Written: September 1st – October 5th, October 5th - December 14th.

Nobody got the cookie from last time, I see. Sad.

"What do you call a fruit that is never alone?"

Without further delay and ado, I present to all of you the chapter you've been waiting for for such a long time I'm trying to forget just how long it actually was. Traumatizing.

When Stulte came to Ireland, it was because of exhaustion, the knowledge that if he pushed himself any harder, he would drop, and so he had landed on the nearest sizable shore.

"Thar's a free land," said another Nadder once, an outlaw whom Stulte had met on his travels. "Time I'm done with my business out here, I'll head home to it."

"What's your business?"

But the stranger gave him an odd eye and would not tell, cutting short the conversation and flying away soon after. Stulte did not ask that question again, but left that place.

And when fall turned to winter, Stulte kept looking, island to island, only quickening when the cold began to take its toll. But he remembered what the outlaw had said, and worked his way closer to the mainland. And when a cold snap came, and the weather only promised to get worse, he knew where he had to go.

He'd met Forster here, at this very pond, and from there their friendship had grown; set back at times, but never destroyed. Forster knew him as Cain and he knew Forster as Forster, and the two had always respected that.

Here he looked for Ocean occasionally, combing the countryside, asking anyone he met. He never saw nor heard anything hopeful, but went on in spite of that. There were girls there too, nice Nadders and nice families he'd seen, and they tempted him, they did.

Always his stubbornness saved him, the same stubbornness that had made him fly through that storm. If that wasn't ironic he'd eat his heart out.

And in the meantime, Forster painted him a whole new worldview; of a place where everyone was free to do anything that he liked with what he had, as long as it didn't keep anyone else from doing what he wanted, and so everyone was free of obligation except to those they preferred to be obligated to. That, Forster said, was a free land, not even a free kingdom, or country. There was no Tyrant, no 'Her Ugliness', and Ireland was the better for it. Save for the border conflict with the English dragons, which had been going on for millennia, but that was another matter.

"You knew about these shores, when you left," said Forster once, framing the question as though he were sure of himself.

"Didn't," said Stulte.

"More's the pity," remarked Forster. "Many a grand, and no idea of freedom."

And by now Stulte knew that by grand, Forster meant thousand, thousands of dragons.

Months later, here they were, standing by the pond in the early morning just after the sun had risen and there was still a tinge of blue light left on the ground, the scattered clouds still a mosaic of beautiful colors. Forster tapped Stulte on the shoulder.

"When're you going to go find your girl, Cain?"

"I don't know where to look."

"Wal, there's a few things I know about where you're lookin', a few isles she could've gone to," said Forster. "Reddish, Scale. Spine Point is nearer to where you looked."

"Spine?"

"Long, rough. They say it looks like a human weapon; sharp 'n pointy."

"All of them are sharp and pointy."

"Cept the ones with rocks tied to them," said Forster, with some satisfaction.

"Oh," said Stulte, who'd never seen a human weapon himself, or if he had, hadn't recognized it. "Well, there's those."

Forster shifted, held out one wing and pointed it towards the sea. "Like a stick, only headlands jut out from each side, across from each other, pointing north and south. That's Spine, and you can't tell it wrong."

If he said so.

Then:

"You've combed this land so many times I wonder how your girl could possibly have squirreled away from you," said Forster, "One of life's great mysteries."

They chuckled.

The frigid winter nights passed to cold winter days, and cold winter days passed to chilled winter nights, and as time passed, the sun set later and rose earlier in the sky, its light warmer than it had been before.

"Spring is coming," said Forster once, on one of his visits, when the air had become so humid that day it made Stulte's scales itch, and water dripped from the icicles that hung on the dark cliff boulders, icicles that formed on evergreen leaves and grew from tree boughs until the forests resembled a field of crystal. "Won't be long till winter's gone, and the birds of summer will come north again. The farmers will bring out their plows and the rabbits will change their coats."

