"Yes?"

"Hello, Avar. Have you heard the news?"

"I don't believe so."

"A small group of offworlders recently appeared with a verified miracle."

"All the infant shrens and everyone resident to a house has already been handled, as far as anyone knows. There doesn't seem to be any miracle supply shortage and the offworlders are working on finding everyone else who would benefit from their attention. I took the liberty of putting down your address."

"Thank you," he says. "I appreciate it."

"You're welcome, of course. I'll let you go tell Mial and Finnah now."

Finnah, for her part, is dozing in the backyard on a picnic blanket in the sun.

"Are you awake over there?" inquires Avar.

"Depends, did I win a million aaberik?"

"No. I just got a call from Alys. A group of offworlders has appeared and started handing out miracles to every shren in sight. They've done all the houses and all the babies and they're working on the stragglers. Alys gave them our address, but she didn't say how soon they might come by."

"No shit," he affirms. "Alys is hardly the type to joke about this kind of thing."

"I guess not. I - wow. Wow."

"Yeah. Know where I can find Mial?"

"Last I saw him he was fussing with his scoot."

"I'll look there first, then. Thanks."

"Hell yeah, miracles, don't you say that the same way you say 'canceled scoot race'."

"Okay, yes," he acknowledges, half-smiling, "miracles, miracles are awesome. I am happy for everybody who's been happily miracled and downright ecstatic for the babies. I just... look, you have to have some inkling by now of how I feel about being a shren, right?"

"Complicated as fuck," diagnoses Finnah.

"...what, really? You are aware you can make rude metaphorical gestures at draconic superiority and so on without having to actually be a shren right at the moment you're doing it?"

"Yes, really. I. Look. I don't really care that much about whether or not I can fly in my natural form," he says. "Racing scoots is more than enough for me. It'd be nice, but so would being a unique, you know? And between the two I'd go for being a unique first, no question. So... the only reasons to stop being a shren are the chance I might infect somebody, and purely to stop being a shren. And there's no fucking way I'm going to do it purely to stop being a shren. All that's left is contagion, and... and I don't know, Finnah. I just don't fucking know."

"Yeah," he says quietly. "Fuck, does it ever. But that's just it, don't you see? I can't let it win. If I stop being a shren just to get away from that, I'm letting it win."

"I don't want to beat my head against the wall that is fucking Draconic for forever. It's not like it's going to be smug and tell all its friends if I let it win."

"Yeah, well," says Mial, "it's been said that I have trouble knowing when to quit."

"Noooo, really, you?" snorts Finnah.

"I know, it must come as such a shock." He sighs. "Anyway. I'll think about it, I guess. Until they show up. Whenever that is. Just... don't be surprised if I say no."

"What about being contagious? If you ever lose a form?"

"That's the only reason I haven't yet decided to say no," he says. "And... I mean... if these people don't mean to just leave all the future striped eggs in the lurch, their miracles must be renewable, right? So - even if I lose a form, even if I lose a form around a dragon in their natural form - it's not nearly as bad as it could've been. I'm keeping the extra safety spells on my scoot, mind you. I'm not going to be careless about it."

"Mm-hm." Finnah rolls over to sun her other side. "Well - don't be surprised when I take it instantly."

"Yeah. Have fun being a miracle."

"Oh, will do. I'm going to fly to the sun and go for a swim."

He laughs.

"I'm going to buy a saddle and take hot girls on aerial tours," she adds. "I'm going to go to Dragon Island and check out that firepit Aurin's mentioned."

"And I'm going to keep racing scoots and inciting obnoxious letters to editors," snorts Mial.

"I bet they get slightly less repetitive when you are The Last Shren," says Finnah.

"Shit, they'll be lining up to interview me on that basis alone. At last, the fame I deserve."

"...No," he admits. "I sort of distantly hinted at it a little bit. I said 'I need to think about this' and not, say, 'hooray!'."

"...I know your dad is your dad as opposed to, say, my mom, but that makes me extremely nervous, does that make you even slightly nervous?"

"My dad... is very much my dad," says Mial. "I don't know. He's never - he even says 'dragonish', you know? Basically only to me, but still. He gave up his line name for me. I don't feel like I have a reason to be nervous."

"He's... he's your dad. I dunno though. My mom got divorced over me, and then... And the very degree the miracle-workers show up on our doorstep any further time we spend being shrens is more our fault than all the previous decades put together."

"Well, now it's going to bug me until I go talk to him. Might as well get it over with," he says, getting up and dusting himself off.

"Sorry," calls Finnah.

"You weigh, what, ten pounds, I'll be done in no time," drawls Finnah.

He cackles.

Finnah lounges.

"That's a relief," says Finnah.

"Yeah. ...I wonder how Aurin'll take it. Aurin will probably tell me I'm crazy," he decides.

"Probably, yep."

"So, pretty much like any other stunt I've pulled in my life."

