Discovery and Badgers
Errorgone knelt in a bed of trampled reed grass and scanned the tracks with a practiced eye. The prints told him that this was the fifth time he'd been there in the past ten minutes, which was enough to surmise that he was awfully lost.
The sky was clear and dark, and a slight breeze stirred the air. Some ominous-looking mist blanketed the forest. Errorgone shivered.
He was fifteen, the same age, he noted haughtily, as the Author Himself, or at least the same age that the Author Himself had been at one point.
Messy eyebrows perched above his intense brown eyes. His clothes were all raggedy seeing as he couldn't afford proper ones, and quite a few of his garments were made of animal skins or potato sacks. A hunting knife he'd made out of twigs and wood (the only materials he could afford) was sheathed at his belt, and a battered postage tube protected his yew bow from the mist.
By this point he was lost deep in the Spine, a notorious mountain range that extended up and down the magical land of Ãĺāġäŷźįă. Weird things were said to happen around there. Like alien abductions and yetis. Errorgone was the only one dim-witted enough to go near the place, and certainly the only one stupid enough to get lost there.
He was originally tracking a rabbit, and his hunt had continued for several days until it turned out that it was not, in fact, a rabbit he was tracking, but a particularly grumpy badger which had tried to maul him to death. Errorgone had bravely slain the beast, and had eaten it for his dinner. He had also crafted a rather fetching if not smelly badger-skin hat.
He wasn't really sure what he was going to do now.
Well, he supposed he was going to have to keep hunting for a bit longer seeing as his family needed the food. That and the fact that he was extremely lost.
He shoved that thought aside for a moment and looked around for any conveniently placed deer for him to kill. There being none in the immediate vicinity, he set off in a random direction through the trees. To his delight, after a while spent crashing through the undergrowth, he found a herd of deer resting peacefully in a moonlit glen.
Errorgone licked his lips and, after carefully drawing his bow from the postage tube, stealthily fletched an arrow. He took a last, steadying breath and—an explosion shattered the night, complete with multicoloured smoke, glitter and party steamers.
The herd bolted. Errorgone squealed in shock and accidently fired the arrow. It missed his target by several hundred meters and hissed into the darkness.
"Poo." He said.
Where the deer had been smoldered a large circle of burnt stuff. In the center of the blast radius lay a polished blue stone which definitely bore no resemblance to a dragon egg whatsoever. It smoked cheerily.
Errorgone stood frozen for a minute, carefully watching it in case it a) exploded again or b) turned out to be a yeti. After none of these things happened he cautiously stepped forward. He poked it with an arrow, and jumped back. Nothing happened again. He picked it up. It was smooth and blue and shiny and about a foot long. He decided it was quite pretty and therefore would be able to be sold for at least enough money to buy a nice sheep's head for a family tucked it into his pack, adjusted his hat, and sauntered vaguely off into the night.