She looked out across mountain peaks that were still white with snow, although it was quickly being compressed into ice as the top layers slightly melted and sank into the layers below them to freeze again.

Spring was raising green carpets that crawled slowly upward from the bottoms of the valleys. Bursts of sweetness and color decorated the slopes as the season of flowers began. The world was beautiful in its ever changing variety.

She spun on an updraft and turned her gaze toward the city that marred the charming view. Perhaps it improved the view for those who occupied it, but it was inelegant in her sight. If they had built two of those, arranged all of the buildings in descending heights, and capped them all in white, it would have been…

She stopped herself. She did not wish to get drawn into the silly games that some of the younger generation had played with the tribes. The territories of animals could not be adjusted without consequences.

The mankind weren't the first species to suffer the attempts of dragons who thought that herding them could be amusing. Carrying a single breeding pair of interesting animals to a different continent could destroy the balance among the residents for a thousand years. Eventually a new balance would settle, life was strong and enduring, but there were always consequences to meddling with things that you didn't fully understand.

She had thought that she had understood them well enough. Others had studied them more. But it was obvious that none of her kind had really comprehended what they were capable of.

She was currently running away. Not because they were so horrible, not because she feared for her life, but because she had found herself reluctant to leave. Reluctant to stop investigating everything that they had discovered.

Dragons prized knowledge, they bartered it among themselves, they shared it, they hoarded it. Knowledge shaped them as a species, quite literally, as they wove their future into their own patterns. Each of them was a scholar, a singer, a weaver, and could read the very flow of the world itself. But they had always been few, living within the balances, and they could live long, so long that no one had ever sung the limit.

The mankind lived such short lives, that as intelligent as they seemed, few of her kind had ever imagined that they could ever gather as much knowledge as a single dragon. But now she knew. It was still true that no individual among them could match more than an infant's store of knowledge. But they were no longer storing it within themselves.

Their fragile hoards of written documents had made them stronger and may even have been the reason that they had spread far enough to threaten the balance of the entire world. But what her kind had not understood, was that it was the very number of them that was accelerating their collection of knowledge as a species. That they would develop a form of storage and recollection for knowledge that individuals could access from almost anywhere.

Their species had not just multiplied beyond comprehension, they had stored knowledge beyond comprehension and were constantly discovering more. And she could feel that knowledge changing her already, and so she ran.

She would return of course. Not only had she promised it, but she already knew that the draw of so much knowledge would call to her as light called to a moth. But she must share what she had already learned first, she knew that it would draw them all in eventually, even if she did not know where the pivot that would let her kind find their own balance again would form.

--

Anne didn't know why she was still living at Chris and Mac's place, not that she had any desire to leave! She just couldn't figure out why they were letting her stay.

Amaru lived on top of the nearest mountain, and came down to visit only when his phone needed to recharge. Anne had almost suggested solar panels once, but Chris had silenced her, and made her promise not to give the elder dragon ideas. He seemed to think that the dragon would become the first Hikikomori among his species if they let him.

Mac was human, like she was, but the wrinkled little old man seemed to welcome her presence. She wasn't entirely certain that he knew that Chris was a dragon, because he kept hoping that the two of them would develop a romantic relationship. He did know that Chris wasn't human though, because the two of them often laughed over things that had happened when Mac was a child.

The six week quarantine that Chris had insisted on after she returned, even though she had improved so quickly that she'd felt completely well within another week, was already over. With an address available, she'd been able to update her identification, and get an online job as a transcriptionist. The pay rate was horrible, not even meeting the minimum wage in her state, but it was a real job.

It was the toehold she needed to get a better job someday. Someday when the world-wide lockdown ended. A few places had ended it and the new outbreaks there had resulted in many deaths and scenes just as horrible as the first round.

The slow spread in confined populations was remaining manageable, and far fewer were dying on a per infected person scale, but it wasn't sustainable. Already electronics were becoming more expensive, and certain foods were becoming harder to get. Somehow they needed a controlled infection rate. It sounded horrible everytime she thought it, but it seemed to her like they needed to purposely infect small groups.

The problem was that it was a deadly illness. Even with the best care it still killed too many. Now that she was well, she no longer doubted Chris's insistence that she'd actually had an older illness.

--

Emma Louise Forsythe Beaglesworth deeply regretted a few sharp words that she'd said to her grandmother half a century ago.

The girl that she'd been then hadn't been able to understand how anyone could truly regret that they had lived when another had died. But she thought that even back then she had understood the bitter doubt that came from doing something as well as you possibly could, and failing. The doubt that couldn't be silenced by others telling you that you'd done the best you could.

She'd repeated the empty words to the others who had failed in the same task. It was what you did when someone died in their care. Even when you secretly wondered if you could have done better than they had. Even when you knew that you hadn't done better, even if you hadn't done worse.

