Her jump carried her away from the cliff face, so she fell through the open air. The wind rushed in her face and it was the wind from her dreams, the wind she had always imagined. She could feel it, could feel what it would be like for her wings to catch the wind and lift her. There was no fear in her at all now. The ground below was rushing up, but before she had even fallen half way she felt it.

The first sensation was unexpected, a kind of lurching and a flash of pain that ran over her whole body, but the second was the one she had been expecting, the feel of wind under her wings, and she spread them wide, catching the air and pulling up from her fall to glide out over the golden desert sand. She felt a wild exhilaration run through her. This was right! This was how it should be. Everything else in her life had been subtly wrong, and she'd never quite known it, but now that she was flying she felt it. She had been missing something and now she was whole, was herself.

And as she was changed, the world was changed. The colors were all subtly different, and the line of the horizon ahead of her was crisp and clear, her eyes seeing farther than they ever had before. She could see too a kind of tint, faint and strange but there, that swirled through the air, rising from the desert floor. As she passed through it, it lifted her, and she realized that it was warm air rising. She turned, keeping herself in the rising column, and spiraled upward until she was above the level of the cliff top that lay now some distance behind her. She could see her whole world laid out below her. The nearly featureless expanse of the Circle Desert, the layered red and orange and white of the escarpment, the red earth and dull green trees that topped it, the patch of gold and brighter green that marked the fields, even the village, the houses impossibly tiny in the distance, were all crystal clear to her. And she could see the rocks of the bluff that rose above the village some miles distant as well, as clearly as she'd ever seen them from the village itself, though she was easily twice that distance from it now. She could even see what she had never glimpsed before, the second plateau above the bluffs, that stretched on until it dropped off again into the beginning of the badlands.

She almost felt like she could fly forever, but while flying she couldn't see what she looked like. She felt different. Very different. So she angled down in a long, shallow dive that deposited her on the edge of the Great Escarpment, not too far from where she'd jumped off.

She landed with a bit of a thump, not quite having judged it right, but was unharmed. Filled with a sense of wonder she looked herself over. Holding up her hands before her face, she saw that they were four-fingered and that each digit was tipped with a sharp ivory claw. They were also covered in fine golden scales. Upon a brief inspection, she saw that all of her was similarly covered, the scales smaller on her hands and larger over her torso. Her frame was still slender, but longer, and deeper in the chest and broader in the shoulders, and her arms and legs were proportioned so that she could go on all fours as easily as upright. Her feet, she saw, had three long toes, each tipped with a heavy, blunt claw. She had wings, large and golden on top with pink-veined skin on the undersides. They were bat-like and the tips of the bones that supported the thin membranes sported long thin claws, as did the joint where the bones came together. She spread and folded them experimentally. Running her hands over her face she found that she was long-snouted with a webbed crest running from the top of her head down her spine. Glancing behind her she saw that it went all the way to the tip of her tail. With delight she realized that she was looking directly behind herself. Why I can turn my head all the way ‘round! She was also, as far as she could tell, something like twelve feet long. Though a good bit of that was tail.

Having completed her examination, there was only one conclusion to make. I'm a dragon, she thought. A real dragon, just like in the stories. And yet, some things were different. All the story dragons had horns, and they had big plates on their stomachs and spades on the ends of their tails. I don't have horns, my stomach is the same as the rest of me, and my tail just kind of ends. Are the stories wrong, or am I some other thing and not a dragon at all? she wondered. She glanced down automatically at the bracelet on her wrist, and was somewhat surprised to find it still there, having grown to fit her larger arm. Though it has grown along with me all my life, so I don't know why that should surprise me. The dragon there was just like the ones in the stories, not like her.