66 Fragment 66

He massaged his temples, drew in a deep breath, and released it slowly. The world needed a dragon registration system. They needed a form of ID that could be accepted worldwide, since boundaries meant little to them.

There was too much paperwork involved in keeping track of them. He needed to answer the inquiry about the traveler that may or may not have entered his country illegally and then vanished. Because the dragon had been scooped up by the blockade guards this time, they knew exactly what had happened to the "traveler".

It would have been convenient if there had been a dragon country that had suddenly appeared like the fabled Atlantis in the west, instead of having a few of them pop up individually here and there all over the world. Then negotiations could have been made with them as a group, and standardized regulations couple have been agreed upon. Passports, such as most of the industrialized nations provided their citizens.

His finger hovered over the photo for a moment, and he compared it to the appearance of the dragon an hour ago. Passport photos were going to be useless. Fingerprints too most likely. He wondered briefly whether or not retinal scans would work.

After a moment he shrugged off the useless speculations. The dragons claimed that they communicated across long distances by listening to the echoes of songs. They didn't have any laws either, just more songs passed from parent to child. They were obviously not going to have a governing body to issue proper documentation any time soon.

--

Amaru made his return journey the slow way, on his own wings, feeling the wind dance across the world.

How strange it was to think of his flight as being slow.

Seen from this elevation the fragmentation of the strings was more obvious, but he was even more certain that it was because their strength was fading than just because their flow was being interrupted. Anywhere that the path was disturbed the strings were broken instead of stretched.

When he dove into the sea to speak to the seafolk, the strings there were still less fragmented than those that ran across the land, but now that he knew what to look for, he could sense their tenuousness. The echoes of the song that would normally have carried from one shore to another were too faint.

The devices that the mankind had created were much more efficient than the strings at transmitting information via the words the mankind used. But they were limited in the range of information that they were configured for, they did not convey the songs or speech of dragons well. The child's suggestion of creating a chat group had been a good one, but it would be even better if the transmissions weren't so limited. The devices had bad ears, or perhaps it was their voices that lacked the proper range.

The other problem was that both methods of communication seemed likely to be unavailable while the world turned over. Or perhaps, since the stars remained in their accustomed places, it was actually just the flow of its pull upon the particles that turned over.

As far as his own senses could discern in the past, when the heart of the world finished turning over, the strings that reformed flowed in reverse as though the world had been turned upside down. The 'down time' had never lasted for as many tens or hundreds of thousands of years as the 'upright' alignment, and the capacity of the strings never reached the same strength. Because of this he had speculated that perhaps the world slept for a while after it turned over.

The youths all seemed to believe that the 'digital communication' carried by waves of light and powered by tamed lightning would continue to work, even if their guesses that magnetism was the way humans had defined the pull of the Earth that guided the strings proved true. But despite their optimism he still thought it likely that the crafts that flew above the world would fall when their sense of direction became muddled. However, the information they carried was quite useful, and perhaps they could be modified to follow an artificial guide until the strings regained their strength.

He did not hurry, despite his desire to begin investigating the structures and functions of the devices that rode the fragile crafts high above him. There was still much to learn along the way.

--

"We got our first dragon applicant!" Tanwen announced triumphantly.

"How can you tell that the person is really a dragon?" Mac asked the copper haired woman who wasn't a woman curiously.

Tanwen pouted as convincingly as any human ever had, and replied, "I recognize her." She added a little sourly, I suppose that it's possible that someone else could have photographed her though…"

According to Chris the other dragon was probably over thirty times his own advanced age, but her disappointment over her realization was as poignant as a child's.

"If you know her, there might be something you could ask about that only she would know?" he suggested.

Tanwen brightened for a moment, but then frowned again. After a bit she nodded at him and agreed, "Yes, I can confirm her identity easily enough, but there will be difficulties when it is an individual I am not acquainted with. Thank you for the suggestion."

When she remembered that he existed, she was oddly polite, charming, and even alluring most of the time. But it felt like her interactions with mere humans were something like a game that she was very good at, if she paid attention. Unlike Chris, she did not seem to regard any humans as true friends, family, and well… real people.

"You're welcome," he assured her anyway.

Even if his own life was as short as the life of a cat or a dog to Chris, he knew that he would be mourned when he was gone. This ancient child was waiting here to meet someone that she obviously idolized, so she had the capacity for strong emotions, but there was apparently a line in her heart that humans had yet to cross.

Her eyes watched him curiously. The intensity of her curiosity would have sent him running when he'd been a child. Intense interest in others without hostility or desire was rare, so attracting someone's interest usually meant you were in danger of losing something.

The ancient dragon who came and went as he pleased from the mountain above the city seemed to regard humans in general as a pestilence, but consistently treated individuals as people. Rather deficient people, and he was rarely polite about it, but… somehow he knew Mac's kind quite well, even if there were many things about the world they both lived in that seemed strange and new to him.

"Why haven't you asked to join?" she asked.

He blinked at her. "I'm not a dragon?"

"But you talk to dragons all the time," Tanwen pointed out airily.

A twinge of guilt stabbed his old heart as he wondered if he'd misjudged her.

"Your application would be a good test, since you know so much about us. If I can't keep people like you out I probably need to think of a better challenge," she muttered.