had any chance of hatching, so in the final moments of its life, it desperately shook itself.
The wolf had happened to push it to the edge of a snowy slope. As it trembled, the Dragon Egg rolled down the slope with a rumble. Though the snow was soft, at the bottom of the slope stood a great tree with a trunk thicker around than Shade's waist. In its current state, the egg would probably truly shatter if it struck it.
Because