Winter, 2064 CE, Japan

  WAVES OF LIQUID blackness lapped at Dauria’s consciousness, rising and falling, yet never allowing her any glimpse of her surroundings.

  After a time, the ocean of blackness surrounding her slowly receded. By degrees, she opened to a vague haze of physical sensation.

  Cold.

  The bitterest cold she had ever experienced lapped at her face and claws— no, that wasn’t right.

  Hands! she thought. These are hands! I’m still in human form!

  Her breath caught in her throat and her blood turned to ice. The frigid air around her suddenly felt as warm as a tropical heat wave.

  How is this possible?

  She wracked her brain for the answer, but came up empty. She couldn’t recall where she was or how she’d come to be here.

  What’s this? she wondered as she noticed the soft, stiff weight of something rough that covered most of her naked human flesh. It carried the acrid scents of old death and old blood mingled with the sweetness of long days in the rays of Ryujin’s Blaze.

  What was the wretched thing covering her? Why was it covering her? Perhaps it was actually binding her in place?

  Moving slowly, with as much subtlety as she could manage, she moved a hand out from under the covering. Her movements were not hindered, though the cold in that hand grew exponentially. She immediately drew it back beneath the covering.

  Oh! she thought as realization dawned. It was a fur blanket, of course. How ridiculous of her to have forgotten such a basic fact as humans needing coverings to keep warm.

  I truly have been out of the world for far too long.

  “Just as well open your eyes,” said a coarse voice from perhaps ten human paces away. “I can see you’re awake.”

  Stifling her shock, she cracked a single eye to peer at her surroundings. A single, curving wall of animal hide surrounded her, though it had no discernible frame. In the center of the small room a new fire crackled as it struggled to life, its tiny flames licking their way around several thin sticks.

  A tiny, sallow-skinned man with a long, thin beard of snowy-white sat cross-legged before the fire, watching her intently.

  Her eye narrowed. “Who are you?”

  The man chuckled. “I was going to ask you that very thing.”

  Without meaning to, her mind snapped out to touch his and pulled a name from his surface thoughts, a woman from his past for which he cared deeply.

  “Amaya,” she said.

  He nodded without expression and she waited, watching the man.

  Interesting that the telepathy still functions, she thought.

  The small man stared back at her, unblinking. Tiny wrinkles in the shape of crow’s feet surrounded dark eyes that seemed to swallow her, freezing her solid within their embrace.

  She tried to turn away, to focus her attention elsewhere, but her body refused to respond to her commands. Opening her mouth to speak, she found her throat too dry to produce sound.

  Although ordinarily a patient creature, even among dragons— or, rather, she had been. Who knew how one might change during centuries of deep slumber? —Dauria clenched her teeth and fists. The inability to act grated on her.

  After a moment, she forced her jaw to relax and her fists to uncurl in an effort to fight down the impatient frustration gnawing at her nerves.

  The old man smiled at her then, the lines around his slanted, angular eyes vanishing in the process.

  “Kaito is my name,” he said, smoothing the cloth of his trousers. He paused then, looking thoughtful for a moment, then added in a whisper, “It is so strange to hear it said aloud again.”

  Dauria offered a small nod and closed her eyes again, this time to delve into her own soul. She’d lacked the focus to do it before her blackout, in the cold. She prayed she could manage it now. It would be something productive to do while the strange little man sat in silence.

  She raced through the corridors of her Internal Universe, seeking for any sign of her arcane energy. It was normally an easy thing to find.

  The Apex Of The Soul was a spot just behind the heart, a nexus point where all the energies of a dragon’s body converged and reached out into the Ether. It was there, in the unreachable Nothing of the Ether, that a dragon’s arcane power was kept hidden.

  Or locked away, she thought bitterly.

  The Apex was supposed to shine with a light proportionate to the dragon’s arcane strength. Dauria had glimpsed her sire’s Apex once. She recalled the experience fondly, as the most humbling event of her life. Baalhalllu’s Apex outshone her own as Ryujin’s Blaze outshone a single star in the night sky.

  Where is it? she thought. She was there, in the spot behind her heart where it should have been, but there was no sign of her Apex. No light. No flame. No window into the Ether.

  What was going on? A dragon’s Apex couldn’t just vanish, could it?

  It seemed an eternity passed while she looked over the area where it should have been over and over and over again.

  At last, after passing the spot at least three times, she noticed a tiny pinprick of unlight. A spot where, when she shone a light on it, it did not reflect, but instead swallowed the light, giving nothing back in return. She wanted to roar in frustration.

  This must be my Apex, she thought. But by the tails of my ancestors, what could it mean?

  She reached out a trembling— human, even here in the heart of her soul —hand to touch the Apex, but found she could not. Her fingers stopped little more than a hair’s width from the Apex itself.

