A/N: Alright... this is it then. u.u I'M DONE!!! D!! WHEEE HOOOO!!! I finished it!! =D!! All by myself withalittlehelpfromAubriwithideas ^.^;; But it's written! It's down! It's done! Over 50,000 words and ALL IN A MONTH!! *does a joyous victory dance* ^.^

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Music was the key for at least some of them. It held the ability to touch any mind in its own right, and this was what I needed it for now… I snatched up the fiddle and stretched my awareness around it on every level. I laid the bow across the strings and started to play. The notes and energy vibrations danced up along the bow, vibrated and trembled with the strings, coiling and spiraling far and fast through the dozens of levels that the instrument existed on. With barely a thought I kept intruding other life away, especially the faeries… I centered the music on the group of humans, letting it flow through their minds and enrichen their own perception. I drew it up past the physical level, and invoked such a surge of revitalizing force from the fiddle strings, that I had nearly all of them dancing within a moment.

The timelessness persisted, and in the elation of the music's energy I reached out to the boundless cascades of it that splashed from their heightened minds and enhanced state. Including their emotions. Love, joy, other deep currents, and baser ones that no Dragon touched, surged and grew. I'd always scorned the emotions and the base energies, but here they were, they could be tapped into, and they were surprisingly quite powerful. Why, then, if they themselves were so powerful, did they act as such a inhibiting cloud to those that had them? I set the fiddle down on a physical level so that I could dance with them, but my mind kept playing it on the higher levels. The music and human emotions swept through us, evoking my own dormant tendencies. I knew this connection to humanity, I remembered it, and at the moment I was buried so deeply into it nothing else mattered. The danger of this didn't appeal to me quite enough as it should've… there was another here like me, and he too was dancing, tapping into the energy that was quickly being raised and reaching a pinnacle.

Looking at it again from the outside made me pause. I'd never seen Dragon energy entwined so deeply with human energy before, and it was unsettling. But somehow, at least in him, the edges smoothed, the lines worked together, and while the Dragon remained dormant it became the driving power behind the currents driving the human piece. This was it then. This became the challenge. Letting the human emotions and urges fly free, but yet, don't give them rein. Only what more could be done, so I thought, as I leapt and twirled with my friends, who were moving as fast as Aubri and I were. That was fast for humans, but they had an intense energy and awareness boost from us. The music swelled and throbbed around us, carrying us along in its everreaching beat and melody. And it wasn't just our own emotions; we held a connection to the emotions of the others, as well. And they matched. They followed every peak and swell of the energy which was beginning to reach a point where even a blind human just walking in would feel a strong tingle. We could either do something with this energy, or drain it away into the ground. But none of us wanted to let it go yet.

The tendrils of it spiked up and twisted around each other, battled wildly, joined, and soared. We laughed, we cried, we screamed, and when it was over we fell to the floor, fully unable to stop laughing. Our auras melded together with the similar paths of energy, and I rolled over to hug the first person within range. Lost in the cloud of emotion, it was a moment before I could sit up and take stock of my surroundings… to my startlement, JC, Bast, and all the others, except for Aubri, were gone. Oops.. all the human emotion had pulled me out of the transcendant state in which distance was not an issue. Now it was, when I'd come back down… I felt a surge of sadness… a feeling I hadn't felt in a long time. I let it stay where it was, for simple virtue of the fact that it was human, and I was determined to immerse myself in ‘human' no matter how painful. Although it was far less painful to focus on something positive. My continued good feeling hadn't ebbed away, and it infused itself as a connection on a surprisingly deep level with Aubri, who was still here. I sat down next to him and sank into his presence, though with my heightened perception I didn't feel the want or need for physical contact. Things were peaceful enough how they were.

Why should anything need to change? I picked up my fiddle again as the extra wisps of energy died down, Aubri centering them into the ground. It wasn't long before we were both back in a state of complete harmony and unrufflement, the energy around us mellow and comfortable. A deep connection to the earth, even as my perception moved up through the levels, examining the fiddle that I held once again in my lap. The strings still trembled on the highest levels, echoing upwards and downwards, stirring things up a little, but not enough to attract even my attention, really. But then, the instrument was always in this state. It was very comforting to have around, for some reason… by now it nearly had a deeper connection to the world than I did.

At least, my confused state was not present. The human emotion was easily melding with everything else right now, and there was nothing for it to work itself up about. I didn't let there be anything for it to work itself up about. It simply was… the same as I was, and Aubri was, and the entire earth around us was. I'd reached a center of peace with another human facet, at least for now… I could only hope it would stay that way.