"Maybe more so."

"Well. Yes."

"Are you going to get that over with too, or let him assume until the miracle-workers have been and gone that obviously next time he sees you you'll be a dragon?"

"...I'm not sure. If I'd actually made the decision, I'd go tell him about it, but this in-between thing I've got going... I don't know. If they don't show up in the next couple of days I will, even if I haven't made the final call by then."

"Mkay."

There is a flurry of confused panic. She did not teleport there, not in ferret form with ferret hands. She must have been pushed. Why did that work? Someone check the wards. Someone call our wizards. Someone get ahold of Keo, add the malachite and copper representatives simultaneously, something's wrong with her. Does she look familiar to anybody? She looks sort of like a minor crystal line; have any crystal women been having kids with jets at around the right time? Someone call the genealogists.

"I've got the crystal for the Paraasilan house," says the white rep. Shift. "Oh, no, it's in my other form -" Shift. Here it is.

Piro shifts and rings it.

There are a number of spells on the shren. One to keep her fed without her being able to make voluntary movements; one to stop her from making voluntary movements, although the esu was accomplishing that pretty well all by itself. Various kinds of wards, including several very aggressive ones against scrying.

"Yes? What is it?" says Lazarus.

"Yes," he says. "I'm just - slightly stunned by the amount of the thing that happens when you don't fly that she has. Oh, but Keo is here with her mildly alarming mind magic, hello Keo, thank you for whatever you did about that. She's not a shren anymore, in case I am the only person here who can tell by looking. Um. Let me just think about the best way to miracle through all those spells, goodness whoever came up with all this is a nasty customer... someone should probably inform Libby, this is the sort of development Libby would like to be informed of, I will do it when I leave if no one else has by then. Oh goodness."

"The esu is still technically there," Keo says. "Just not experienced. It doesn't seem to have helped very much."

"She may have just been - very distracted," murmurs Keo. Hello? she ventures.

Can you talk? Keo inquires.

There were some spells on you keeping you from moving, but you should be able to open your mouth and speak, now.

"I've blocked it off temporarily with magic," Keo says, "but to make it go away permanently you need to fly. You should be able to do that now."

"Fly?"

"Flap your wings and move around through the air. You're also going to need to eat."

She makes some more nonlinguistic mumbly sounds and tries to figure out voluntary body movements. Flop wriggle.

"You're going to have to stay in the air a little longer."

"That did it."

"...He's a separate person from me," Keo says, after realizing what the miracle means.

"Oh. ...There's more people?" she asks, beginning to be excited. "How many?"

"...Here, or everywhere?"

"Either!"

"There's a little over thirty people in this room and several billion worldwide."

"I don't even know how many that is," the miracle says dreamily.

"...one to a body," summarizes Keo.

"What?"

"Are you having trouble with seeing...?"

"You probably don't have a name, do you," says Keo.

"What's that?"

"A word that means you specifically."

"Oh. 'You'... 'me'... 'I'... 'this'," she says. "Not those. Different thing. Do people have names usually?"

"Yes. Especially dragons, although I don't think you can get one that will stick now."

"Stick...?"

"Dragon names are magical, but they have to be given before a certain age and you're older than that. Unless the miracle-worker can do something?" Keo looks at Lazarus.

"Oh, yes, probably," he says. "I can also do something about - I don't have the vocabulary, excuse me - she's locked out of the only one of her available alternate shapes that she's taken? Because it died?"

"The ferret form?" asks the blue opal representative. "You can give it back to her?"

"Yes. Or free it up entirely, I don't know which she'd like better. I also don't know how much magic either one will take, but the bulk of the enormous magical crisis is past as far as I can tell and I can probably afford to experiment. Unless there is another group of dragons who is about to drop dead at any moment from easily fixable magical causes, which, now that I'm not distracted by a great big pile of horrifying, I'm beginning to suspect might be the case..."

"Uh, who?" asks the diamond representative.

"You can fix old age?" asks the iron.

"I can fix quite a lot of things," says Lazarus. "I can see magic and have access to a nearly unlimited supply of nearly arbitrary miracles. The only thing is that it's not immediately apparent why old age kills you. There is a difference in - in precariousness, between younger dragons and older ones, but I'm not sure where it's coming from. And it looks like if I fixed it too naively you would all just continue growing a foot a decade forever, which has got to get unmanageable at some point..."

"Quite," says the largest representative present, a gold who is pushing 4,000.

"I suppose I could just make all adult dragons variable length - pick any size between twenty feet and your personal maximum via normal growth rate, anytime you like," he muses. "And probably institute some sort of reasonable maximum so that a few million years from now some dragon or other does not decide to swallow this planet just to be obnoxious... I'm just throwing ideas around here, but I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work."

"Can we get back to you on that?" inquires the white opal. "In the meanwhile I have a list here of shrens who haven't been cured yet, unless you've been to see them without updating us."