  Dauria ground her teeth together in frustration and pushed at the barrier with all her strength.

  After several minutes of intense effort, her metaphysical muscles slackened and she fell to the floor before her Apex, panting.

  “How. Can. This. Be,” she gasped between breaths.

  “…be here, Amaya?” a gruff voice intruded on her private battle.

  Blast it, she thought, realizing the old man had been speaking to her for some time.

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  She abandoned the corridors of her soul and opened her eyes again. “I’m sorry, Kaito. I think I may have drifted off for a minute there. I didn’t hear your question.”

  “Quite all right,” he said. “I was asking how it is that you came to be here, all alone and in such a… delicate situation.” His eyes remained fixed on hers.

  Good question! she thought.

  Fixing a confused expression on her face, she looked down at her blanketed form. She forced her eyes to widen slightly, as though only just then realizing she was naked beneath the blanket.

  “I…” she didn’t have to fake her faltering voice. Bereft of any idea of what to tell the man, she floundered. Her mouth worked, but no sound came.

  After several tries at speaking, she stopped and swallowed hard. The beginnings of an idea drifted into her mind and she seized on it, forcing her voice to work. “Truthfully, I could not begin to guess. The last thing I remember before waking up here is picking berries in a field about an hour outside of my village.”

  “Speaking of which,” she added, inserting a note of helplessness to her voice. “Where am I?”

  Kaito’s eyes widened slightly for an instant before his features returned to his careful, expressionless mask. “I don’t know where your village is, Amaya, but it must be a considerable distance from here. I found you a short way up the mountain.” He pointed to his left. “Not sure what you might know it as, but the maps all call it Mount Fuji. We’re in a small valley near the mountain’s base.”

  Mount Fuji? she wondered. Where is that? The mountain of my lair, I hope. Elsewise, I can’t imagine what I’m going to do.

  “Did you hit your head?”

  Dauria made a show of reaching up to feel around her head with her hands, taking no pains whatsoever to keep the blanket up to cover her human skin.

  Kaito didn’t respond in any recognizable way to the display of feminine flesh.

  Curious, she thought. In her admittedly ancient experience with men, they never failed to note such a display.

  After feeling every inch of her head thrice over— and fully exposing her form’s pink flesh down to her waist —she dropped her hands and pulled the blanket back up. “It doesn’t seem so.”

  Unperturbed, Kaito nodded. “What is the name of your village, Amaya?”

  With an inward cringe, Dauria tossed out the first name that came to mind. “Kauljiinra.”

  Kaito’s blank expression didn’t change, but Dauria caught the roil of thoughts and emotions bubbling just beneath the surface of his mind.

  Did he recognize the name?

  She didn’t know what had happened to the place. At the time of the Long Sleep, it had been a thriving town. Not large, even by local standards, but it had certainly had the potential to grow into a bustling city.

  “If that place even still exists,” Kaito said slowly, “it is far from here. Much too far for me to take you there.”

  Dauria narrowed her eyes.

  “Is there someplace else I can take you?” Kaito asked.

  Dauria relaxed her expression and offered a faint, coy smile. “There might be.” She paused, then added, “Which side of the mountain are we on?”

  “South.”

  “Can you get me to the north-east spur?”

  “Should be easy enough, if somewhat time consuming.”

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  Kaito brushed a hand down his beard, smoothing it. “Yes, Amaya. I’ll do it. I could never abandon a lost soul to this place. I don’t know what you expect to find there, it is a desolate place, but I will see you arrive there safely.”

  “Thank you, Kaito.”

  Inanely, a warm flush of pleasure crept up Dauria’s neck and into her cheeks.

  * * * * *

  For two days, the pair hiked in a generally north-easterly direction around the low, rocky hills near the base of the mountain.

  Even at this low elevation, she couldn’t stop herself from shivering with the intense cold. The sharp pain of her gasping breaths was a new experience for her. Never before would she have believed breathing could be painful, though she couldn’t help but appreciate the clean, fresh scent of the open mountain air. It was a far cry from the musty dankness of her lair.

  “You seem quite at home out here, Kaito,” Dauria said between heavy breaths. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Doing what?” Kaito grunted.

  “This!” Dauria said, spreading her arms wide. She immediately pulled them back though. She curled in the heavy fur blanket draped about her shoulders to envelop the thick, fur-lined blouse and trousers. “Living out here, in the wild, away from other people.”

  Where did he get the clothes? she wondered, not for the first time. Not only where they women’s clothes, but in a size closely approximating her human form.

  But more curious was the question of why he had them in the first place. To say nothing of why he’d kept them.

  Kaito chuckled. “My dear Amaya. City-dwellers and I don’t get along so well. It’s really much better that we are kept separate.”

