1

Given the choice, he would have preferred to stay asleep. He had to deal with them regardless of his state of consciousness, the fogs, the fogs which crept over the hills and crevices in his head, the fogs he knew were keeping his own memories hostage. In his dreams, they were just as hazy as anything else -- he never had to question what lay within those memories as he passed by.

Or, rather, those memories never got to question him.

And so it happened, every morning, the daily fight to keep his eyes closed for a few minutes longer -- but the act of keeping his eyes closed roused other parts of his mind into waking, and with the waking came the questioning.

What was so strange about waking up underwater?

What did he care about being naked?

To address the first question, waking up underwater was a perfectly normal thing for a dragon. Waking up in a bed, not the kind that formed by chance in a thick swath of sea grass, but in a bed covered with cloth sheets and cloth blankets, with a pillow stuffed with feathers under his head -- wouldn't be. As for the second, he was plenty warm enough, owing to the layer of blubber wrapped under his skin. And yet, he couldn't stop looking for anything flat and wide enough to drape across his stomach, even if he only found stones -- such as the one lying on him right now.

In short, he missed having underwear. Here he was, a creature with fangs in his mouth, webbed spines running the length of his back and tail, a pair of horns long as his head -- and he was prepared to trade them all for a piece of cloth he could pull between his back flippers (and how would he do that without fingers to grab on with?).

As the days passed, hints of before trickled back to him despite the fogs' best efforts -- the first had been a smell, the second, the word belonging to that smell.

That smell, the smell of fruit, tangy, and light enough to stay off his tongue, drifted through his nostrils now. She was nearby. In the end, sleep lost out, as it always did, every day, and Haraan opened his eyes.

"Has anything else come back to you?" she asked him.

He nodded.

"What was it?"

"Chalk."

"Mmmm." The little dragon before him closed her eyes and smiled as if receiving a back rub. "I know that one. You can use it to write stuff."

Another memory struggled against its hazy prison, its fierce babble dumbed into a moan. Something thin and rigid pressed between his fingers -- from when he had fingers, if he ever _had_ fingers -- he couldn't choose how these things came back to him and what he remembered by touch was hard to ignore.

"Really? Don't pencils do that, too?"

The smaller dragon shook her head. "They're different. You use a pencil on paper, but you use chalk on a street."

"Spoken like a human."

"I am one. And you are, too."

"I still don't believe you."

"I remember bein' human. All we have to do is get you to remember, too."

Haraan groaned. She said that same thing every day for the past half-tide. "I doubt that's going to happen. The way I am right now? I'm fine with it." The lie burned on his tongue. "Really."

He rose from his resting place from last night -- nestled against a quarter-arc of stone set on top of more stone, cut in even blocks and laid in a flat, interwoven pattern. He knew the arc had belonged to something called a fountain, and that it belonged above the water so it could shoot more water into the air. Wide stairs led up and out from the area around the fountain in four directions, passing under algae-slimed arches at their apexes.