Oceana

The wizard of Cwm Jones was not the only wizard who helped raise and care for baby dragons. There was another not too far away. He lived in a tower on the coast of the sea. There was no village nearby. It was just the wizard, the dragons, and the wild and lonely cry of the gulls and crashing of the surf.

Not all the dragons who lived on this rocky, wild coast were babies, either. Some had been there longer than the current wizard had been. Dragons live a tremendously long time, and they grow very slowly. Some of these adult dragons were only the size of cats. Others were the size of a cart horse. And one or two were the size of...dragons. These were enormous, old, and very wise. They lived farther away, some of them on islands, but they often came back to the coast for a visit.

Because of this variety, the young dragons at this coast were a bit different from the dragons of Cwm Jones. The dragons of the valley were well educated by the wizard and learned much about the earth and its plants and small woods and streams. And they benefited from knowing several humans and other animals. The dragons of the coast were sometimes a bit more somber and had more of the wildness of wind and wave in them. And they had the benefit of learning years of wisdom from the other dragons and the human wizard.

The two wizards visited one another fairly regularly, and the wizard of the valley had just made his way up the coast for the first time in a little over a year. The two wizards were standing together, looking out one of the tower windows at the surf crashing on the beach. Soon, the valley wizard noticed that there was a little dragon flitting around by the surf. She was hard to see because of her grey and blue coloring, but there were occasional flashes of a jewel-bright blue-green as she tossed and twisted, riding the wind, splashing down in and out of the wave crests.

“Who’s that down there?” he asked. “I don’t think I’ve met that one before.”

“Ah, that’s little Oceana. She’s hatched since last time you were here. She had a beautiful egg, it was a shimmery greeny-blue with just a little gold – you know how they can be. Hatched near some of those colorful rocks down there, where the tidal pools are. She loves being out in the surf.”

As they watched the little dragon playing in the waves and wind, another dragon landed on the beach. This one was about the size of a sheepdog and a green-grey streaked color.

“Say, is that Charlie? I haven’t seen him in a few years.”

“Oh yeah, that’s him. He’s generally around here somewhere, but he likes being up on the cliffs and in the moors behind. Still knows an awful lot about the beach, though, you probably remember. He’s been teaching Oceana and some of the other little dragons about the tidal pools. We have a pretty unique array of things that live in the pools here.”

“Think we could go down and join them?”

“Sure, don’t see why not.”

And so the two wizards went down and joined the two dragons and spent the afternoon discussing all of the amazing features of that special stretch of beach.