"I have not! I would like that list! Um - but is there any warning before old dragons spontaneously die," he says. "Enough time to fetch me so I can do magic to them, preferably. Because if there isn't I might rather focus on that until it's solved."

"Er, well, no," says the gold, "but perhaps we could figure out exactly how long we're going to be separately."

"Ye-es... it's just," he says plaintively, "your species' magic has been so obnoxiously arranged in the time I have known it, I really want to apply the most elegant and precise solutions I possibly can in case there is yet another terrible thing no one has told me about lurking around the corner and it matters how well I design my miraculous interventions."

"Some time spent looking at precariously old dragons and muttering to myself," he says. "Less time if I have someone to talk to who is moderately well versed in the theory of why dragons die of old age the way they do. If you have a theory of that."

"It's pretty mysterious," Narax puts in.

The dragons whose magic is bumping together and swapping little bits look at each other.

"I'm pretty sure that's also how shren contagion worked, when it did," he adds. "But now it doesn't anymore. I wonder if it will be as easy to fix this as it was to fix that... I wonder..."

"...I have my elegant solution," Lazarus announces, "but I don't have enough miracle magic to apply it. That can probably be fixed, though. In the meantime, I expanded the range of swapping-little-bits-of-magic for a while, so everyone's precariousness will be minimized while I seek out bigger miracles. If you don't have anywhere else to put the nameless miracle girl, I'm sure Libby would be happy to talk to her and look after her for a bit. Libby is the coordinator of the miracle expedition."

"How can we get ahold of Libby? Or, for that matter, you?" inquires the turquoise. "Keo isn't a formal council employee and if we can just get communication crystals we won't have to use her as a relay."

And now that Lazarus has left the problem of procuring even bigger coins with Libby where it belongs, he can go round to all the addresses on this list and proclaim that he is a miracle distributor from another world here to distribute miracles.

"Hello I am a miracle distributor from another world!" says Lazarus. "Would you like a miracle?"

"I want one and I should get Mial and double-check with him - do I have to do anything? - MIAL THE MIRACLE-WORKER IS HERE ARE YOU POSITIVE YOU DON'T WANT A MIRACLE?"

"You don't have to do anything! You are miracled!" says Lazarus. "...Who doesn't want a miracle?"

"He says he did!" Finnah says. "I haven't checked yet."

"Oh. Well, I fixed that," says Lazarus. "Shrens aren't contagious anymore. As someone just demonstrated rather thoroughly by dumping a shren into the middle of a meeting of the dragon council. I hope they are very unpleasantly surprised by the total lack of infections, whoever they are. She was a hundred and sixty years old and she hadn't ever flown before. She needed magical help to figure out how to move and talk."

...Mial is speechless.

"Holy fuck," says Finnah. "She can move and talk at all? How in the hell did they get her to fly?"

"The unique green-group was there and she used her mildly alarming amounts of mind magic," Lazarus explains. "To make her not experience the esu and talk to her telepathically to jump-start her language comprehension and give her enough body-memory to flap her wings with. By the time I left she had figured out how to use her senses of sight and hearing, and learned that large numbers of people exist. She seemed very excited about that. It was adorable except for the part where it was completely horrifying."

"It sounds it," says Mial. "But also: shrens aren't contagious? Shrens are natural-formed shren in the middle of Dragon Island and nobody caught it not contagious? Then hell no I don't want a miracle. Thanks all the same."

"Can we, like, call you back somehow, if Mial changes his mind," says Finnah, "and also holy hell I guess if you want to draw the unique green-group's attention to shrens that's the way to do it, hell of a stunt, poor kid..."

"Communication crystals are deeply inefficient," says Lazarus, but he hands one over anyway.

"What's wrong with 'em?" asks Finnah, pocketing it in case Mial would be disposed to do something dramatic in a fit of emotions about miracles.

"Where I come from, the thing we have that is similar to communication crystals works like this: people have phones, and phones have numbers, and if you know someone's phone number you can call them on their phone. So you do not need yet another pair of communication devices for every two particular people who want to be able to get ahold of one another. When I am done solving all of these very important magical crises I am going to find someone to talk to about inventing a system like that here. But in the meantime, if there isn't anything else, I should probably continue distributing miracles."

"I," snorts Finnah, "have a persistent trouble with the fact that if you know someone's address you can send them a letter. I think I like crystals better. But go miracle people, you're awesome, thank you!"

"It'll go like this: 'Aurin, I turned down a miracle.' 'Holy shit, you are insane.'"

"Probably. I might want, like, half my weight in candy if he unexpectedly decides to be a lizard about it and never wants to talk to me again."

"Aurin?" says Finnah. "I was sort of nervous about your dad, but Aurin? He couldn't muster the inertia."

Aurin is on his couch necking with some girl.

Well, