She had been learning new things almost since she'd crawled out of the snow. It was invigorating. And the interruptions were annoying, but every exchange of knowledge was owed its price.

"What do you want now?" the dragon grumbled without looking away from her screens.

"A cure for the world," the man replied mockingly. But beneath the mockery lay both sincerity and fatigue.

She answered sincerely, but with the understanding that she was simply answering one meaning of the words while ignoring another. "Lead your species away from this world, fly away, and it will quickly recover."

"While we conveniently die somewhere else?" another of the humans asked bitterly.

The man held up his hand and shook his head, but even his controlled expression wavered as the dragon looked up and winked at him. The evolution of the expression that used the voluntary and momentary closure of one eye had been interesting to read about. It's meaning was vague, but often implied, 'We have an understanding.'

"That is impossible, even if we could convince every government on the planet to agree to it, which is perhaps even more impossible," the man said coldly.

"Oh, how disappointing. It would have been so much easier if the conspiracy theorists had been correct about the levels of cooperation being maintained across the world to create the great virus hoax," she said with mock disappointment.

"So much easier for you to rule the world," he agreed dryly, sharply, and with no mockery beneath his words this time.

She cocked her head at him, like a bird might, and asked curiously, "Who would ever wish to do such a thing? It sounds exceedingly troublesome."

"Ha," his response was less a laugh than a sigh.

Another spoke up and argued, "Why bother to pretend! One of your kind has already declared himself Emperor in the East!"

"The blind child still lives?" she asked curiously, and her question raised his eyebrows. "But that one has been cultivating one of your tribes for millennia, silly thing, surely you all must know of him. Or perhaps it is another of the youngest playing at kingdoms again?"

"You think ruling over us is silly?" he asked warily, with more distrust than she'd ever heard from him before. "Something merely for children or the impaired to occupy their time with?" 

"Perhaps. Mostly I think it to be a laborious and unrewarding task, and what could you possibly offer that could not be acquired much more easily by other means?" she asked with real curiosity. The knowledge they had acquired and stored might actually be worth such a labor, for a while, but just because dragons did not collect material things, did not mean they did not understand the concept of bargaining.

"Your lives?" the man suggested dryly, his mistrust hidden behind the threat.

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Even the others of his kind regarded him with surprise, but she did not. She had studied as much about humans themselves as about their creations in the days and nights spent in this enclosed space.

"Rule us, or we will kill you? Just as effective as cure us or we'll kill you, I suspect, and you know that as well as I do, or you'd have tried it," she replied mockingly.

The man actually bowed his head, and then knelt before her. He silenced the protests of his subordinates, and slowly, reluctantly, they joined him on the floor of the artificial cavern.

She held her tongue, and assumed nothing, even though the show of submission targeted instincts that even dragons shared. Her kind had pursued control and clarity of mind for millions of years, longer than mankind had existed. Her true eyes opened and she looked farther than the walls allowed physical sight to see, to measure the beat of his heart.

A tiny smile curved his mouth. It seemed to imply that he understood what she saw, but his words were completely serious as he asked simply, "Would you cure my people if I could offer you any price? Even the world itself?"

"Of course not," she replied neutrally. "It is something that one only does for oneself, like a compression. Few of your kind even live long enough for any of my kind to learn even a single individual's essence before an infant would die of old age."

"I see," he replied a little uncertainly. The others rose to their feet, but he just raised his head and looked at her expectantly. "But you could if we lived longer?"

"There are other complications and dangers in crossing the boundaries between self and other," she prevaricated. "However, I suspect that your kind will also learn to reinforce your own patterns eventually, using tools that I cannot yet imagine, no doubt. If I am wrong, and you cannot…" She glanced at the screens she'd been studying, and his eyes widened as he followed her gaze to the screens that spoke of using a virus to manipulate DNA strands, "…then we can only hope that you have not given the unweavers the power to unravel all that lives before your end."

--

The golden straw burned from both ends and was quickly extinguished as the last fragment blew gently away from small fingers. The dirty child grinned and silently lifted another to the old man's pipe and waited for his sleeping breath to enliven the spark that still lurked in the bowl.

A dragon observed the small play from a distance. If he had woken beneath this mountain, he wondered how long it would have taken him to learn of the extent of the changes the mankind had carved into the world. Away from the airport, many of the mountain tribe were living much as they had lived for centuries. Although even here he could see 'batteries' and small devices glowing almost like a scattering of miniscule hearts across the slopes.

He currently stood beside a faded heart, that resembled the small one on a much younger mountain on the other side of the world, and had perhaps even been carved by the same pair of claws. The strings here sang of life rising in the distance, but not with the power of the rising tide of spring that had swept across the world earlier in the year, nor yet with the spring that would rise when the sun began to warm the other side sufficiently. They sang with a voice that he knew well.

A small child looked up, and went completely still as the stars above the mountain went dark and the wind snapped like the beat of enormous wings. The flame that had been his plaything bit at his fingers before dying. The old man, who had seemingly been deeply asleep a moment ago, stared upward and whispered a word that meant 'dragon' in the tongue of his childhood. He glanced at the child and repeated the word in a more familiar tongue.

"Dragons are kind and wise and ride the storms!" the child argued, and then stuck its burned fingers into its mouth.

The old man puffed at his pipe and released a mouthful of smoke as the stars twinkled back into existence above them. "In these lands dragons may speak elegantly with rulers and wise men," he agreed with a nod. "But that only means that entire countries will shed blood when their wings sweep across the world again." His eyes looked toward a darkness that could hardly be seen. "In the far north they talk less perhaps…"