Underneath she is charred like a curved trunk that has smoldered and cracked. Her skin is burned rugged as a scree slope, broken facets of carbon slick with anthracite rainbows. She trails veils of debris, like lacy webs of paper ash.
The scars are armor. Better armor than the skin before. Not so good as the flames, but they will keep her safe as she heals.
The scars slowly tighten. Contract. They curl her hands and hunch her shoulders. They seal her face into an expression without expression. She is stiff and imprisoned in her own hide.
She cannot sing now either.
And she certainly cannot climb back down again.
She amuses herself as best she can. The dragon gives her small things. Toys or tools, but bits of its body. Parts of itself. A scale for a table, a bit of claw for an inkwell.
The woman wrote a poem for you.
It was a poem that began, “I am the woman who still loves the dragon that burned me.”
She wrote it on the armor over your heart. She cut it there with a pen made from a sliver of the black glass from your spines, and she filled the letters with your silver blood, and there it shone, and shines.
The winter comes and the winter goes.
There is a curl of green among the ash below, the great trees fallen like new-combed hair.
One day the woman began to dig at her skin. Her nails had grown long and ragged. Blood and lymph welled.
“What are you doing?” you asked her.
“It itches,” she said.
You gave her another bit of spine to make a knife with and watched as bit by bit she peeled a narrow strip of scar away. The skin underneath was new, more tender than her old skin. It did not look like her old skin, either; it was raw, and unpretty, and she flinched at every touch.
She couldn’t bear to work at peeling herself for more than a few inches of scar at a time. It hurt, and you didn’t really understand hurting, but she made noises and water ran from her eyes.
But she had never lacked for courage. The knight a dragon loves must surely have plenty of that. So you watched as over the summer and the spring and the winter that followed, bit by bit, she peeled her corrugated scars away. They had made her look a bit like you.
You did not miss them.
Everything is pain.
Beneath the pain is freedom.
At first she shied away from you, her new flesh rare and weeping.
You flew away. You passed over blasted forests and plains of basalt. You passed over soft meadows, and curving shores. You stood over still water, and looked at the words she had carved into your armor, reflected backwards and still shining.
You tried to understand.
But it was pain, and a dragon has never felt pain.
She still hid when you returned.
But she was a woman who loved a dragon, and such people are brave. Eventually she came and sat beside you on the stone. She rubbed her shoulder absently, fingers moving over scar-laced skin.
“You are because you are,” the woman says. Her hair is growing in again, a thick black cloud that has never pressed beneath a helm. “And I love you because you are. But I fear you because you hurt me.”
“And you?” the dragon asks her.
“I fear myself because I made myself open to hurting.”
“But you flew.”
“I flew.”
“And you survived the burning.”
The woman is silent.
“And what you made of yourself this time was not for anyone but you. Now truly you have done what others have no claim to.”
The woman is silent still.
“Are you the litany of your boasting?”
“No,” the woman says. “I am the thing I am. I am the space I take up in the world.”
“And so am I,” the dragon says.
“We should go fly,” the woman says.
Dragons are undying, after all.
You could not keep her.
But she left behind a song. And the space she took up inside you. And the space she left empty in the world.
She still loves the dragon that set her on fire, but the love has been tempered now.
Annealed.
This is how the poem carved over your heart ended:
“As I have been tempered too.”
Tideline
Chalcedony wasn’t built for crying. She didn’t have it in her, not unless her tears were cold tapered glass droplets annealed by the inferno heat that had crippled her.
Such tears as that might slide down her skin over melted sensors to plink unfeeling on the sand. And if they had, she would have scooped them up, with all the other battered pretties, and added them to the wealth of trash jewels that swung from the nets reinforcing her battered carapace.
They would have called her salvage, if there were anyone left to salvage her. But she was the last of the war machines, a three-legged oblate teardrop as big as a main battle tank, two big grabs and one fine manipulator folded like a spider’s palps beneath the turreted head that finished her pointed end, her polyceramic armor spiderwebbed like shatterproof glass. Unhelmed by her remote masters, she limped along the beach, dragging one fused limb. She was nearly derelict.
The beach was where she met Belvedere.
Butterfly coquinas unearthed by retreating breakers squirmed into wet grit under Chalcedony’s trailing limb. One of the rear pair, it was less of a nuisance on packed sand. It worked all right as a pivot, and as long as she stayed off rocks, there were no obstacles to drag it over.
As she struggled along the tideline, she became aware of someone watching. She didn’t raise her head. Her chassis was equipped with targeting sensors which locked automatically on the ragged figure crouched by a weathered rock. Her optical input was needed to scan the tangle of seaweed and driftwood, Styrofoam and sea glass that marked high tide.
He watched her all down the beach, but he was unarmed, and her algorithms didn’t deem him a threat.
Just as well. She liked the weird flat-topped sandstone boulder he crouched beside.
The next day, he watched again. It was a good day; she found a moonstone, some rock crystal, a bit of red-orange pottery and some sea glass worn opalescent by the tide.
“Whatcha picken up?”
“Shipwreck beads,” Chalcedony answered. For days, he’d been creeping closer, until he’d begun following behind her like the seagulls, scrabbling the coquinas harrowed up by her dragging foot into a patched mesh bag. Sustenance, she guessed, and indeed he pulled one of the tiny mollusks from the bag and produced a broken-bladed folding knife from somewhere to prise it open with. Her sensors painted the knife pale colors. A weapon, but not a threat to her.