After circling the lair 5 or 6 times without falling even once(!) and thinking it through carefully, I decided the first thing I'd learn would be ‘flying.’
Dragons had magnificent, sturdy, practical, and even beautiful wings. Giving them 11 out of 10 for artistry wouldn't be enough. Refreshing, elegant, splendid yet simple, utterly perfect wings. Wings that could kick off the ground and carry us in graceful, beautiful flight toward a sky so blue it looked cold—not my words. Mom's.
But what would you do with wings if you didn't fly? Make soup with them? Don't even think about making a pot large enough to fit a dragon's wings unless your stupidity is so abundant it overflows to cover the earth, fill the seas, climb heedlessly upward, pierce the atmosphere, and reach the sun. In the end, what else could you do with wings that had no use except flying? So fly! You have to fly! You simply must fly! ......That's what she said. So I tried to fly.
To do that, I should check my wings first, shouldn't I? The heavy weight on my back, and that foreign sensation I still wasn't used to. But they were definitely part of my body, so I should be able to move them. For that reason, I tried. Yet no matter how hard I strained, my wings didn't move at all.
How on earth was I supposed to move these things? No, going back to first principles, what human in the world was ever born with wings?
I’d originally been human, and I retained many memories of that time—in fact, thanks to a dragon’s intelligence, which knew no forgetting, I retained all my memories of life on Earth.—So I had no idea how to control or move a tail or wings freely.
I tried to move them, but it was hopeless, so I called Mom.
“Mmm...... Mom, how do I move my wings?”
Mom tilted her head in thought for a moment, then spoke.
“Who knows? I've never thought about how I move my wings. I just move them because they move.”
Because they just move......? You've never thought about how you do it?
......That's it! So that's how it works! You idiotic dragon head!
Only then did I understand. You didn’t move body parts by consciously thinking about them. I’d said it before—damn it! How could you forget something you said yourself?!—Body parts moved smoothly without conscious thought, and you made the body remember how. Telling it what to do wouldn’t make it happen. However much my mind shouted, ‘Move, wings! Move!’ how could it retrieve information my body didn’t have? Moving a body part wasn’t about ‘knowing’ but ‘feeling.’ Once you felt where it was and how it moved, doing it again wasn’t particularly hard. The more you did it, the more you used it, the more familiar it became.
When I'd been human, I'd had no idea how to move my arms. I simply used them because they moved, because I could do it without much conscious thought.
Remembering that, I tried hard to ‘feel’ my wings. Had I spent a whole day sitting in a daze like that? My wings moved smoothly, as though it were nothing. Absurdly simply, they just moved. I could ‘feel’ the muscles in my back twitching, and how the muscles and bones in my wings moved.
Repeating it wasn't hard. At last, I could move my wings!
Ah! Now I can fly! I've never even been on a plane, and now I can kick off the ground and soar into the wide sky under my own power, I thought.
But flapping my wings hard enough to take off was very, very, incredibly difficult. For a mere young, delicate hatchling like me, moving my wings was a truly arduous, overwhelming exercise—after saying that, I remembered I was a thriving hatchling and had to mourn the fact that I wasn’t pitiful at all.—Using the muscles that moved my wings required tremendous patience and painstaking effort, so at first I had to pour all my energy into flapping them 5 times.
I hadn't known moving my wings would consume so much energy. Honestly, I could flap them all I wanted if that was all I was doing. But the wing strength needed to make my body even a little lighter, push aside the air, and lift myself was no joke. In the end, I collapsed after 5 powerful wingbeats and slept for a day. The next day, too, I flapped 5 times and collapsed.
It took about a week for my wingbeats to reach double digits: 10. As I flapped, I learned why dragons' wings were so large. With both wings spread wide, their span was almost equal to or slightly greater than a dragon's body length. I thought that was probably true of most creatures capable of natural flight. But there was a huge difference between birds' wings and dragons'.
Birds' wings were made of feathers, with most of their bones hollow inside. The feathers pointed opposite the direction of flight, making them very good for gliding. Birds didn't flap their wings that much. First, they kicked hard off whatever supported them and lifted themselves into the air, then gained more altitude with a few wingbeats. After that, they spread their wings and glided.
Watching a bird's flight pattern, you could see it repeatedly rise and fall, gliding on updrafts and downdrafts. It flapped for short movements, to gain speed, or to land. Otherwise, it simply spread its wings and rode the wind.
But dragons were different.
Dragons glided, too, of course. But the energy consumed by their wingbeats while gliding differed enormously from that of birds, and the energy cost of flapping outside a glide was vastly higher, too.
Dragons flew using flight membranes rather than feathers, so the bones supporting them had to be sturdy and strong. Unlike birds' mostly hollow wings, dragons' wings were heavier in proportion, and that weight made their energy consumption far greater, too.
You might say, ‘But don’t dragons fly farther?’ Yet in terms of flight distance relative to body length, dragons lost to birds. There’s no reason to lament, ‘Grrrr......! This is a disgrace! Losing to mere birds!’ is there? Flying is their livelihood, while our job is eating and playing, isn’t it? Gwahahaha!—But why do I get the feeling that’s nothing to boast about?—Ahem, back to the point. With all those conditions and reasons, it was enormously hard for a dragon to lift itself and fly by flapping its wings.