She was tired. She was old. She almost ignored the sound of another message arriving, but a moment later she was standing up and pulling a freshly washed handful of masks out of her dryer.

Even if she couldn't trade her life for a child's, she could still help a young woman fight for her child's life.

--

Chris turned himself into a bat or an owl and flew to the mountain every night. He had the energy to spare for it now. A week after Amaru's surprising return with Anne, the elder dragon had taken Chris away from his city for two days. It would have been longer, but after Chris figured out where the older dragon wanted to go, they rented a car.

The hardest part hadn't been teaching the elder dragon to drive, it had been forcing him to return the car in one piece. The coolest part had been drinking from the heart that had been carved out of light that shone as brightly as Amaru himself to Chris's true eyes.

The dragon carved heart rested inside of a mountain within a mountain. The informational signs said that it was a new volcanic peak forming on the crater of the old volcano, but it was still a mountain within a mountain. Chris hadn't really understood the garden when Amaru tried to explain how the garden pulled the strings through the heart to fill it, but it all sounded very Feng Shui somehow.

When Chris looked up Feng Shui later, and discovered that the term itself translated as Wind Water, it seemed even more similar. Amaru dismissed it as a useless guide after reading the same descriptions, but did concede that it might be based on a blind human's interpretation of the way a dragon built a garden to adjust the strings. Chris decided to reserve his own judgment until he had a chance to see Amaru's reaction to actual buildings that had been built around the concepts.

Amaru grumbled at Chris when he landed, but the elder dragon still came to meet him each night. He didn't shift his focus from the tiny cell phone held in smaller than normal hands that were shaped with soft clawless digits that could manipulate the device easily, but his tail swept up between them. The tip was shaped into an oddly flexible series of fans.

"I have managed to form lenses that will magnify my own true sight," Amaru informed him distractedly. His tail fanned out, holding the nearly transparent fans in a line with the flatter surfaces held one after the other between the two of them.

Chris blinked, and then looked at the tail again and tried opening his own true eyes. He moved from side to side for a moment.

"It does affect what I see, but this current arrangement is just moving the edge of the brighter area where you are," Chris said with disappointment. "But ophthalmology is a complex field! And very small changes in alignment and curve can make a huge difference in what each person sees!" he added swiftly.

Amaru didn't look up from his phone as his tail flicked and changed the order of the fans.

When Amaru finally turned off his phone and looked at Chris, he said, "The sequence of tests should, in theory, match those of the lens swapping mechanisms used in measuring a prescription for glass lenses. Either the lense is not the source of your half blind state, or my lenses are incompatible with your eyes."

Chris sighed, and said, "Sorry, it seemed worth trying."

"Oh, it certainly was. It was a very instructive course of study. I shall find it quite useful even if you cannot," Amaru said firmly.

Chris nodded. "Thank you."

"I understand your impatience," the older dragon began. Chris gave him a sharp and doubtful look, but Amaru ignored it. "However, even if this experiment had been completely successful, you could not learn to modify even a single human's pattern in time to make a difference."

Chris wanted to argue, but instead he nodded reluctantly.

"We will go back to focusing on having you learn your own pattern without sight," Amaru announced decisively. "Once I am certain that you can repair even your true eyes, I would like to examine them more closely with these lenses."

Chris almost protested that he could already replace a missing limb when he reshaped himself, but then he realized that if Amaru wanted him to be certain that he was able to replace his eyes, he was probably going to dissect them. Another horrible thought occurred to him a moment later. The memory of a blade slashing across his eye.

His sight had not changed after that injury had been healed by reshaping himself, but… "What if my true eyes were damaged when I was an infant? Won't I be learning a damaged pattern?"

Amaru shook his head. "It would be a blessing if that were the source of your blindness, because once you reinforced your full pattern, it would heal."

The patterns really sounded a lot like DNA. The unweavers sounded like viruses.

"I know that it won't matter for this virus, but if Anne could live long enough for you to learn her pattern, and you could write resistance to the unweavers into it… When you wrote it into her, would it be like reinforcement? Would she regain her youth and be able to bear children?" Chris asked soberly.

"Why do you want to make them even stronger?" Amaru asked grouchily as he turned on his phone.

"Why are you spending all of your time on the internet now?" Chris asked dryly, without answering.

He didn't really know if he wanted to make humanity stronger. They could be even more terrible than the monster he had believed himself to be when drinking life from a still beating heart was the strongest source he knew of. When he had lived without knowing that he could drink from a carefully carved heart of stone filled with light instead.

He thought of Mac's last video call, where his grandson had presented his great grandchild to him with the only method available during the long confinement. Mac would be lucky to live another decade. Chris was lucky to have met him again.

"There are a few people of value among them," Amaru said grudgingly as he studied the page on his small screen.

"Yes," Chris agreed. It was that simple.