Fragment 22

The human girl had fallen asleep awhile ago, but her vessel was like an enchanted ship out of a story. It seemingly sailed itself according to its captain's last commands.

The device in her hands was more incredible than any scrying stone or magic scroll in any story she had ever heard of. The girl had said that its primary purpose was communication, and while she hadn't seemed to be lying, the dragon was fairly certain that its value as a research tool was far higher. The girl's reluctance to let her use it was actually quite reasonable, once you understood its power.

Studying had never been one of her favorite things, she would rather learn by doing, but the world had never before changed to such a degree during one of her sleeps. She had heard from elders of times when one could awaken to find the continents had shifted, or that ice locked the world. And she had woken before to find new countries had risen, or that a long established one had fallen.

But somehow she felt quite certain that no one had ever before woken to find that old tales of magic were coming true, and even being surpassed, before this age. They would have sung of such an event for aeons. She was tempted to sing it into the strings herself, even though the device in her hands told her that she had barely experienced any of the wonders available.

In a way, what the elders predicted had happened, was still happening. The plague of humanity had covered the Earth, more unstoppable than any plague of locusts. They had devoured everything in their path. Stripped everything of value that they could grasp.

The page that showed on the surface of the small device in her hand spoke of terrible things. Wars more horrible than any she could have imagined. If she hadn't read of so many wonders, and heard about how incredible the cooperation between nations was in fighting this new disease, she would have assumed that she had woken just before the end. She might even have chosen to join the elders in their long sleep.

But the human's complaints had only highlighted the general harmony that humans in general finally seemed to have achieved. She gazed at the moon overhead, and then scanned the stars, trying to pick out the distant planet known as Mars. The humans had devices there, farther than any dragon could fly, that could let anyone with a device like this look around the surface of another world.

They had spread, and devoured, and destroyed… and grown beyond any dragon's imagining. They were not dying, despite their fear of the new sickness. They were still growing.

Numbers she understood well, even if many of the new words in the books that the device could display were beyond her current grasp. The numbers of the dead were tiny, compared to the numbers of the living. This new plague had not yet stricken even a single city as hard as what had become known as the black plague had once stricken entire countries, and they were winning against it.

It had not even plagued them for a year yet, and they were already producing medicines, according to the somewhat confusing reports that the human had declared to be somewhat credible sources. Apparently even magical access to vast libraries could not prevent those who knew little about a subject from writing about it. No, it likely encouraged it.

What the elders had predicted was not wrong, exactly, it was just that they had not been able to imagine a species capable of surviving a global famine of its own making. The humans were still thriving beyond even her own predictions. They had just been learning to fly through the sky when she had gone to sleep, and now they seemed to be preparing to fly among the stars.

She looked at the strange little tablet in her hands that could show the words and pictures from a thousand libraries, that could repeat the songs of singers across the world, and after a moment she set it down with incredible reluctance.

The oldest of her kind did not understand the concept of property, in the way that their legends told them that their kind had once lacked the concept of self. They did not take with the intention to steal, like many humans would, because the concept of theft required an understanding of property and possession. Bees understood what very old dragons did not. But according to the songs, bees had developed societies long before humans, and societies were built around homes.

She was young, and she had been playing 'the game' among the humans for much of her life. She understood property. She even thought of her garden as hers, and though she would take no offense to any who drank from its heart, she would be offended if others changed it.

She left the 'phone' beside the sleeping girl, on her fascinating little craft, and altered her shape to one that she'd admired during her first millennia. That elder had been a quite patient teacher, unlike her mother, and many other younger elders. Her 'game' was actually patterned off of his method of studying 'the tribe of the conquerors', as he had called the Romans that he had moved north with.

He would love to have one of those small tablets. But he had decided to sleep through the end of humanity's self destruction like the other elders. It was actually one of the most united actions that dragons had ever taken, as far as she knew, almost as though they were finally developing their own society into something beyond the small guiding songs.

She launched herself into the air. If the sleeping girl had been a dragon, she would have owed her a great debt. Knowledge should be traded for knowledge of equal value, even if some old dragons would accept the knowledge of a simple flower in exchange for knowledge that spanned the world. Not taking wasn't the same as giving, but…

After she saw an 'aircraft' in flight, her next priority was to obtain a 'phone' of her own. She flew higher and her eyes searched the sky for shapes that were not birds.

She saw the traces of their paths through the sky long before she saw one in flight. At first she simply wondered at the strange streaks of cloud across the sky. If the device had not shown pictures in the book about 'jets' she probably wouldn't have connected the clouds with the 'trails' of an aircraft at all. They were too large. They cut across the whole curve of the sky.

When she finally detected one that was moving, at first she could only see the trail that was growing behind it, and she was relieved. The tiny speck that was the actual aircraft was not actually unimaginably large. It could not be small though, to be visible from this distance. She flew swiftly toward it, and then altered her course.

It was swift, impossibly swift. If she flew toward it, she would never reach it. She turned and flew at an angle, in the direction that the line of its trail indicated. It was such a straight line. It did not fly like a flying thing, it flew like an arrow that could cut the wind. Like shot from a pistol. People rode such a thing? Humans were crazy, humans were amazing, humans were fun!