It was embarrassing to admit, but Chris was lost. Not completely lost in the woods like a child in a fairytale, because he could turn and see the glow of the city at the base of the mountain reflecting on the clouds, but unable to find the stone outcropping where he presumed that the elder dragon was waiting.

He might be hundreds of years old, and have spent his first century living in the wild, but he was still basically a child of civilization. He had traveled through forests without roads before, but only when other people had led the way. There were traces of old roads crisscrossing the national forest, and even signs with identifying numbers that would probably reveal an exact location to anyone with the map that matched them… but none of that helped him find the large stone outcropping that he remembered.

It had seemed so simple when he'd returned to the city by simply flying down to where a wide highway cut a clear path through the trees, and following it back. But now all of the trees looked pretty much the same, and there were a lot more clearings than he'd remembered on the rolling curves of the mountainside. Some of them even contained rocky outcroppings, though more contained buildings, water, or traces of old fire.

He flew upward, and tried to match his view with the one he'd seen the night before. Simple triangulation with the lights of the city, and the smaller town farther down the big river along the freeway should get him in the general area. The problem was that the general area was still miles across.

His bowels gurgled ominously and he sighed. He kept having to land and dig another hole too. The bag of potatoes had contained enough energy to let him alter his shape a few more times without becoming so hungry that people started to look like food… but they weren't efficient.

His body didn't take long to extract what energy they could provide, and his system was in a hurry to get rid of what it couldn't use. Even though he could expand his stomach to hold more than it seemed like it should, he still had to expel the waste products like any other living creature. An efficient high energy food source would be mostly absorbed, but potatoes were not.

He frowned. Learning that he was actually a dragon had somehow opened up a lot of questions that he'd never thought to consider. Like, if he could actually rearrange his own atoms, why couldn't he just absorb all of the atoms from whatever he ate? When he turned himself into a mist, he didn't have organs, so wasn't he turning the contents of his stomach to mist as well?

He supposed that it had never occurred to him to wonder because he'd thought of it as magic, even though he wasn't able to carry clothes or other objects along in that shape. Actually, now that he was considering it, he wasn't sure that he could remember ever needing to defecate after turning to mist, but it had definitely never given him more energy.

Turning himself to mist and back actually used up a lot of energy. He'd done it to show off the night before, but even though he was really curious about whether or not the potato waste would become part of him, if he shaped himself into a mist again even Anne might start looking like food.

--

He hurried back toward the mountain where the child was probably already waiting.

Without hunger gnawing at his stomach, it was easy to get distracted. Especially when dusk had begun to settle, and the lights of the mankind's settlements had begun to light. As he had noted the night before while walking the city streets, no one seemed to be tending them, or even obviously bidding them to light.

The hivelike city at the foot of the mountain contained so many lights that the clouds above it glowed with the reflected radiance. He debated for a moment, and then flew higher. It might put him in the path of one of the airships, but if he stayed between the lights and the clouds he would be quite visible to even purely physical eyes.

The cold vapor curled around his wings as he skimmed across the surface of the clouds, and he added a snap to the beat of his wings that forced the beads of water that wanted to settle themselves against his long flight feathers to bounce off the tips and back into the air. A smile curved his cheeks around the teeth that a distant ancestor had added to his pattern.

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As he'd explained to the child, a wingless dragon could fly by simply expanding until even the movement of a breeze was strong enough to lift them, but they were at the mercy of the winds. They could swim through the air to a certain extent, as a snake could swim through the water, but it was slow.

At first, dragons who enjoyed flight had learned to shape their forelimbs into wings, in the fashion of birds and bats. But few dragons were willing to permanently alter their forms in such a fashion if it meant giving up their hands. Those who desired to keep their wings had studied the forms of creatures who had more than four limbs. Few were successful at taking a shape that had more limbs than their own natural forms.

Those who managed it found it fatiguing. The addition of just one extra set of limbs taxed their minds and energies far more than simply altering their compressed shape did. He had been one of the few who persisted, who chased the dream of wings of their own for millennia.

Eventually he had figured out how to alter the pattern of his own mind as he compressed its shape. Although he had nearly died more than once in the attempt, he finally managed to create a natural pathway for the extra limbs. Once he perfected the combination of pathway and wings, he attempted to teach it to others.

Of the few who could give themselves extra limbs, even fewer could understand the pathway for the mind. In the end, he knew of only three who had mastered the form well enough to write their wings into their own patterns. But anything that was written into their patterns could be inherited by their children, like the teeth that nearly every dragon living carried in their jaws.

His next child had begun to grow its own wings shortly after it started to develop its hands and feet. Many of the younger dragons were winged in this age, but still far from all them.

He had never known a child with such control over its compressed shape at such a young age, as this wingless and half-blind child that he had found. If only the child had been able to see the patterns, he was nearly certain that he would be one of the few who could give himself and his descendants wings of his own design. As it was, he was still hopeful.

Even if it turned out that the child could not write it into his own pattern, his display of the mistform of his own design pushed his odds of at least being able to create a six limbed compressed shape into a likelihood.

--

Chris looked up when a large shape passed by overhead. A moment later he was in the air, and following in the wake of the other dragon's descent.

Amaru landed neatly on the familiar stone outcropping overlooking the river, to Chris's chagrin. It had been so close, and the other dragon had flown straight toward it without the slightest sign of hesitation, as though it had a beacon on it.

Amaru looked around and caught sight of Chris, with what appeared to be surprise. His words even carried a startled feeling when he spoke, "I had expected that you would already be waiting for me."

Chris landed much more awkwardly than Amaru had, and let his shape expand into the form that was uniquely his, and yet still unfamiliar. He avoided mentioning that he'd been lost by bringing up the question of waste atoms, "Why do we need to expel wastes like other creatures if we can move our own atoms around, why doesn't everything just become part of us?"

Amaru blinked at him. The enormous dragon looked nonplussed, but after a moment he seemed to gather himself, and he nodded and replied, "Not every fragment will fit into your pattern, the extras are naturally discarded."

Chris immediately felt like the question had been rather stupid, because the answer sounded quite obvious. He raised his little clawed hands to his face in a human gesture of humiliation, but raised his head after only a moment. "Nevermind that, what I really need to know is if we can cure an illness? And will you come and teach me at Mac's place?"

Amaru opened his true eyes and frowned down at Chris. "You don't appear to be ill, or injured?" he replied questioningly. "But if you were, you could cure yourself if you could reinforce your own pattern. Even a lost limb can be recovered by pouring more energy into the reinforcement. It is an important skill to learn."

Chris objected, "Are you sure that I don't have it already? I can already replace a lost limb by reshaping myself." Amaru looked surprised, but Chris continued swiftly, "But that's not what I mean, I'm trying to ask if we can cure others of illness."

"Yes and no," Amaru replied reluctantly. "It is possible, but it is very dangerous. Even more dangerous than pushing your will onto someone, or accepting theirs. You must know their pattern as well as you know your own, and put your own energy into it without letting it overwrite yourself, and without writing part of your pattern into theirs." He closed his eyes and added somberly, "Few would risk it, and even fewer would succeed, and most would prefer death to being rewritten even if it were successful."

The answer was no then. For him at least. And it sounded too dangerous to risk for Anne anyway, since she would probably recover with time unless she worsened. But he decided he might as well ask, "What if it were you, and it wasn't another dragon, but a human? Could you heal a human?"

Amaru's eyes snapped open and then narrowed as he asked snappishly, "Why would I ever bother?"