The sickly girl stared at him blankly. He wholeheartedly agreed that she did not fit the normal definitions of 'wise' in her own tongue, even though the child had insisted that it was the closest word to wise in the language of dragons.

The word in her tribe's language implied knowledge that this girl obviously lacked, but the wisdom of dragons did not require knowledge as part of its comprehension, perception of patterns, and shrewd instinct.

The child had explained that words often had more modern meanings than those written in the impressive 'book' of papers that he had read from. Wisdom's modern definition was apparently closer to a dragon's term because 'games' had 'stats' in which intelligence usually conferred knowledge, and wisdom conferred shrewdness and perception. Perhaps he should tell the girl to play with the energy of the strings as though it were a game.

Actually, with a single string she could reach out to strengthen her connection through her fingers, which might explain the way she flailed around with her arms. There was no need to reach out when she was immersed in the pool formed by many strings meeting, but perhaps…

"Why don't you try showing me what I'm doing wrong," she demanded plaintively.

He considered for a moment, perhaps that was also a good suggestion. "Very well," he agreed.

He resisted the song of the strings, the muddled hum of the pool, and drew a firm line between I and not I. It was a rather stifling feeling, akin to holding his breath. She could see the effect of it though, he could tell by the way her eyes widened as she got to her feet again and turned in a slow circle.

He was confused when she closed her eyes again, and continued to turn slowly.

"Can I touch you when you're in that form?" she asked uncertainly.

"Yes?" he agreed questioningly. He wondered if she thought that he'd changed into some sort of mist form as the child had demonstrated because he was so much larger than the tightly compressed form he'd used in the small dwelling.

She took a few steps, fell, and then opened her eyes as she stood again to walk over to him. Once she reached his side she tentatively reached out to press her hand against his scales and promptly closed her eyes again.

"I think I see," she mumbled.

"With your eyes closed, or with your hands?" he asked facetiously.

"Both I think," she replied agreeably. "I can see the water more clearly with my eyes closed, but I can kind of feel a, sort of a line of separation?"

"I see," he said thoughtfully.

Her head still moved as though she were looking with her eyes when they were closed. She moved one hand to her own chest, and asked, "Can you go back to absorbing it again?"

He released the layer of separation, without speaking, and it was obvious again that she could see something. "What happens when you look with your eyes open, while in complete darkness?" he asked with interest.

Her eyes opened and she turned to stare at his face. "I have always been afraid of complete darkness," she explained nervously. "But it's usually hard to find anywhere that's completely dark, so it's not a problem normally."

"Why do you fear it?" he asked thoughtfully.

Her hand was still a small point of contact between them, and he listened to the vibration of the single scale as it trembled. Her fear was sharp and real, but her answer was strangely hesitant.

"No one believed me, but I thought I could see my own heartbeat, I thought I could see my blood through my skin. And everything got really loud, so loud that I was deaf for a while after they finally let me out," she said the statements as though they were questions.

"Ah," he replied and she yanked her hand away and stumbled back. It took him a moment to realize that he had forgotten to mute the sound into the range her kind used for speech. "I think that you should try to look at the pool, and yourself, and the barrier that you have formed without the distraction of physical light and the barrier of your eyelids."

She squeaked some indiscernible reply and stumbled back to the center of the space he had left around her initial position.

Ideas that he had never considered about why the wise of most other species were blind to physical sight danced through his mind as he unfurled one wing.

--

Anne had no idea how long she'd been in the darkness, days, or maybe even weeks. She had slept sometimes, but invalids slept more frequently, and she had been feeling very weak. The first few hours of darkness had been frequently interrupted, because she'd brought Chris's iPad with her.

The dragon was utterly fascinated by it. Not because it glowed enough to relieve her eyes and her fear, but because it had internet access even way out here. Although, that probably wasn't surprising given the expensive houses.

He claimed that he'd learned to read by simply watching as Chris read the new language to him. Maybe dragons were actually geniuses, but Anne wasn't really sure. She told the web browser that a child was using it before she reluctantly let him have the device, after having seen the results of some of the things he had already asked about.

Amaru talked with her quite cordially whenever she asked what he was reading about, and did not seem at all surprised when the tablet finally ran out of energy. He even explained his theories about how her eyes were actually impaired by the fact that she retained her ability to see with light.

It was possible that she'd only been kept in the dark for a few hours instead of the days that it felt like. She had no way to tell after the tablet shut down. She also had no distractions other than the dragon himself. No one had even come to try chasing them off. Whenever she fell asleep, she would wake up wrapped in the warmth of a curled dragon tail.

She wasn't really surprised to learn that everything she'd thought she'd seen in the utter dark as a small child was real. What surprised her was that the ripples, waves, and flashes of light that she was used to seemed to have mostly vanished. Infinitesimal things moved through the darkness around her almost as thickly as they crowded her own veins.

If she closed her eyes she could see the familiar rippling surfaces, but she realized that those were just tricks her mind played with the patterns of movement. They matched the patterns that she could see in the darkness with her eyes open, but it was the difference between looking at a flame and watching its reflection on a wall.

The sounds that had deafened her as a child existed here too, but they were muted by a dragon. The lights and patterns were muted by the dragon too. When her eyes were tired she could look at his radiance and find an anchor.

He had her play games with the lights and sounds that filled the lightless dark. He would hum something into one of the stronger currents and have her track it down and somehow catch it on her skin. That wasn't how he described it, but that was how it felt to her.

Eventually she caught the trick of letting her fingers hum with the sound, which made it vanish. It was still a long time before she could open more of herself to the energy that swirled around her. When it finally started drifting into her the way it drifted into the dragon, Amaru praised her rather awkwardly. She had expected him to release her, but instead he ordered her to sleep for a while and let herself absorb more.

When she woke again, she asked what she finally realized that she could have asked even a creature who did not seem to understand the meaning of an hour. She wasn't so hungry that she was certain it would be more than once, but she felt fairly thirsty, though not nearly as thirsty as she was certain that she should after talking so much even if it hadn't actually been days.

"How many times has the sun set since we came here?" Anne asked.

His reply was infuriatingly vague, "Several."