  “Why?” She couldn’t stop the curiosity from bubbling to the surface of her mind.

  Why do I care? she wondered. This man is nothing more than a means to an end.

  Kaito chuckled again, this time more darkly. “I suppose you would call me a naturalist. I can’t abide all the cars and computers and pollution. I grew up in a simpler time, when men had honor and toiled with their own two hands. Japan has grown lazy. And complacent. And corrupt.”

  Although the images she gleaned from his surface thoughts were confusing, they were enough to get at least a rough idea of the things he spoke of.

  And the clear disdain in his voice made it plain what he thought of those technological marvels.

  She nodded as though she understood everything and flashed a knowing smile. “No family?”

  “Long buried and mostly forgotten.”

  “I see,” she said in genuine sadness. “I’m sorry. Friends?”

  “Not for many, many years.”

  “Sounds lonely.”

  Kaito smiled. “Not at all.”

  Dauria raised a single brow.

  “I have the moon and the stars and the animals to keep me company.”

  “Animals?” she asked, bewildered.

  “After a fashion,” he said through a laugh.

  It was such a strange sensation. For some reason, his laughter made her want to laugh as well. And that twinkle in his eye didn’t help. Not one little bit.

  “And you?” he asked. “No family or friends?”

  “Some,” she said hesitantly.

  Kaito watched her in silence. She couldn’t tell if he was waiting for her to say more or if he simply watched her while waiting for the next conversational turn.

  “My…” she paused to consciously force herself to use the human words, rather than the draconic ones. “Father and my siblings are here in Japan, somewhere. My truest friend, though, the only one I’m certain I can still trust, is a long way from here. But I will find her when I’ve finished what I need to do here.”

  “When you’re finished here?” he asked.

  She didn’t think she heard suspicion in his voice, but she watched him carefully as she spoke, just in case. “Yes. My father left me something that I need. Once I have it, I can be on my way.” She hoped he didn’t notice the obvious holes in her story.

  “I see,” he said, his expression falling just a touch as he turned his face away from her.

  Dauria breathed a silent sigh. Is this even going to work?

  Kaito cleared his throat and turned back to face forward, his expression returning to the blank mask. “What is it your father left you?”

  “Um…”

  Blast it, she thought. How do I handle this?

  Kaito turned back to her with a raised brow.

  “It’s more of a place than a thing.”

  Kaito’s lips curled into a small smile. “Now I’m intrigued.” His eyes twinkled in the fading light before he turned back to face the path.

  Dauria sighed aloud this time. I just keep digging my hole deeper.

  “Is it such a secret?”

  “Not as much anymore, I suppose,” she said. “I wasn’t born in the village. In my earliest memories, we were very near here. My s–father and I, we made our lives with only what nature provides in a cave delved into the side of this mountain.”

  “And that is our destination?”

  “It is.”

  “And there’s something you need there?” he asked, glancing at her.

  Dauria opened her mouth to answer and Kaito stumbled, a foot landing only half on the sharp rock beneath it. His foot twisted with a wet crunch, his arms pin-wheeling and his eyes wide with fear, then he fell backward.

  With inhuman speed, Dauria zipped across the rocks to catch the human in his backward fall, arms locked around his chest.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid! she thought. Why did I do that?

  His weight was more than she’d anticipated and his fall bore her to the ground along with him. Her tailbone struck sharp rock and sent a jolt of agony— unlike anything she’d ever experienced as a dragon —up her spine. She gave a soft grunt, her sole concession to the pain.

  With her arms still wrapped around Kaito, her hands clasped together over his chest, the heat of his body as it pressed against hers soaked through the blanket and her clothing into her own flesh. Her body warmed more than she felt was natural.

  A tingling flush crept up her neck and she glanced down at the small man’s face. She blinked in surprise.

  What? Did I really just… But she cut the thought off.

  For a moment, she thought she must be losing her mind. Perhaps the days spent as a human were getting to her. She couldn’t have seen what she thought she’d seen, could she?

  For a moment she’d been certain, but that certainty dwindled with each passing second as he looked up at her with confusion in his dark eyes.

  “How did you…?” he asked, voice a husky rasp.

  “Hush,” she whispered. Disentangling herself from Kaito, she slipped from beneath him and stood.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Setting up the tent,” she said softly. “That slip is proof that we’ve come far enough today. We both need rest.”

  “Let me help you,” he said as he climbed to his feet.

  And fell right back to the rocks with a wince.

  “You’re in no condition for that. I’ll do it while you get some rest.”

  He nodded glumly.

  Besides, she thought, I need time to think.

  For that bare instant when she’d first looked down at his face, she’d been certain his eyes had flashed metallic gold with vertically slit pupils.