Stulte looked up, saw the green buds sprouting from the branches of oak trees, looked down and saw the blades of grass, poking up from the slush between his talons.

"A good time to be alive, eh," said he, talons crunching the thin ice of the pond where they'd first met.

"Grass as far as the eye can see, and game, Cain."

Always the game with Forster, his enjoyment of the hunt.

"This place looks different even in the winter," said Stulte, now Cain. "Compared to where I come from."

"That barren's a dead old rock and everyone knows it," said Forster, and he snorted.

The two began to walk along the edge of the pond, towards the trampled old rushes and brush.

"I killed my first elk here."

"Bull moose."

"I'm the one who scored, not you."

The ground squished under his feet, and bits of slush clung at them, though he was stepping in two feet of snow. A breeze blew, not so frigid as the gusts of a month past, but merely cooling to a dragon, rustling the trees and causing the icicles to jingle; like the ring little bits of metal make when they bang against each other, only, Stulte decided, with a more happy tone.

"Sure is beautiful out here."

There was a comfortable silence, both of them resting on their feet.

"So," said Forster after a while. "When're you going to go find your girl?"

"I don't know," said Stulte. "It's good enough weather for it."

Weight. That burden of the search which had been lifted from him by the months of relative ease came hurtling back down to him.

"I always knew I had to leave," he went on, "but now that it's not far off…"

"Tomorrow," said Forster. "Or the day after that. A storm is coming tonight; I feel it in my bones, and best not to start off on such short notice, or you'll forget something."

"Like the galoot I am, that's what you're probably thinking," said Stulte, or Cain. He really was Cain now, yet Ocean would know him by his old name, his birth name.

"You know me well, but not well enough," said Forster, "for I was going to call you a cricket."

Stulte fluffed his wings, his muscles already loose now that the air was warmer, the wind less harsh.

Would she still be the same? Did she yet possess an impetuous spirit, as he had had, and now hoped he had not kept? If she was still alive – which she was – then she'd be changed. The last flight they'd gone on could've ended differently., might've, would've, didn't. He still remembered that race around the tiny islet, an islet he could never find again in a thousand miles of ocean.

"Where is Spine?" asked Stulte, going back to their earlier conversation. "It's named Spine Island?"

A pause as Forster thought back, rummaging through the scroll-shelves of his memory. "Spine, that was it, thank you. West, obviously, and a little north, since we're on the south part of the coast of Ireland. Use the spring sun as your guide, a claw-spread to the right, where the summer dawn rises."

"I haven't seen many of those," said Stulte, thinking back those rare times when he'd watched the sun's glow spread. "The smoke where I came from, it blocks the light."

"The fog-mire keeps it out? Your childhood must've been miserable."

But it wasn't where he was now, was it? And the chance he'd see it again was the chance a snowflake would survive his fire-breath.

"I searched north last year; didn't find anything. I worked back against the storm winds but… didn't help."

"Maybe you overcorrected."

"And my senses were dulled by the storm," finished Stulte, jaw set. "If I see any of the islands I saw I'll head south this time, see what I get. Wish I had a chart. Reminds me that I should take along the things I came here with, show her that I really am me."

"The amount of flying you'll be doing you could jog down a chart of your own," said Forster, and Stulte thought back to the roll of scrolls he'd brought; obtained by Nayla for whatever reason, useless ever since.

"That idea isn't half-bad," he said. "but how I'm to do it with these big claws -" and here he casually waved a leg bearing talons the size of large jigsaw blades - "I have no clue. I can barely scribble in the dirt with a pole."

"There's a reason why we Nadders don't usually do it," said Forster. "It's going to be lonely around here without you making some noise. Maybe I'll pay a visit to some of my friends east of here; more apt to it."

Stulte kicked a dead branch and it flew over the thin ice and hit and skimmed across the surface with a whirring like a half-whistle made from the throat instead of the lips, then slid into the water in the middle of the pond with a sploop and a tiny ripple.

