Fragment 21

Chris shivered beneath the dragon's glare. The remains of his clothes were clutched in his hands, but they didn't seem to matter. He didn't know why the dragon had suddenly switched from radiating sadness to fierce anger, and his mind was reeling.

The dragon, the OTHER dragon (he was a dragon?), looked away from Chris, heaved an exasperated sigh, and said, "Shit."

Chris couldn't help it, he started to laugh. Hysterically, perhaps, but he laughed nonetheless. The dragon turned its glare back toward Chris, and he waved his armful of clothes, and explained quickly in gasps, "Every language. I read that the word for… 'excrement'," he stumbled over the language suddenly, as no other word than shit presented itself, and used the English word, "is an 'explicative' in every language."

The dragon didn't roll his eyes, he just turned his face away, but that was the feeling that Chris got from him, although, somehow this wierd direct sense of its emotions was fading. Its… his anger was no longer tearing at the air around them, even though he was certain that the feeling lingered.

His laughter trailed off, and he couldn't stop shivering. He didn't think that it was from the cold, cold never affected him as quickly as it affected humans, as though he had a hidden reserve of heat in his core. It was shock, he decided in self diagnosis. He was going into shock, the overload was too much.

The information was too much.

Maybe what had made the dragon angry had been the way he'd spoken of what had just been done to him, but he didn't know what had been done to him. There was no way he could describe the way his head, his body, maybe his very soul had been cracked open. If this was the way every person he had ever used his eyes on felt… remorse swept through him with the shudders that wracked him.

That dazed look they got when he commanded something, he felt sure that it was in his own eyes now. But… the command, he could understand it fully now, the word, feeling, and concept were all the same. And it was still simple. Release. How could release wrack him with… with memories? How …no. He knew how it could turn him into a snake, no, into a dragon. He was a dragon, that shape… was his.

It wasn't anything like the dragon he'd made of himself before, not the shape he'd crafted. It was like… the snake he had barely remembered being, the snake that he had been… for a long time. How long? As he asked, he knew. The haze of time that clouded that time seemed to have withdrawn. A full century.

And before? Before that? He remembered the eyes. He blinked and shivered, and turned his gaze upward. A concerned frown met his eyes. He looked. He looked at the shape of the face surrounded by… fur? feathers? His eyes wandered to the rest of the dragon's form. The hands, the clawed hands, they were small compared to the rest of him, but he was… enormous.

He made a whale look small, and whales were HUGE. In another lifetime Chris had watched whales from the deck of a wooden ship, and found them almost inconceivably large. It felt like they had dwarfed the ship the way this dragon would dwarf a whale.

There were… fins? Along the dragon's colorful back, fins and decoratively trailing strands of that soft fluff that could be either fur or feathers. And he had wings. There was no way something that big could fly without wings that would cover the entire sky. No, something that big should simply be unable to fly.

He shivered uncontrollably, and he shifted. He… released his form. He was still tiny, barely larger than his normal human form. And then he craned his head back to examine his own back. There were no wings. He wasn't… they weren't the same. A wave of sorrow so deep that it felt as endless as the night sky washed through him. They were similar, but they weren't the same kind.

He started to cry, like a woman (a woman of this age might slap him for that thought, but it was deeply ingrained into the culture he had lived in), or like a baby, and… in this form it poured out of his mouth like a song.

--

The child… mourned.

The connection had faded but the child cried like an infant, and the world shivered with the raw song of its sorrow.

The anger that he had been setting aside flared brightly. What memory had been released that could make him feel such sorrow. The anger cooled, just a little, as he wondered if the child's language had been bound accidently. Maybe whoever had sealed his voice had been well meaning but clumsy?

It was possible. It was still wrong, more wrong than what he had done. Even if forgetting seemed like a kindness, even if it was begged for, it would be like violently erasing part of one's self.

--

The dragon's fierce glare made him struggle to regain control. It didn't deserve this childish reaction. It had offered to teach him, and had somehow almost instantly given him words, released a whole language that he hadn't known he had forgotten.

He focused on that thought. A language he had forgotten. When had he learned it? He shook his head… and felt a weird pull at the edges of his jaw. Suddenly he really wanted a mirror.

"Can you tell me what brings you such sorrow?" the dragon asked with a really weird mixture of anger and sympathy.

Chris blinked and met eyes that were just looking. The focus was frightening. He had never seen such raw curiosity from any human. They had a thousand ways to veil their interest, to avoid direct questions, and direct answers were rarely appreciated.

The truth slipped out of his mouth while his thoughts danced in circles. "I don't have wings."

The dragon blinked.

Its mouth opened, and then shut. Just like a human who had changed what they were about to say. Sorrow shimmered to the surface of its gaze, drowning out the anger, sympathy, and curiosity. And it closed its eyes for a moment.

"I am certain that you can shape your own wings well," the dragon said almost calmly as it opened its eyes again. Sympathy had replaced the sorrow. "I just don't know if it is possible to teach one who is mostly blind how to change their own pattern. I think it would be incredibly dangerous, and I cannot advise it. But if it is your true wish, I will attempt to teach you how it is done."

Chris knew that he was staring up at the dragon with an open mouth and a blank expression, but…

The dragon declared quickly and with sharp emphasis, "AFTER you have learned to reinforce your own pattern and clear it of the echoes of others!" His voice dropped to a mutter as he added, "If you can do that, it might be possible…"

"You MADE yourself wings?" Chris demanded incredulously. It was really a very silly question coming from a talented shapeshifter, but the small dragon's usual mental walls, and the guards on his tongue had been temporarily shattered.