The former vampire, who had just discovered that he was actually a dragon, the being temporarily self named Chris T'andy, was currently laying on his wingless back, and staring at the stars.

Actually he wasn't discounting the possibility that he was still exactly the type of creature that the word vampire was meant to describe. It was more like he was now adding the possibility that he was literally the kind of dinosaur that he'd mentally accused himself of becoming everytime keeping up with the latest technology became rather tiresome.

Dinosaur was the common name of all of those lizard-like beings who had existed long before mankind right? And according to the dragon beside him, he himself had been alive, although young, during that epic era. Age, it seemed, was the reason for the vast difference between their sizes. Therefore, dragons must be dinosaurs. Probably.

Snakes did not lay on their backs and stare at the stars. Neither did dragons, from the glances the older dragon kept sneaking at him. Humans did though.

"What is your real name anyway?" Chris asked. There was something odd about the word for name in this language, but he was still feeling out the corners of this new/old knowledge. He was also beginning to suspect that he had only had a small child's grasp of it when he'd become… a mute snake that couldn't remember its passing days clearly. He was still almost certain that he hadn't had hands and feet like this back then.

The older dragon didn't answer right away, and he felt a frown wrinkle his face. It was odd, he'd never thought much about the expression before, but this face could frown, although he wasn't going to bet that he'd recognize his own expression in a mirror right now. He flexed his tiny fingers that were still some weird cross between a lizard and a cat's claws. His hands still felt like hands, unlike when he took the shape of a cat or a lizard.

After a moment the older dragon SANG something, and Chris sat up and stared. The older dragon kept singing, without repeating, or no… there was repetition, or maybe a pattern to it, but it definitely had no chorus or verse. And it all MEANT something. Something that was too big for him to understand.

His mind fled to tiny details, like the fact that dragons were not meant to sit on the backs of their spines. His body lacked the proper padding and support for such a position. And the older dragon still sang. He was singing… his NAME. Chris was somehow certain. And he was probably a horrible failure as a dragon, because there was no way he was going to be able remember it, let alone repeat it.

But it was… wonderful.

It felt like the whole world was echoing with the sound.

When the dragon whose name described more than could ever be said in words stopped singing, Chris felt like the world had dimmed, and the… it wasn't silence, because the wind sang through the trees, dozens or hundreds of varieties of life made noises, and even the trucks on the freeway along the river far below them could still be heard. But the lack of song was just that, a lack, an emptiness, a silence.

And then the dragon opened his true eyes, and said calmly, "Your name is:" and he SANG again. Chris desperately tried to grasp the song this time. He tried to catch even a phrase of it firmly in his mind.

When it ended he was crying, except that dragons apparently did not cry with tears. Sorrow curled him into a knot. He could not remember even a fraction of it. And he also felt certain that he had heard it before, unlike the older dragon's, he somehow recognized his own NAME. Even if he couldn't grasp it.

"How do you know mine?" Chris asked in a broken whisper that bent his words, when the silence sat between them again.

"I can see it," the older dragon replied gently. Too gently. Sorrow and sympathy laced the words.

Chris uncoiled himself and looked up at the older dragon. "Earlier, you said that I'm mostly blind? What did you mean? I can see quite well… I think? Is it something like letting my throat open properly, am I not opening my eyes properly?" He opened his true eyes and looked around, trying to somehow 'see' more than he usually could.

"What does the world look like to you with your true eyes open?" the dragon replied to his string of questions with another question.

"A white mist that fills the world, it is the energy that is everywhere," Chris confided openly what he usually kept secret. "I can also see things that hold more energy than the background radiation, because they glow. All lives glow a bit more, but you glow like… like a power plant, only differently, with overflowing life." He was embarrassed, but in this shape his cheeks did not burn with it. He added, as he looked at his hands, "I glow a little more than others, but not nearly as brightly as you."

"The few, the one survivor that I have spoken with who was completely blind could see only pure unchanging white when he opened his true eyes," the older dragon said quietly. "But those who can see, can see the patterns within living things, and the light of the strings of the world."

"One survivor?" Chris asked fearfully, ignoring the patterns and strings for a moment.

The dragon hissed. But after a moment Chris realized that sibilant sound was mostly a sigh. "They usually starve. They cannot see the hearts to drink from, and they cannot consume enough energy to compensate for the lack on their own. Unless they eat the hearts of creatures that have patterns that echo too strongly within them, and drive them mad because they cannot look at themselves and reinforce their own pattern. And then they starve."

"Consume the hearts of your enemies, but do not be consumed," Chris blurted awkwardly. It wasn't quite right somehow in this language, but the phrase had always rung true with him, like something learned at his mother's breast. Although apparently it was very unlikely that his mother had actually had breasts, per se.

The older dragon chuckled. "What an awkward paraphrase of a fragment of the guiding songs."

Chris had to struggle with the meaning of some of those words. It helped somehow that he knew the concepts for them in another language, but paraphrase was definitely a guess. It had probably been too complex for a child. There were so many things he needed to ask, and each answer brought a dozen new questions with it.

He looked at his strange little hands, and said instead, "I'm almost sure that I didn't have hands during my first century. I was sure that I had been a snake for a long time before I discovered that I could shift my shape."

The older dragon laughed, and the light of the world around then shimmered with his amusement.

When he finally stopped laughing he informed the young dragon, who had lived a mere five centuries and considered himself very old, quite cheerfully, "Of course not. Infants don't begin to develop their hands and feet until they are at least a century old."