"Terrors?"

"Not any kind you'd come across regular," said Forster. "It's real, you leaving so soon?"

Never thought he'd hear that plaintive tone coming from someone like Forster, but here it was, and then it'd be gone.

"You suggested it," said Stulte. Besides; he'd promised himself. To shy away now would be betraying his honor – or was it pride? "I can spend today composing my things -" and here he looked west, seeing the hazy pall rising up over the horizon, a horizon that seemed to stretch into distance until it disappeared as it always did -"while the storm blows, and tomorrow getting my muscles together, and I guess that means I'll be leaving day after tomorrow. I wonder if – I wonder if I'll be leaving the same day I left when we got away from that island."

And left a friend behind. Her name was Nayla, that was right, and she had better have gotten away, or… or what? An older Stulte refrained from making threats he could never carry out. Best to keep on hoping, quietly.

"I'd best get working," he said. "Will you be here to see me off?"

"I will," said Forster; that ubiquitous promise, the same as made by two dragonets arranging a meeting, and rarely kept; but this was Forster and he knew the risk, knew the loneliness of weeks without talking to anybody, never given assurance, and Forster would turn up…

"You were late last time," said Stulte, prodding at a joke now old between them.

Forster had nothing to say to that now, and the two fluffed their wings in the moist spring air, turned, and flew away; ships of old putting into port before one of them departed on a long voyage.

Or something like that. They would have had to stay in port anyway, for out of the west came a great sleet-storm, shapeless gray haze rising over the horizon, morphing into pancake-like clouds; flat as a cobbler's stone, yet these had definition, clefts and rises and promontories similar to the rolling hills and tall valleys and fjords of Ireland's acreage, only the difference was that they were intangible, even to a being who could reach up and touch their shifting vapors, and that intangibility and mystery was what made clouds fascinating to him in a day when he had already flown their altitudes and soared their haunts.

He spent the rest of that day in the cave which he had made his new home, soon to be his home no longer when his bedding lay under the sun and the moon and the stars. The cold stones he warmed with the heat of his fire, and then he looked over his things, what little he had, fiddled with a pebble that had fallen into his living space here, made another scratch on the wall there, charred the floor with a flickering, sighing flame in another place. That he needed time to get his possessions in order was only a half-truth, and Forster must have sensed it, given him time to think.

He might never find her again, for she might really be dead. What distinguished one corpse for another, if indeed her bones survived yet on land instead of sitting at the bottom of the sea? He might wander the world for ever and ever, chasing dreams and vagaries and for what? Perhaps this was his last search. Here was his second departure; soon he would leave, and he ought to be at the pinnacle of his renewed hope, not at the bottom of it, and yet:

And yet he had heard from Ocean once, before, much before they had left, a saying passed down to her from her unfortunate mother. Success will find you even in the depths of despair, and it was only a saying, yet somehow it bolstered hope, because it was something that had come from her, and if he found her he could hear her say it again, and if he had a chance of that, even a slim one, it was worth holding onto and working for, and he rubbed his talon in the soot he had made on the floor and picked up the old, old parchment, unrolled it and wrote the saying down shakily, as a reminder to himself, and when he had finished with all this he settled down and went to sleep next to the warm-stones.

When he emerged the next morning the snow was gone; all of it. The sleet had come and had melted it down into the ground and then it had frozen in a layer of ice that coated the boulders far beneath. Still, the sun was up in a sky where the only clouds were the crescent bank of stormclouds blowing off to the east, and its light was warming and soothing enough that Stulte stopped in the entrance, letting its light soak into his scales and seep into his flesh, and here he remembered another of the sayings of Ocean's family, this time from her father. You can't do anything halfway, he had said, and Stulte dimly remembered hearing him say it a long, long time ago in a deep, gentle voice. A shame he was gone now.

What would he have made of all this?

It was a thought worth bearing.