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Next… physical and base activities. I stared down at the plate in front of me, watching sideways the dense vibrations of the steak, potatoes, and corn that covered it. The clink of silverware echoed throughout my family's dining room, along with extremely palpable tension as they watched me. I hadn't touched food since I'd truly been human. I picked up the fork next to the plate, not liking how it felt, but ignoring it for the moment. I looked again at the food… the meat looked crawling, and gross; dense and clumsy like my own human body. Yuck. The potatoes were all right, but they weren't much better… they were fried and sluggish. Only the corn looked edible at this point… it had a clearer, lighter feel to it. I scooped some of it up on the fork and munched on it.

Yes, that was alright. Watching how my body worked to indirectly stimulate the process of turning food into energy, I was again disgusted by how clumsy and inefficient the entire thing was. Why did it all have to be done through a physical level? I had not liked eating since I was a little kid. And now, neither did I feel like using forms of energy denser than I was, or wanted to be… to fuel myself. I finished the corn. It was alright, if not good. The meat and potatoes I didn't touch. I didn't want them near me, and so I left the table, wandering outside. It was cold out, the human body shivered, but I didn't acknowledge this as quickly as I should've. The pulse of life and energy now was slower, more methodical, but it was still there under the cold and frozen landscape. My human feet began to slow their own process, too, when I looked down to realize I had them planted in a snowbank. It didn't bother me… I preferred the cold. It was less heightened than heat was, and while heightened energy and emotions had their place…

I shook my head and went back into the house. I needed to take care of this body, no matter how little love I had for it. I just needed to take care of it… I touched my awareness on the nerve endings and bloodflow, re-stimulating them to a healthy level with barely a thought before heading upstairs, instead. I picked up my fiddle on the way up, carrying it cradled in my arms. There wasn't much I could do right now… but my destiny, for a short while, was here. Live, co-exist with other humans, reproduce, raise a family… yes, it was all something I needed to do, experience, learn about, and grow through… I let the human emotions stay well in my mind, intermixing with the Dragon calm and perception of the universe around it. I suppressed and gently washed away the longing that occasionally wanted to spike up, when I thought of my wings, when I remembered traveling the worlds, dancing through energy unbound and unrestrained by a physical body. It wasn't worth worrying about. I wouldn't be here long. But at the moment, I did need to be here…

I paused in my old room, looked down at the single amaryllis plant that sat on the bookshelf under one of the tiny, slanted windows. Three leaves of it were dead, the fourth wilted badly. Not enough sun… it was dark out now, but I reached outside… and felt the tendrils of energy that still clung to the ground and everything the sun's powerful rays had touched. I swept the traces of the energy up, amassed them gently, and drew them into the plant, stimulating its life flow, the tiny spark of creation and growth that spiraled up from the bulb and roots underneath it. Tiny green shoots of leaves thrust outwards tentatively as the dead leaves crumbled away to make room for them.

A half-smile crossed my face. I turned my gaze upwards, looking at the extravagantly colored and detailed murals that coated the walls. The theme was a forest, currently, but I'd started again painting over parts of it with new ideas as the surge of creativity led me to do so. I recalled what someone had said to me a long time ago, I didn't remember who… that it was being human that put the life and emotion into my artwork. It didn't have to be the human part of me that did that… but it was a certain kind of art that came from my humanity as opposed to my draconity, and both deserved to be embraced. Humans could create, in many senses of the word. My music could be a human creation, or a creation of something else entirely. I knew the music of the worlds, but I knew the music of emotions just as well. My art, while no longer lacking in technical skill, due to my connection beyond technicality, had at first been having a tendency to be bland and cold, and at other times, it had held subtle qualities of emotion and energy that weren't human, and so couldn't be identified with by humans… not exactly. But since I'd tapped back into the human part of my mind, I'd drawn out the emotions and used them in my creation. The effect was stunning, to those who cared to look at it, though I tried to keep it away from them. That was the main reason it was all on the walls of my room. No matter I'd painted over all of it again and again. There were dozens of coats of murals on my walls. I could still see and sense the feelings and energy behind each and every single one. Their images, emotions, colors, vibrations… every aspect of them seeped into the room, unmarred by the fact that another mural covered them physically. My room was becoming more beautiful in this aspect, the more I painted over the old with the new.

And then there was writing. It was another way to express, albeit a slightly more difficult one until I figured out how to tap into the strongest centers of expression this limited human language possessed. It was then my point and my decision to try and focus a volume of feeling and truth into my literary work. It didn't come out quite as well as the art and the music, but again and again I worked at it, expressed concepts, emotions, interactions, and growth. Even if nobody would read it, I had to speak truth and experience in a way the humans could understand. I had to struggle through it, let it flow out, put it into enough of a tangible and physical form that it could hopefully carry the truth through. You could read farther into writing than just the physical; Aubri and I had done that in the scholar's library… but for those who can't read farther yet, I will give you the best I can manage in this limited physical format. I will tell my story and I will try to express the substantial lessons I've learned from it. And hopefully, you too can receive something positive from it.