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Save Point: The Implicate Order

The Dragons wings are like crystal fracture planes across spacetime, dislocating the light as it passes through. They drift subtly back and forth even whilst at rest, moving around themselves in strange and incomprehensible ways.

The tentacles extending from along and inside its spine and shoulder-blades are in there too, somehow, moving and guiding the whole structure like the muscle and bone inside the spans, but the multiplication of refractions makes it impossible to see them clearly, as though they spread outward in a branching arterial or nerve-like structure, getting thinner and narrower and more numerous to infinity until they are completely unseen somewhere out near the edges, mixed in with the diffracted light from the surroundings.

"You can see why making out whilst flying wouldn't work," sighs the Dragon sadly. "It would be like swimming in razor blades."

Soft white crystals are still falling and spinning, cast by the wind, and there is still snow about. Inspired by something it once saw, the Dragon has been celebrating the day or maybe consoling her as to its absence by blowing bubbles, streams of them, laced with some surfactant whipped up quickly in its gullet and introduced to the folds of its mouth through the same modifications that allow it to spit dissembling corrosive venoms.

The bubbles freeze solid as soon as they drift far enough away, or when the Dragon loses its attention, and crystallize instantly into sparse, almost weightless spheres of interbranching ice spars with surprising structural strength. Some of them are impossibly large, bigger than any living creature could ever have the breath for, as the Dragon, stripped down to fly, runs the whole network of collimation and ventral slits in through its body reverse, breathing out endlessly until the bubbles are the size of igloos, gleaming in the winter sun as they tumble along the snow or finally break into pieces after bouncing one too many times.

"I wish you didn't have to go," she tells him, blackness against the pristine white.

"Something is going on over there," he tells her again, for the last time. "I'm not sure what exactly, but it impacts contingent events. The outcome is too distant to see, so I'm going to go meddle a bit. Maybe I can find out what it's about."

"Yeah, well, I remember what happened the last time you wanted to find out. And here we are on a headland again," she sniffs, not sadly but in the manner of a miffed cat. She strolls around, and in some cases inside and through, the huge frozen bubbles, inspecting them with her hands clasped together behind her back in a distinctly asiatic stance, collar flicked up high on her favorite deep carmine jacket with the brass buttons and toggles, like a splash of blood on the snow.

She can't get close to him with the wings furling about, so a goodbye hug is now out of the question. She studiedly turns away.

"You should fly now," she says, still not looking at him, and there is a crisp wing-snap like the air being cut and a brief downdraft as he ascends toward the thin, drawn out clouds fleeting across the thin air high above. Nonetheless, as soon as he has been gone for even a moment she turns and watches his departure, shading her eyes against the bright flare of the winter sun.