Stulte recovered the rope and the scrolls and the sort of cover he'd made for them to keep them out of the rain, stiff and huge as his claws were, nothing compared to the dexterous workings of the Terrors, oh, Frot, that was his name. Frot, and what had become of him during the days when Stulte had been gone? It'd been almost a year now, it was, or felt like, but really more like six months, if even that. Time had slowed when maturity had been forced upon him and life had fallen out of its routine.

He put on his things and winged out of the cave at a slow pace. Was it dread of change that made him reluctant to speed up so?

He hunted that morning; missed four easy meals and made a terrible job of the fifth, his mind on other things, yet a part of that same mind recognized that he must embark satisfied, and give himself a good start, lest something go wrong early on and he have to return home to Ireland because of his ineptitude, or worse, plunge into the sea because he had forgotten where his landmarks were.

He found a ledge when he was eating, looked out at the beauty of this land and tried to ignore it, imagining islands taking the stead of oaks, and sea stacks of hills, and so on, and when he had cleared his mind he returned to the pond for what might be the final goodbye.

Forster was there, he really was, looking oddly wistful, not for the first time, yet this time the emotion was in response to something happening in the now instead of an event occurring years in the past. Had he come to like Forster this much, that he was feeling the same sorrow?

"I won't be gone forever, you know," began Stulte, his breathing clipped, though he was perfectly at rest. "I can always come back here and find you again." And wasn't that a concept to remember; permanence, that some highlights of life would always remain and could always be reembraced.

A small, whirling cloud of breath, breaking swiftly into tiny curlicues, yet when they had gone he saw a green tree blossom. Hardy and tough, the young stripling had chosen this day to sprout, fresh melt-water dripping from the tiny leaflings not yet full-grown. Was it symbolic, a sign of a new start? A leaf had bloomed inside him when he'd come to this pond, and now it had matured, and that leaf was hope.

Today was when he began to finish things.

"Good-bye," said Stulte to Forster. "I guess I never told you my real name."

"There was no need, whippersnapper," said Forster, gruff, perhaps to hide that he'd miss Stulte. "Till now, Cain."

"Stulte."

"A good name, for someone such as yourself. Did your parents ever tell you that it means, depending on how you say it, bullheaded or foolhardy in the old language?"
"I didn't know there was an old language," said Stulte, miffed. "Or if I did I'd forgotten."

"I'll take it to mean brave," said Forster. "though the title fits you. My name is Crimson."

Stulte kicked his feet, ready to take to the sky. "You'll always be Forster to me. You taught me a lot of things. Thank you."

"No. Thank you, Stulte, for bringing some excitement to my life. Same-old, same-old, and then you came along. Good-bye, and take care, especially not to fly into old-timers taking off from ponds!"

"I will!" shouted Stulte, and he took off from their first meeting-place, leaving behind a good friend, an aid, a confidant and a mentor, carrying with him the knowledge that he was a new dragon.

The ship had left port at last.

The island looked like a charming little place, far enough out of the way that it promised to be a backwater shore, and most people unfortunate enough to stumble upon it would soon leave. That was what she thought about it, at any allowance.

Well, she wasn't stumbling; she was looking, and she had a reason to be out here, because she was looking for something, or rather, someone. And this isle was enough to be it, and its shape almost that of a quill, save for the headlands jutting out on either side, nearer the western shore than the eastern.

She thought in passing that here was a good place to flare back, mess around and do next to nothing, since next to nobody seemed to have been here, or ever would be.

She thought that before she saw the smoke. It rose from near the middle of the island, farther away from the northern coast than the east, from a little clearing in the hilly woods, where some dirty snow still hung from the trees, sheltered by rolling slopes. And there were only a few things smoke meant.

It could mean other dragons, but usually it was humans. Did she search this place anyway, mindful of the men who lived there? - or…?

Well, she hadn't seen very many humans, and it might be worthwhile to watch some, even if there was no one here whom she was looking for. She dived a little, and did a roll. Here was something exciting.