This was why life was shouting its song through the strings of the world strongly enough to wake them after so long. In a way, it was the most terrifying thing she'd ever seen. It was also wonderful.

The mankind, or humans as they called themselves now, had not died out. Rather, they had multiplied beyond belief. By any sane calculation the entire world should be as barren and lifeless as the land the old kingdoms had occupied.

But it was not.

The world bore the scars of the struggle, and the strings felt fragmented and tangled, but still strong. And life was shouting victoriously as the world renewed itself, oblivious to the fact that they, the ones who had been declared a plague upon the world, had merely retreated into hiding.

That retreat was the wonderfully terrifying thing. An entire species acting in unison, a coordination that spanned the entire world like the first song. And they were fighting the old foe, the unweavers, the pattern warpers, the unseen.

And there lay irony. The unseen had been seen by the blind. They had built tools to see what could not be seen by the sharpest eye. For all of their crude tactics and their individually short lives, they had built themselves chances to live, again and again throughout the centuries that were many generations to their kind.

When she had shaken herself free of the ice and looked down the mountain, she had known that they had chosen the wrong path. But now, she was less certain. The man in front of her was intelligent, efficient, and surprisingly helpful. He was the leader of the troops who had come to capture her.

She had sent the other dragons who had also chosen to sleep in these mountains away to replenish their energy reserves and investigate on their own. Her own garden had endured well enough that she had drunk deeply from its heart before surfacing, so she had felt confident enough to allow herself to be 'captured.'

Some of the younger ones would have argued that forcing one's will upon a human was as wrong as forcing one's will upon another. They thought that they had the minds of people. She had always thought that they were as intelligent as their seafolk cousins, but no more. Now… she thought that the young ones had been correct.

The man said apologetically, "I'm sorry, I have reached my limits and must rest."

She blinked and then nodded. "Of course. My apologies, I have been caught up in fascination."

He stopped at the door and turned back, "I wish you had not… used your magic on me." He swallowed nervously. "I cannot trust my own decisions because of that. I have never believed in magicians, sleeping princesses, dragons and such, and it's been quite a shock."

She waited, but he seemed to have stopped talking. "I did not want you to shoot me," she pointed out dryly. Although at the time she hadn't been completely certain that the devices were weapons, she had learned much.

After a moment he nodded. "I hope that you will still be here when I return. I hope that I can trust you."

She could not answer that yet. Her kind had always wandered the world freely, but their numbers had never been large. When an individual could live for hundreds of thousands of years, barring accident or enmity, producing many young would be detrimental to their survival, and they had always lived in balance with the world.

It had been clear for tens of thousands of years that humans were not patterned to live in balance. Usually another species would rise to force a balance upon one that had no natural limit, usually by regarding it as a plentiful food source. But it looked as though perhaps they were going to become capable of creating a balance of their own.

She didn't know if they had been wrong to sleep through the struggles that they thought had signaled the beginning of the end for the mankind. Perhaps their absence had allowed the younger species to find its own way. Or perhaps if they had acknowledged them as the people that the youngest insisted they were, they could have helped create a balance.

Now, dragons would have to learn a new balance.

--

The mankind were still filthy creatures, even if they hadn't succeeded in completely destroying the balance of the world and bringing the end of an age.

The rocky shoreline was littered in discarded objects. A pod of seafolk danced around him, chattering excitedly. They were already composing their small songs.

They shouted that none of them had seen one of his kind in many many years. That any of them had seen a dragon within their lifetime surprised him a little. Perhaps several of the youngest had chosen not to sleep through the end of the mankind then.

Someone had given life to the half blind child of course, but he still suspected that it had been one of the older ones. The beginning of life was always quick. Not as quick as the end, of course, but it took only a single circle around the sun. A brief waking would be enough, and given how hungry he was, he thought others might have woken earlier to replenish their energy.

He compressed himself and shifted his form into one better suited to hunting in the cold ocean. For whatever reason, the oldest forms of life carried the smallest echo. The ones that had existed long before he had. He would construct new gardens to fill new hearts eventually, but for now, old hearts would do. He was still starving.

The seafolk laughed and danced around him, and he scolded them and warned them not to drive off his prey. Their kind had existed for a long time. The stories the mankind told each other, of how the seafolk were descended from their kind, had always made him laugh, because the seafolk were hundreds of times older.

The strings that ran through the ocean weren't as fragmented, though they didn't run clear. Their rhythmic songs carried traces from other continents, recent vibrations from the world shifting, and the rise and fall of the moon's passing. The mankind, the 'humans' as the child called them, did not crowd the water as they did all of the land he'd flown across.

Their numbers were staggering. They had walked this continent, like all the others, but they had been much more scattered and far fewer when he'd gone to sleep. He wondered if it would be too cruel to wish the unweavers greater success in plaguing them as they plagued the Earth, and reducing their numbers.

The water had unpleasant aftertastes that he didn't want to think about too much.