The government servants and soldiers assigned to the historic palace eyed each other nervously. The dragon who had declared himself Emperor spoke their language, and most of them had never considered that odd, but the sounds that were coming from the gardens were not recognizable words from any language any of them had ever heard. They didn't even sound like words at all really, but the air seemed to hum with meaning.

The spy for the country far to the North suddenly wondered if the people who had sent him here knew how dragons spoke to each other.

--

"I guess you heard." Turquoise and gold shimmered beneath the bright sun as the younger dragon watched the compressed form of his more colorful parent staring at the heart beneath the garden with his true eyes. He knew that the elder dragon could never have stood within the garden walls if he hadn't compressed his form. Play houses, the humans called the small houses they built sometimes for their children, and that's what this vast palace his people had built for him had always been to the elder dragon. "I didn't think it would travel so far so quickly, or were you nearby?" he added when there was no immediate response.

The elder dragon blinked and considered his child who was no longer a child like the little half blind one he had promised to teach. "I was not, and I heard no whisper of it on the strings until I landed in the mountains to the north. I was curious about how you sang a wave of energy strong enough to rival a season but the empty heart explains much of it. However, that is not why I have come."

"Why have you come?" the self declared emperor asked diffidently.

"I was wrong, about many things," Amaru admitted.

Surprise rippled outward without being spoken, but the younger dragon nodded calmly and replied, "They did not exceed the world's capacity for them. They survive."

Amaru shrugged in the manner of dragons. "For now," he agreed.

"They will survive the unweavers this time as well," the younger dragon promptly insisted.

"It seems likely. At first I assumed that I had woken to the song of an unusually strong spring and that the world was recovering from the plague of the mankind. I was surprised to discover that they had actually continued to multiply and yet somehow still prosper. Even more surprising was that their unbalanced expansion has actually begun to extend beyond this world. "

"Satellites fly above us like stars, and have even been sent to other planets," the younger dragon added rather excitedly. "There are even a few people living above the sky!"

"For now," Amaru agreed. "But they may fall back to the ground."

"What?" the younger dragon objected indignantly. "They won't fall!"

"The heart is refilling too slowly isn't it?" Amaru questioned, as though changing the subject.

"My people," the word the emperor used implied descendants, and Amaru gazed at him with mild astonishment as he continued, "maintained the strings better than I expected, but even though I can't see them, I can still sense that they have moved out of alignment. I adjusted things here back to the old pattern, but it hasn't changed the sound much. I think it is not just the shift, because the sun seems hotter and the strings sound muted… so I wondered if perhaps it was like the songs and they are gradually fading away?"

The elder dragon nodded and approval hummed beneath his words. "Yes, things here have barely shifted compared to the untended strings. I suspect that they are fragmenting because the time has come for the world to turn upside down. And from my understanding of the 'devices' that the 'humans' depend on to guide them, I suspect that they will become confused like the birds and other animals who use their sense of the flow of the world to guide them, until the world settles and the strings sing clearly again."

"How long will it take? The guiding songs do not speak clearly of those times."

Amaru shrugged again. "The world sings at its own pace. But it is possible that they may fade too quickly to replenish this heart, and then what? How will you sustain yourself? I fear that you may starve before the world settles."

"I won't leave, I mean, I won't abandon my people again. They are barely recovering from a long bout with the unweavers that may not yet have run its course," the self declared emperor of his chosen tribe declared firmly. "I will eat living things. The crops of my people are doing well since I returned the energy of the heart to the lands around it."

"How?" Amaru asked curiously. "I have learned many new things that I can teach you in exchange."

"You needn't mock me," the younger dragon insisted abruptly. "I know that I have discovered nothing that you have not already mastered."

Amaru narrowed his eyes and replied sharply, "I would not ask if I knew."

The smaller dragon who could not see the world as others of his kind saw it blinked in surprise. His parent had taught him to trade knowledge as others did, and had always listened to his descriptions quite seriously, but for the hundreds of thousands of seasons that he had lived, he had always believed that the elder who had lived more than a dozen times his own span actually already knew everything that was known and only traded for the joy of teaching others.

Rather hesitantly, the emperor began to explain, "When we shout our songs into the strings I think we are adding to the energy they carry as much as we are adding or sound, but the songs fade with distance, and only whispers of distant voices travel the world." He described the energy he sensed and his feelings about the way the energy of the world flowed, and then summarized it all, "So if you sing the same song that echoes through the strings when everything is growing, it tells everything that senses the song that it is time to grow, and since the energy flows from where there is more to where there is less all really did was let the heart's energy flow out of the heart's pattern into me, and back into the world through my song."

Amaru listened intently to every nuance of the song the younger dragon imparted. There were too many factors to be certain, but long ago he had taught this one to listen to the strings he could not see through his own bones, however it had never even occurred to him to study the vibrations of the songs the strings carried through his own bones in such detail. Perhaps it was something that only one who was blind could 'see' so clearly.

--

Chris had a hard time focusing when he began his shift. The female dragon, Tanwen, was apparently around 3000 years old, not quite ten times his age, which would have been extremely impressive if Amaru weren't far older than the human race according to both himself and Tanwen. But that wasn't what was occupying his thoughts.

As he'd been leaving, a stray remark had revealed that Tanwen had been in the region he had lived in during his earliest years at around the same time. He hadn't quite been able to bring himself to ask if there were any chance that she might be his mother, or if she might have known who else had been around that area at the time.

He wasn't even certain that dragons normally raised their young as mammals tended to. Amaru had not said much about the subject, although he had mentioned that they sang the guiding songs to their children while they were still in the egg.