“You’ve grown,” her mom said with a note of pride.

Had she? The obvious answer was ‘yes.’ Her dragon body had continued to grow without her, coiled up inside her soul where she had fed it a constant stream of nourishment.

It felt like home. Its patterns were a part of her being from birth till death and it could be destroyed and when she built it anew, it would feel like home again.

Still, Lisa shifted as she walked. She shook her wings, moved her tail, and put more force into her steps every now and then, leaving footprints in the dirt.

She was uncomfortable. Not because of her body. She was getting used to the feel of it, the difference in perspective—both height and a wider visual spectrum—her strength, and three additional limbs.

Arms full, Lisa walked on the wrists of her wings. She technically had four arms, but her wings weren’t very dexterous.

It was what she carried in her hands that unsettled her. Her own corpse.

Her mom had preserved it. A wave of her hand, and the blood had flowed back into the individual pieces of flesh and stopped unraveling into essences.

The torn stumps, strips of bare muscle, and clusters of veins looked like gemstones where the blood waited in suspension. It wasn’t bloody.

Lisa looked down at the eyes she had seen in the mirror for the last few years. There was no light inside them. The hands with which she’d spent hours practicing her handwriting were cut, the arms with which she had hugged her friends broken. Even her clothes were torn.

Lisa wasn’t queasy around blood, but something about carrying this corpse made her uncomfortable. Not because this had been ‘her’ an hour ago. She doubted she’d ever considered this body to be herself at all.

She only missed it like a person would miss the hair they’d grown out for years after they got it cut, or the old clothes with so many memories attached to them after they gave them away.

It made her uncomfortable because it was human.

Through the lines of suspended blood, Lisa saw Myra’s red hair, imagined carrying her corpse instead of her own, and looked away.

What had her mom said? Right.

She smiled. “I’ve had to look up to Garen these last few years, mom. I don’t know if I can appreciate the difference between now and before I left.”

Her mom gave a thoughtful hum. Coming from her, it sounded like a force of nature.

Anyone would feel small next to her. She was larger than the collector, larger than a blue whale. Lisa hadn’t fully comprehended that fact until she had left home.

Of course, everyone else is smaller than us, she had thought, much the same way a human child might take it for granted that ants were tiny.

As her mom had come down through the canopy, she had timed her wing beats to the gaps between the trees to avoid knocking them over. She wasn’t the same vibrant red as Muri, or even Lisa herself. Few of her family members were these days, and they saw it as a good thing.

In the first years of their creation, she was told, they had looked different. Living fire and hatred contained within vessels of blood and flesh.

They had been made from the liminality between fire, hatred, and life, but hatred had faded within a day, and life had turned them into survivors. Their bodies were malleable and they adapted within their lifetimes.

Over the centuries, her diet and the environment had muddied her moms’ scales into a deep red color like dried blood. She had lightened it in places into subdued autumn tones.

Less living hatred, and more natural fire. Less autumn leaves, and more the leaves that had lain in the mud for some time.

Her eyes were amber, but it had almost taken Lisa a year to realize that. They turned pink when she was at work.

She had intentionally grown frills and kept her hair short so it floated like a shadow behind the spiked crown of her head. Her head … was asymmetrical. And unlike Micah, that wasn’t natural in her case.

Pale scars ran down the left side of her head and neck all the way to the shoulder of her wing, like cracks in stone, and that part of her was frailer.

The wounds Garen had inflicted had run deep, to challenge the healing of a dragon, but they had healed. Her mom could have removed the scars with some time dedicated to the task, but when Lisa had asked her about it once, she had said it was a waste of time and life essence, then become quiet and excused herself.

Lisa had respected old wounds enough not to pry. By now, she knew the truth. It was a sign of guilt, for her part in things.

Maybe someday she would remove her scars, but in the meantime, as horrible as the thought was, even they were familiar to Lisa. Even they felt like home.

She realized she had been staring at her mom for some time … but her mom stared right back at her and hadn’t noticed yet.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Mm. Your growth. You have grown, however …” Her eyes wandered, measuring her body with a hint of a frown.

Lisa panicked and gestured with a nervous smile. “If anything, Muri has grown!” She thought of a ring she had made for Micah, a few other times she had tapped her life essence without permission.

She had known there would be consequences, but her past self had been happy to shove those on her current self like a sociopath, without empathy or remorse.

Thankfully, her mom took the bait. “Yes, we have learned much from watching your cousin grow,” she said, “and we have been able to teach her refined lessons on her growth. Not that she will catch up to you anytime soon.”

Lisa watched Muri with a mixture of feelings as she scampered ahead of them. She glanced back from time to time to comment or ask a question, but she was distracted.

She carried Lisa’s luggage and shielded it from view, rummaging through her things when she thought they were distracted.

Too bad Lisa had meant what she’d said. As soon as Muri broke something—something else, other than her backpack and body—she was going to have to give the spellbook to someone else. That was going to be a headache.

She remembered a time when Muri had been little enough to cling to her hand. Now, she was larger than a horse. How she missed those days.