Above all, keeping your wings moving was truly difficult. Just spread your arms to either side and flap them up and down. Keep it up long enough, and the strain on your shoulders would gradually tire your arm muscles. Your arms would grow heavier, and if you kept going and going, eventually you wouldn't be able to move them. Probably before you'd even reached 300 repetitions.
Wings were the same. My own definition of wings, based on how they felt, was ‘slightly heavy arms attached to the back.’ So how tiring would that be? Besides, back muscles weren't as tenacious as those in the shoulders and arms. Flapping was hard, but this training was essential.
The longer I flapped, the stronger my wings would become, letting me glide for longer and even hover—fly in one spot in the air. Did hummingbirds flap their wings several dozen times a second to hover?—.
These days, about a month after I'd begun practicing for flight, I could manage 30 wingbeats a day.
Ahh! This was dazzling improvement, tremendous progress! From 5 to 30! Ohh! God! Did I truly do this? Me, who’d had no patience and was a fervent believer in can’t-be-bothered-ism (the state of not wanting to bother, plus ‘ism,’ meaning a doctrine, as ‘material’ becomes ‘materialism’)? But this was only the beginning.
Mom said I had to be able to flap all day without resting before I could fly. She also said it would take about half a year to reach that point. Grrr! I have to live like this for another half year? My future somehow felt bleak, but I rallied. Get a grip! You're no longer a frail human! You're a dragon! Your mind may be human, but your body is a mighty dragon's!
Then, in the 4th month, I achieved something astonishing. After just 4 months of practice, I could flap my wings without resting for a whole day and a half!
Ahh, I think I'm going to cry.
Only then could I lift myself into the air and fly. Only then did I understand what Mom had really meant.
Having to move my wings all day without resting meant building that much strength in the muscles that moved them.
For a week, I flew around inside the lair. Mom watched me with great satisfaction in her eyes.
Mom! I thought you only ever teased me, but it was all for my sake! Looking into her deeply red eyes, I could feel how full they were of love for me.
Full of gratitude, and hoping to earn some extra favor, I acted cute as I flew around.
“Mooom, look! I can do this, too!”
I showed off, rolling once in flight or suddenly turning in the opposite direction. Watching me, Mom smiled with what looked like real joy, rather than mockery.
The next thing I learned was Fear (Fear).
Fear was something like an aura (Aura) emitted by dragons. They turned their immense power into an intangible, airlike energy and released it to overwhelm an opponent. In other words, it was easy to understand if you thought of it as a sort of terror generator.
Because Fear was an outpouring of a dragon's vast energy, it could crush an opponent beneath terror and rob them of the will to fight, or force instinct-driven monsters to submit. It was also a versatile, very useful technique for threatening someone with, ‘I'm this powerful! So stop getting above yourself and get lost, will you?’
Mom's comment on Fear.
-So it's very useful to learn, since you can drive off weak fellows without the bother of fighting them. The sight of those monster fellows falling flat and trembling after one burst of Fear...... Ohohohohohoho!
If Mom said that, it seemed quite useful. According to her explanation, Fear came in several varieties, broadly divided into 2 kinds: long-range and short-range. With the long-range kind, your energy spread subtly, making anything within its range feel subdued and tense, so any creature would fear you. The short-range kind compressed those long-spreading waves into a limited area, making it that much more powerful. Short-range Fear would see a lot of use in battle.
She said Fear only worked on opponents weaker than yourself, making it particularly useful for gauging an opponent's strength. She added that if it didn't work, the opponent was stronger, so I should quickly fire off a spell and run.
That was my plan, too. Eager to try Fear, I asked Mom a question.
“Mom, how do I use Fear, then?”
“Good question, isn't it? I was just about to teach you. Fear is like killing intent. Terror is an emotion rooted in death, you know? The feelings that you might die or get hurt gather and gather until they become dread, and that becomes terror. Fear gives your opponent a sense of death and draws out their terror. Even the bravest warrior is weak before death. What can fighting in the face of death get them except death? So they give up the will to fight, or think, ‘If this being fills me with such great terror, I must submit.’ That makes your task simple. Just think ‘I'll kill you!’ at your opponent, or in your mind.”
Hmm, does that mean Fear is a sort of mental attack?
So, is it like when I was human and got scared or quietly avoided the burly gangsters I saw on the street? No, that was shrinking back at their appearance.
Then what was Fear? Any creature could express its feelings—let's leave out plants, as well as single-celled organisms, bacteria, brainless creatures, crustaceans, and many-legged creatures, which could hardly express emotion. Let's think of animals that seemed capable of it, mammals and birds—and spread those feelings as a sort of energy.
For instance, a tiger living in the mountains roared loudly to announce its strength. Another tiger passing nearby might hear it, sense the energy and power carried in the roar, then tuck its tail or issue a challenge.
Or perhaps this was a better example. They said very close friends could sense each other's feelings with a single glance, and no matter how far apart they were, hearing the other's voice was enough to know what they were thinking.
If one friend was terribly angry, others might not notice, but their closest friend would detect it and try to soothe their anger.
If the angry friend was the dragon and the closest friend was another race, that race would sense the dragon's energy and know to grovel, wouldn't they? Hmm, somehow that example feels rather weak.
Using Fear was a little difficult, too. Could I release it merely by thinking, ‘I'll kill you!’? From reading various fantasy novels, I knew very well what a dragon's Fear did. But I had absolutely no idea how to use it.
I sat down and kept thinking blankly.