Intrepid she is, this leviathan queen, with no siren's grace to refine the monstrous length of her serpentine form. Rising like a kraken from the depths of her inky, night-black claws to the coral-strewn twilight of wings' erratic spars, a distant song of gold froths the tangled sargassum of that ill-fitting hide, and ebbs undaunted up untidy curves of neck and head. The salt-encrusted canvas of her capsizing 'sails, windthrown and weathered to palest sea-glass, brines a flotsam of shadows across the expanse of her imposing withers, and brindles the fragmented abalone that pearls her full flanks and awkward, silver-shiny tail.
    -Hatched in High Reaches' 5th clutch, from Nuff's gold Tiareth by G'vin's bronze Chiernnath (NPC)

   I applied for High Reaches 'Double 0' Search in April 2000, as I was coming up to graduating from University and finding (gasp!) a job in the Real World. Exams and job-hunting made a nice counterpoint to any sort of stress over gold application, and I had a very enjoyable Search experience in between frenetic bouts of revision and the odd interview. The same friends who had lent me their computer for the first hatching Pyrene had stood at agreed to lend it to me again this time. So once my exams were finished on May 25th, I was all set to be present for all the stress and nerves of a hatching on June 4th, and rather looking forward to it, since the only other time I'd stood for a dragon, I'd missed the hatching. 

   However, in a previous life I must have really cheesed off the patron saint of hatchings. On the Tuesday beforehand I was called to an interview at the other end of the country Monday, June 5th. There was no way I could use my friends' computer and make the interview.

   In a shining example of how you should not let MOOing affect your life, I embarked on a convoluted and frankly improbable series of events that resulted in another friend driving me down the motorway at 100mph Sunday evening to break into his workplace and connect me to the Hatching there. I arrived half an hour late, came onto the Sands still wearing my knot and carrying a gift (at least I had my robe on!) and was so keyed up from the car ride that it took me five minutes to realise that the reason I was so spammed was because I had a lizard in the galleries. I actually remember very little of the Hatching beyond the fact that while Insatiate Mer-Monster Gold Dragonet was wandering about the Sands, I was busy explaining my presence to the security guard in between trying to pose.  Don't try this at home, kids.

   The sequel to this is that I got the job, but it only lasted a year.  Soon after that, I moved in with said friend and almost three years after the Hatching, he proposed to me at Kynance Cove (we had stayed at Cadgwith the night before).  We're getting married in September 2004.  And the security guard?  He was fired six months later for an unrelated incident.

   In my adrenalin-induced arrogance, I realised that Cadge was for me as soon as she hatched, she was so exactly what I asked for: sea-themed, not-dainty, imposing... The name (cadge-with) was one of a couple that I had requested. Like my lizards' names, Cadgwith is a place in Cornwall. It's not one of the places that we used to go to regularly, but we lived near enough for it to remind me of home and it is a lovely spot. It's also a great dragon name, very different to what most people think of as a 'gold' name, and I adore the short version: Cadge. People seem to either love it or go "uh" (it's something of an acquired taste), but I think it's a beautiful name and absolutely perfect for the gold that SearchCo produced. 

   Her inspiration came late, but I had already formed my own conception of Cadge when describing my dream dragon, and my truly wonderful pdragon did a sterling job of playing her without it. We finally got it on the day of her first flight, and here, at last, is her inspiration for all to read. NB Because it was so late, in many ways it does not reflect Cadgwith as she is played. I changed one word of her original desc: from 'paws' to 'claws' (with Nuff's permission). My reasons being that I associate paws with furry things, so everytime I read Cadge's desc, I got to that point and visualised a dragon with bear's feet. Other variations include the fact that Cadgwith does like snow and winter and isn't self-conscious of her looks.

   Ultimately, Cadgwith is as perfect a dragon for Pyrene as I could have wished. Where Pyrene is childish, Cadgwith is child-like; eternally innocent to Pyrene's precocious cynicism. She's not classically beautiful, or dignified, or anything else, but she's Cadge. And so much fun to play in Pyrene's zealous defensiveness of her, and Cadgwith's own indifferent acceptance of so many things in life.