Her mom turned back to her. “I wonder. I had thought exercise would not have much to offer for you while you went south, Lisa. Not much that you cannot achieve on your own, that your body does not do on its own. I assume you took proper care of yourself while you were gone?”

“Mm?” she gave a high-pitched hum of assent.

She had. Mostly.

Her dragon body had its own pattern, one that was likely stronger than any potion Micah could create. All she had to do was feed it life essences and resources—though not even those were necessary. Her body would build itself with life essences alone, it would just take an incredibly long time. But they were omnivores in the truest sense of the words, she could breathe or eat rocks and her body would turn it into flesh and magic. And that was the important part, because while her body consumed life essence to grow, it produced more life essence than it consumed at an incremental rate that plateaued somewhere near her mom’s size.

Lisa had been told not to use her life essence. Every time she did, she slowed down her development.

It was better to wait until she was fully mature than to waste time by making trinkets, which … was exactly what she had done.

How much had that ring cost her? A week, a month? She wasn’t that experienced at using life essence. She could have used more than she needed.

Her family had tracked her development every day of her life. They had made charts and projections, and she had thrown it all out the window to save money.

“Then perhaps I was wrong,” her mom sounded excited about the prospect. “Perhaps exercise does aid you, perhaps it could be something as elusive as the mind, or as deep as a resonance between life essence and living, but you seem a touch … smaller than we had projected.”

Lisa was going to have to face the consequences eventually. Really, they were only going to give her a stern lecture. But did she have to subject herself to that now, when she had just gotten home?

“It’s not like I had opportunities to exercise,” she deflected and tried not to sound nervous, “although, I could have run around the Tower …”

She went up with her voice, a child teasing a parent by suggesting something that would worry them.

This time, her mom didn’t take the bait.

She smiled. And something about the curve of her lips above her teeth as she did it, the glimmer in her eyes …

Trap.

“You can exert yourself however much you want now that you’re home. You must have missed it, Lisa. Flight. If you want to go on ahead, I can carry your puppet if you would like?”

Her cousin perked up as she heard and turned, nearly spilling her bag. “Huh? No! Stay. You can walk with us and—”

“Muri, Lisa hasn’t flown in years. Surely, she wants to stretch her wings?” Her mom gave her a glance.

Lisa did. She was so used to being on the ground, so wrapped up in being near her mom again, she hadn’t thought of it. Now, she hungered for the sky beyond the canopy.

That her cousin wanted her to stay was an added benefit, and she knew her mom was leading her into a trap, but if it let her avoid the lecture for a while longer …?

“Please,” Lisa almost begged.

Her mom accepted her body with care when she handed it over.

“No,” Muri protested, “please stay? Everyone will get to have you when we get back and—”

“Hush,” her mom said.

“But—”

“I’ll hang out with you later,” Lisa said. She fanned her wings and paused next to her cousin to lower one hand into her backpack and pull out a bundle.

Mury hadn’t noticed it yet. Maybe she had assumed it was a bundle of clothes.

“In the meantime, I brought you a present. It’s a spellbook from one of the Tow—”

Her eyes turned pink and she nearly snatched the bundle from her hand.

Lisa yanked it back and stressed, “It’s incredibly delicate. Even to humans. You have to be careful, do you understand?”

She kept up the eye contact and lowered her head. “I’m careful.”

Lisa almost laughed and handed her the book anyway. She would break it, in a matter of days, she was willing to bet, and maybe that would make the lesson stick this time.

She still gave her little cousin a loving pat on the head as she walked by—she frowned at the gesture—and picked up speed with an eager grin.

The wind cleaved past her wings, tickling her, and she flooded her body with magic to strengthen herself even further.

This, too, was home to her.

Lisa picked up speed with every step and ducked her body down as she looked up into the spotted sunlight filtered through the canopy. With a beat of her wings that sent the duff scattering off to the sides, she pushed off.

Over a thousand kilometers south, Micah was carried up to the ceiling of his school gym by a flight of wind spirits. In his surprise, his concentration broke. The bubble of calm around him popped, the spirits enveloped him, and when he reached the zenith of his arc, he turned and panicked as he began to fall again.

Roughly fifty kilometers closer, Ryan whimpered as the ground suddenly disappeared beneath his feet and his guts, breath, and vision all sucked in.

The cold fluttered around him. It felt heavenly in the summer heat, but it sounded like he’d been caught in a circle of blankets being shaken out all around him.

The world distorted as though he saw through a paper-thin window, and that window curved.

Within seconds, the hill they had stood on was just a mound of dirt far beneath them, their scout leader a figurine. He could see the roads he’d come from, and the fields, the trees like untamed hedges—

Someone screamed. It might have been him. And he laughed.

Lisa broke through the canopy. The branches around her bent, leaves falling, and they rocked with the downward beat of her wings. That same beat carried her further into the sky.

The day was bright. An endless sea of blue dotted with clouds stretched above her, an endless sea of trees below. With her old senses returned, Lisa could see the currents in the wind, could feel them against her wings even more clearly, and she caught flickers of distortion in the world—the fabric Mother’s Forest was torn and stretched. One wrong step could lead you astray.

