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She gently waved a hand towards the dragon, waving each finger as if an invisible string hang from it; the movement moved the wind ever so gently, and for a moment the sun seemed to be shining brighter. The dragon's gaze never left her eyes, dawning understanding in his still underdeveloped mind; he had seen this, in his ancestral memory, of something very near, but before he could do anything to act on the dawning understanding, she waved the last gentle motion, and his eyes closed, all understanding and instinct washed away, all ancestral memory gently put to sleep. When he opened his eyes again, he had no idea what he was doing at the periphery of his territory, but he never stopped to question himself why there was a stranger so close to him, and why she was no longer of any interest to him; she had always been here.

She had always...been.

She got up, and gestures the dragon to her, but he missed the movement, looking intently in the distance. Some pat of him was aware of the manipulation; she realized that, and pressed a palm against his soft, sleek back, pressing and pushing with enough force to catch his sedated attention. He gazed at her dreamily, relaxed and passive, tuned to music only he could hear. She moved her hand up and down, tackling the problem from a different angle, creating a different equilibrium, and his eyes focused again. Now they were suspicious and surmised; again, not good. She put a hand on his nostrils, but before she could regulate his in any way, he sneezed comically and she had the displeasure of feeling the wetness on her hand that; She sighed, moved with quiet disgust, and placed her other hand on the dragon's wide, stone-hard forehead; from this close she could see yellow spots on the green skin, as well as several orange lines, barely visible under a different angle. The dragon looked at her with resignation, as if asking what she was going to do to him now. She smiled and petted him on the head; reasonably certain he wasn't going to tackle her down or worse. Then she a hand around his neck, and the two of them walked, serenely, towards the Hold. She kept trying to remember this place, but it wasn't in her memory of the past; and memories of the future were few and far in between. The ground was pleasantly warm, and she took off her tight, unpleasantly hard booth to favor the sand with quiet footsteps. It burned her, burned the sadness of knowing all that she knew, and anchored wit the modicum of pain and pleasure it provided the chaotic mind of a dreamer to the solid earth. The dragon, guessing she was exposing herself to temperatures her fragile body was unlikely to tolerate well, looked at her quizzically; he was aware of how sensitive humans were to walking bare feet. She smiled back at him and continued. If he could have shrugged in response, mimicking human reactions, he would have; he moved a little closer to her, comforted by the non-threatening behavior she irradiated; to him, time, more than any other thing, mattered most; if she continued to be quiet and calm, he would warm up to her. She half regretted changing his mind with her ministrations; maybe they could have gotten along just fine without such intrusions. He seemed to mirror her sentiment, as he huffed and snorted, stopping.

-Hey now - she said gently, indifferent to whether he had learn Terran yet - You haven't shown me around yet, remember?

The dragon shook his head, sighed, as if remembering an old promise, and moved forward with reluctance. She also laughed, albeit for a different reason; a childish, almost naïve smile crawled on her cold, beautifully sculptured face; she approached the dragon slowly from the side, coaxed his large, heavy head very gently with her hand, and looked carefully in his eyes; then, non-calamity, but also quickly, she sniffed him, catching a scent different from nuance of gray from the other draconic scents.

He looked at her, mildly surprised, as she said quietly: - You'll soon prune; and be an intelligent, extraterrestrial creature. Will you then, my possible, future friend, stay here? Or would you jump? Would you be satisfied with a world of three gentle, reasonable dimensions, or will you dive into the insanity of a different...perception? She kissed the air and blew him the kiss, before walking away, stretching her arms, happy as she could be. She savored the livid colors of the sky, the warmth of the earth that burned her like a thirst to be sated, the crayon colors that the dragon's scent of progression had awakened in her mind. The spots of color from the warmth, the air's whisper in her hair and the realization that this newly hatched beast, not a year old, would be moving into sentience, brought her a wave of happiness, and a faint semblance of piece - there would be another sentient being to ponder the universe apart from her and the trillion minds that shone like the night sky when they pondered why they existed. Which was more than enough for her to work with; she could weave a whole would from this much feeling. She spun around, the world becoming a circular blur, came to a stop, and walk on with more vigor in her stride. The dragon, remembering his self-imposed guard duties, suddenly leaped toward her, but then, uncharacteristic of him, forgot why he was leaping. He came to a halt almost mid-air, landed back on the ground, looked at her, as if she held the answer to this most peculiar behavior, then simply followed her, a step behind her back.

-I wonder what the sequence of a dream is, little friend - she spoke to him, raising his flattened ears and evoking concentration in the confused, dull eyes. They sprung back to lively yellow as he concentrate on her words as if to test his intelligence and reawaken it.

-Imagine - she said - that you're falling from the sky. Weightless. Powerful, but perfectly relaxed. Alone. But not lonely. Free. And yet...not free

The dragon could imagine, and did, falling through the sky, but the flying art was the only one he could comprehend - the concept of solitude was unfamiliar to him, he was so deeply naturally bound to all of his kind it seemed a word that humans had coined for no particular reason. Still, he listened with great concentration, slowly coming to some quiet understanding; she wasn't anything like the other humans. She wasn't human. Humans had a different psychological density, a quality a dragon had an instinctive estimate to, and this little lady with the strange charisma and the unusual, uncharacteristic lack of fear did not measure up to the other two-legged friends he had. He did not pause to consider why he considered her a friend; there was a cold, almost snowy, pressure of danger emanating from her when she was silent, abut despite that...she understood this word "alone"; how dangerous could a single life be if it wasn't connected to others? He decided to follow her closely and observe her until she left his current territory.

-Let me tell you a story - she said, spreading her arms again, gesticulating -I once met a person who lived in a very beautiful, marble house. He had a very set way of doing things; he would get up, make tea, then sat down and focus on composing. He would compose something every day. Music. Music that was not great, but wasn't' mediocre either, music that was not very diverse, but had its original moments. At first, it was only classical-sounding music. - She smirked at the dragon and he paused; she continued, grabbing a handful of sand from the ground:

-But with time, he ran out of variations on the melodies he had; the ones that sounded classical anyway. So, to keep composing, he started playing every melody he could come up with - folklore, jazz, anything really...he kept composing every day. I watched him as he never left the confines of his little kingdom. Not that there would have been a reason for him to leave - he was the last human being on the planet.

The dragon looked at her quizzically, and approached her from the back; he stared intently at the back of her head, confident that her strangeness was due at least in part to something of insanity. He had seen insane people before; they could be identified instinctively, they were somehow easy to recognize if only he stared at them the way he was staring at her now.

-I'm not really insane anymore - she noted with indifference, startling him a step back - But you didn't hear the ending of the story; This man, let's call him Gerald, kept composing to keep humanity's existence going; there would be no one to hear him play, and no one to play his songs after him; but playing them kept him alive, and it kept a miniature of humanity alive through him. Even when it's meaningless, we must practice our meaning, and his was music. I wonder, when you awaken, and grow up to become ...whatever you choose to become, will you then in some way incorporate your meaning of life into your everyday routine? Is every dragon on the world alive...through you? She turned around to look at him and he made a noise in his own language before realizing that she did not speak it. But then how could she have known? Had she had other dragons' state at her as if she were not sane? That certainly would not surprise him much. With his reason coming back out of the trans-like state she had somehow whispered into it, he became aware of the presence of his brothers and sisters, of the other humans, of the fact that this was his territory. He showed this change of awareness clearly through his body language, spreading his wings, striking the ground with his tail but she waved his away with casual dismissal.

-It's about time somebody here treated me to some tea - she muttered to herself - Plus, I'm starving, I could eat a dragon bone with sandpaper for dressing.