Lola Ada is reluctant in giving me her eggs. She's grown a little overweight, I notice, so I prod her with my walking stick to rouse her from her stubbornness. The others who are much like her haven't swelled up as much as she has. With each gentle tap-tap-tap of my walking stick she hobbles further away from her bed, revealing enormous globules of membranous gold clinked against each other. 

When I reach in for the eggs, Lola Ada snorts brusquely and sends a cloud of white smoke into my face. I gag abruptly and fan away the smoke, grimacing at her. In reply she looks at me with both her glossy eyes that once held fire, now dormant with extinguished embers. I can't help but feel sorry for her. But I can't stop now. This has been our living for so many years, I think to myself as I gather up the eggs and arrange them snugly in my basket. Lola Ada moans pitifully, as if in reply to my thoughts. I can only caress her temples, channeling all my sympathy into these singed fingers.

Over the past few decades there has been a steady demand for dragon eggs ever since the Benguet incident. A local farmer named Elmer Alanguilan had captured an actual dragon that had been slumbering in the caves near his farm. It took a while to actually capture it, but once he did he kept it on his farm, feeding it slabs of meat and eventually taming it like a domesticated show dog. Then one day the dragon decidedly revealed its gender by laying large and lovely golden eggs, which Elmer gave away to his neighbors to raise. Though one was curiously stupid (or stupidly curious) enough to try and eat the egg, balut-style or fried or baked or boiled, I can't quite remember. 

Upon eating it, he was driven mad with the sumptuous flavor of baby dragon; people soon started with a frenzied clamor, all eager and excited to try something new, exotic even. Everything followed afterwards. Dragon eggs were solicited into the market, and mysteriously, dragons started to pop up everywhere in the Philippines. Thus dragon farms were born. My father and my grandfather started ours long before I was born, before Lola Ada was overweight and sickly, and before my mother had left us. 

I've only tried a couple of dragon eggs in my expanse of 15 years, and I'm not too crazy about them. If you eat them like balut, you first sip up a hearty soup of succulent spices and savoury broth, to be added with a dash of salt or a shake of pepper, if you like. There's a sweet lingering spiciness long after you've gulped down the soup. The richer people put haughty crap in it like cream and croutons, but why do they even bother putting croutons if they haven't even reached the actual baby dragon? Eating the baby dragon is much more complicated than eating ordinary balut with the wrinkled baby duck inside, but it's definitely an adventure for your taste buds.

* * * 

I think I'll stop here. I need to gather up my thoughts for the next part. Woooo