As he slunk down the mountain, keeping low, and staying within the dubious cover of the fragile pines, he began to stumble over their roads and dwellings, long before he reached the edge of the infestation visible from the mountain peak.

--

Sara couldn't understand why people thought that she was brave. She was afraid of everything, which was why she'd moved to this isolated cabin above the city. She'd also never figured out why people thought that forests were quiet.

A bird screamed in the distance and the trees sighed mournfully. She focused with not quite religious fervor on the ritual of making her tea. If she left it a few seconds too long, the cup would be bitter, but she would drink it anyway. Tea was an extravagance, and Sara tried not to waste anything, so that she could maintain her distance from the buzzing hive of humanity that drove her mad.

The earthquake had woken her. It had been a mild one, nothing like the tremors of her youth that had cracked the streets and sent her family fleeing to the north. The mountain had merely shivered, but it had flamed the spark of anxiety that was always buried in her heart into a raging fire, and her fingers trembled as she moved her cup.

At the end of her drive, an entire tree lay across the pavement, tossed there like a branch fallen after a spring thunderstorm. Because of the virus, she had already been held prisoner in her home by the words of a distant politician for weeks now. Because of her fear, she had been hiding herself here for far longer than that, so she'd told herself that the restrictions hadn't really affected her. But the tree's physical barrier added so much weight to her confinement.

Normally she would simply have called someone with the proper equipment to drag it out of the way and cut it up into firewood size pieces, but right now only 'essential services' were still functioning.

There was a small part of her that was relieved by the fact that she wouldn't have to speak to the handyman, that she wouldn't have to pretend to be a functioning member of society in order to have her driveway cleared, and that she could blame the virus for it instead of her fear. The rest of her was silently screaming that if the mountain was shaking, it was time to run.

She had been successfully silencing her internal screams for so long that not even a whisper escaped her when it pushed through the trees and stopped to examine her garden.

--

He wondered if he'd overestimated his own strength as he compressed himself as tightly as he could, and crawled down the mountain. Maybe he should have risked flying directly there. But wisdom told him that if they had expanded to such an extent, their aerial defenses would also have improved, and he doubted that he could defend himself if just moving a few tens of miles was enough to make his legs tremble.

Perhaps he'd underestimated his own age. He began to wonder how long it had been since the world sang the song of beginnings, of spring rising in the North, so clearly. He'd stirred with the rising of the song before, enough to have some feel of the passage of time, but it had never sounded clearly enough to wake him fully before this season.

The plague had continued to expand despite all of their efforts, and so most of them had retreated, confident that it would burn itself out within a few centuries if they stopped feeding it.

He smelled the whisper of the heart and his doubts ceased as he turned toward it like a mindless beast. Thirsty, so thirsty, his stomach twisted and screamed its painful emptiness to his claws. His steps cut deeply into the soft damp layers of needles beneath the trees. He pushed through the trees, and stopped dead, as shock wrenched his mind back into control.

The scent of the heart was small and weak, but certain. The garden was small and twisted, but alive. It was also sheltering beside one of their dwellings, and a pair of tiny eyes met his through the sheet of glass.

He hadn't really taken the time to examine the dwellings that he'd passed, merely scenting them and skirting past them within the shelter of the trees. Glass was something that took patience to produce with such clarity. Perhaps it was the dwelling of one of the wise. Every race seemed to have a few, a few who could hear, or perhaps see, the strings that sang. What made the dragons different was that they had only a few, a very few, who could not.

--

Sara stood frozen as a creature out of fiction loomed over her tiny garden. It seemed to be staring directly at her. Everything except her instincts said that it couldn't be real. Her instincts weren't listening to such nonsense, and were holding her as solidly frozen as one of the glaciers on the peak far above.

It was like some twisted mixture between a giant cat and one of those scrawny carnivorous dinosaurs from those movies, except for the furled wings along its sides. It was all claws and scales and tufts of fur, and the silliest thing was that it seemed to be made in a patchwork rainbow of colors, except for the dark eyes that gleamed like polished obsidian.

After an eternity, it stepped forward, and dropped its gaze. She watched incredulously as the thing began to dig up her garden like an oversized rabbit. The dragon. There was a dragon digging up her garden. She didn't even grow much that was edible beyond a few chives, and other edible flowering plants that could endure the cold winters on the mountain.

Her garden was half stone, as her scrubby selection of plants was arranged around a decorative stone formation that looked like it was part of the mountain, except for the swirling carved shapes like waves. She really admired whichever landscaper had placed it on the property, because the way the large window framed that view had been one of the things that made her choose this particular house.

The dragon lifted the entire center stone, like a raccoon looking for grubs, and then displayed the freakishly snakelike curve of its neck as it stuck its head into the hole.