"I was wondering if you could smooth wooden flooring the way you smoothed the stone floor in the cave that you carved for me," the emperor asked a bit diffidently.

Amaru was not too surprised by the question, as he had more skill at cutting things than most of his kind. He didn’t actually scrape away material with his claws as he sliced. Instead he expanded the material of his claws into the spaces between the tiny pieces of the material that he was cutting, and then absorbed the pieces he surrounded. It was actually similar to the way he could swim through the heart of a mountain and call the gold within the rock into his hands to carry it out. The result was a cut the width of the smallest fragments, that was only truly effective on very rigid things. If the material was as flexible as most living things, such a thin slice would often seal back together nearly imperceptibly.

It was yet another skill that the blind dragon could never master, but Amaru had no regret for the time and energy spent on the youth's behalf. Possibilities that he could never see with his true eyes had been clear to the younger dragon.

His gaze wandered to the uneasy individuals who were trying to watch 'their emperor' without disturbing him or his guest. 'Pets', 'domestic animals', these had been unfamiliar words when he'd last visited this region, but they described the way he'd thought of the mankind who had lived here at that time. Now… their kind too were seeing new possibilities that no dragon had likely ever considered looking for.

When the younger dragon showed Amaru the floor that he wished to have smoothed, he was taken aback. The youth indicated the places where material had been carved out of the wood by his own claws. Rough cuts gouged the intricate parquetry of the wooden tiles that had been carefully crafted from many small pieces of different sorts of wood.

After a long moment Amaru explained, "I could perhaps level the entire floor to a new layer below the deepest mark, but I cannot create new material where it has been removed."

The protest hummed in the air between the two dragons, before Amaru wondered if it was actually true. True, it was not within his abilities at the moment, but perhaps it was a possibility in the future.

The child had unknowingly guided him somewhat in his studies of the sciences of the mankind, and people were discovering that while matter was indeed made up of the smallest fragments that he could see, those fragments were made from even smaller fragments, and some of those fragments were as much a motion as a particle. If he could truly create a drop of water from the fragments that composed it, rather than calling it out of the air, why couldn't he someday call the fragments themselves out by creating the proper waves in the energy of the world.

The blind dragon stared at the marks with his merely physical eyes, and then looked up and suggested hesitantly, "Perhaps I could sing into the wood as I sang into the heart. 'My people' say that even old and dry wood can still contain life and will grow again if planted. And then you could just cut it flat again?"

The elder dragon blinked at the younger one. Their ideas were different, but their thoughts were aligned. His own echo was too faint for him to detect in the blind dragon's pattern, but perhaps a trace of it still remained after tens of thousands of years.

There hadn't been any other way to teach one who could not see his own pattern, but even though he had been so careful not to destroy the separation that was all that kept I a distinct identity for each of them, the echo his will had left on his child had transmitted more than the patterns he had written into the other's memory.

--

It had been a long time since she had written a change into her own pattern, but human hands were more comfortable for using human devices, and she was seriously considering it.

Maintaining a human form was far more convenient for doing research, but such a tight compression consumed a significant amount of energy over time. If she would merely be spending a few years interacting with their devices, changing her pattern would be foolish, however despite her warning to the human who wished to bargain for his species instead of himself, she suspected that such small, soft, flexible hands would be quite useful to her for many millennia.

Reading about her own species was quite amusing. The current generation of humanity seemed to assume that their ancestors had been mistaken, confused, or had been trying to describe things that they did not understand when they described dragons. This generation of humans weren't really much more intelligent than their ancestors had been. Certainly over time the species had changed and developed, but within the short span of years since they had developed their forms of writing, there was very little difference in their individual capacities.

Take this example, which said the dragon had the tail of a fish, the scales of a carp, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the head of a camel, the claws of an eagle, the paws of a tiger, the ears of a cow, the beard of a goat, the horns of a stag, and the eyes of a demon or a god. If you allowed that a dragon's true eyes appeared divine, then there were dozens of dragons who probably fit that description quite literally. She could also sing the identity of an elder who fit the description of an 'Amaru' dragon quite well, although the smaller head of a 'bird' had probably been one of the children he often allowed to ride upon his back while he taught them to look at the world. He was described as a huge colorful serpent that dwells underground, with the head and fur of a puma, and the wings and feet of a colorful bird.

She flexed her own bird-like taloned hands, which had once been patterned after a bird by one of her ancestors as she was contemplating patterning them after a human. None of the descriptions of dragons were wrong, and in another generation perhaps the list of a dragon's attributes would include the hands of a man.

--

Old Jose held the possibly magical shell against his overheated forehead. It was blessedly cool. The heat this summer seemed to be everywhere. Usually the heat waves moved from region to region, but this year the heat was sweeping the entire country, perhaps the entire world. He thought he even had a bit of a sunburn despite his weather darkened skin. Maybe it was that thinning of the ozone layer that everyone talked about.

He never really believed in global warming, and the evidence was hotly debated, but this year seemed like proof of the theory. Ironic, considering that pollution was supposedly at an all time low because of the pandemic that had swept across the world during the past winter.

The virus was still actively wreaking havoc, as evidenced by the way various governments kept deciding to open things up again, and then immediately began shutting down again a few weeks later as another outbreak swamped their hospitals. He thanked whatever deities might exist that he was relatively healthy. His city had not suffered as much as the ones in the news, but the hospitals were not treating anything much that wasn't life threatening.

Nobody really talked about it, but the strain the virus was putting on the medical community was killing off a lot more than its own victims. More people with cancer, heart problems, and other long term illnesses were quietly dying. More traffic accidents were fatal. And more people were slipping through the 'cracks'.

A young couple who had quietly taken up residence in one of his 'safe' places tried to shush their little one. Jose looked at the sweat rolling off the red faced child, and pulled the worn fabric of his scarf up over his nose before approaching.

"Hey, you kids, take this and let your little one hold onto it. I'll bring you some bottles of water in a bit," Jose said firmly, as he held out the precious shell the stranger had given him.

"We don't," the young man began uncertainly.

"It's cold. I can't explain how it works. It was a gift from… an unusual man," Jose said quickly.

The young woman reached out and took the shell, and her eyes widened as she felt the cool surface. She hurriedly rubbed it with her shirt before holding it against her youngster's body.

Jose shrugged and turned away. He was pretty sure the shell was harmless, and there was no point in telling the girl that if it had dangerous germs on it she was just spreading it around, both on the surface of the shell and onto her clothing. If she'd had any water, she'd already given it to her child.

He turned his feet toward the place, the place along the river where the alcohol was expensive, but the water was clean and free. He was already humming before the music reached his old ears.