When she had first caught him

about to scrape barnacles from the columns of the Second Street bridge, she had told him she was a dragoness.

If he ignored everything below her neck, if he blocked the thought of rubbing against that clear, gelatinous bell, if he denied the trailing, circumscribed tentacles anchored beneath him and the frilly mane descending from her inner mantle like a chandelier, shbyk, if he ignored the other frills, rippling in their eerie trains along her front and dorsal — if he kept his eyes on a leash and concentrated very, very hard, then yes, she had the right to call herself a dragon. The upper half of her body remained opaque out of mercy (to who? to him? to her?) and green as the seas off of Kamania.

Her head stirred. She rubbed her cheek against his scales and only the complete evacuation of his mind kept Haraan from flinching. That was the way it was with nighttime ideas: mornings turned them into regrets.

~Hey,~ he echoed, nudging her with his flank. ~Hey. It's time to wake up.~

She blinked awake. Even through the overcast morning robbed most color from the world, her eyes maintained their greenness relentlessly, especially when she turned them on him.

~Good morning,~ she yawned. Her fangs, tiny as they were, spaced themselves along her jaws with smart precision.

Haraan ran a careful tongue along his own, unsure of why he felt a need to compare dentists. ~Yeah. Good morning to you, too. Good dreams?~

A little light show accompanied her answer: four muted rills of green and orange trickled from the apex of her bell to the rim as she nodded. ~We talked again.~

~I remember.~ He uncoiled himself from the strange human-dreaming jellyfish-dragon to stretch. The ritual was so different here — no arms to thrust into the air, but he could touch his nose to his back and twist his body a little more than two full turns, all in three dimensions. By bending into letters from the alphabet, he at least found some use for his new shape.

Start with capital A. Then go through B, and C, and so on. Concentrate. As they encouraged difficult and dynamic body angles, alphabet stretches made great striding exercises. In a sense, he was still himself — possibly even better than he had been before.

E... That middle prong demanded a hairpin his skeleton and its hundreds of ribs weren't loose enough for. F was no better. He got to H and growled.

He dropped the routine before moving onto the letter K. That sense of ~himself~, the one with legs? He was only trying to fool himself longer. The water he breathed, the agitated flare of his dorsal frill, his limblessness (dear Lady, even she got flippers, transparent and squishy as the rest of her was).