If she flew too far up, her mom and Muri would make it back home before she did, no matter how quickly she flew.

But she wanted to enjoy this, she remembered spots where she could dip back into the forest to find a shortcut home, and if her memory failed her, she could always follow the animals.

So Lisa climbed.

Her dad laughed as he broke through the canopy, “Where are you going?”

She had been right. They had been waiting to ambush her.

“Catch me if you can!” she yelled back.

Another dragon with golden scales among the red dove out of trees a few hundred meters further ahead.

“Oh, Lisaaa!” her uncle called and reminded her of times he had chased her around as a kid. Hide and go seek.

A third dragon used a storm of wind magic around herself to fly up, and Lisa saw her picking up speed as it formed a stream like an underwater current.

A chubby myconid with a bright red cap hopped off a tree it had been clinging to and grew giant, mycelium sails to lift it into the sky.

Another grew an open balloon and held a flame up into its interior to carry itself up.

A third simply cast a wind spell that may as well have been [Fly].

Drake swarms rose from the trees, smaller and with vibrant red scales, mouse tails, or tufts of fur here and there. They tackled anyone who came too close to them, including each other, clawing for every inch up on each other with large grins.

A green, scaled stag with burning hooves run straight up into the air as if gravity had no sway on him.

More and more followed.

Her welcome party.

They called her name, joined the chase, asked others what was going on—had the surprise been ruined?—and still, Lisa flew higher.

She couldn’t evade them forever, especially since most of them were going easy on her, and they could be fast when they needed to be, but she didn’t want to evade them forever, it was just fun to try.

A great funnel of bodies rose up below her. Lisa raced them to the clouds. And even still, she wasn’t sure she would make it.

So she played dirty.

A beat of her wings, and a downdraft slammed into her aunt like a wall, breaking the current she had made and making her spiral downward.

“You brat!” she yelled up at her in a shrill, hag’s voice. “Let me hug you!”

That same maneuver made two more people slam into each other, bodies tumbling through the air.

Almost there.

One of the larger drakes passed by her uncle, he glanced at it, then decided to tackle it, slowing both of them down.

She only had one more contender then.

Lisa squeezed every last bit she could out of her magic and her wings, trying to climb as quickly as she could. She stretched herself up—and tunneled through a cloud.

The world turned to blurry fog all around her for a few seconds. She burst out onto an endless sea of rolling white like wool below her, except for a gap of thinner cotton candy where she’d come through.

Her dad dove through that gap with a roar and tackled her.

“Goggles!” the assistant shouted.

“Hah?”

“Goggles!”

Ryan had heard her the first time, his mind just needed a second to process it on top of everything else.

They were so high above the ground, it felt like halfway to the clouds though his mind was probably exaggerating the distance.

Mrs. Perin had anchored them to her orbit almost equidistantly from each other and it reminded Ryan of some people who fought with flying swords, or mages who cast tiny meteors around themselves, except she used people. Every time she moved, with a slight delay, they moved and slowly orbited her.

The assistant was the only one not in on it, and she shouted instructions over the whipping of the wind.

Ryan fumbled for the goggles around his neck. Their lenses were dark, but when he put them on, the world barely dimmed and then he could see much more easily. He could see Hadica in the distance, the Tower a vague pillar that cleaved the horizon, the curve of the Great River.

Like Barry before him, Ryan couldn’t stop grinning. Silas looked a little green around the edges, but Mrs. Perin caught their smiles.

Far from looking like a stereotypical secretary now, she asked, “You’re enjoying this?”

Ryan nodded.

“How about … this.” With a bit of effort in her voice, she thrust her arms out and they spun like a wheel, turning heads over heels unanchored in the air.

All of the blood rushed to one side of his body, his cheeks pressed against his teeth, the wind rushed through his hair, and Ryan could barely hear his own laughter.

Silas waved frantically, and Perin stopped.

“Sorry. You need a minute? Try to take deep breaths and focus on your nose, not your throat.”

They waited for a moment, hanging in the air, and the moment Silas gave her the thumbs up, she smiled again.

“Alright, then. Let’s get this on the road. It’ll take us a while to reach our destination so settle in and enjoy the view.”

She stood in the air as confidently as she would have on the ground, like the need to have something stable beneath your feet was a suggestion from the universe and she’d thought about it and said, Nah, fuck it.

But as they left, some of them calling down their goodbyes to Gus, waving in case he couldn’t hear them, she picked up speed and laid flat as if she were falling face-first from a great height.

The delay elapsed and the leash yanked them after her, and as the wind buffeted his face and pressed his clothes to his skin, Ryan found himself copying her out of necessity.

They soared over the trees and rolling hills then and finally, the reality of the moment sunk in past that smothering blanket around his mind.

What every kid dreamt of at least once in their life, Ryan was flying.

The spirits caught him and eased his descent. Micah hit the gym floor hands first in a great diving roll and let his legs flop onto the practice mats. The wind fell like a bucket of dumped water around him and the spirits fell with it.

He laughed.

Two more mats. That was all it would have taken for him to win for the first time. He had been so close.

“Unfair!” he shouted and rolled around, kicking his legs, and the spirits laughed with him.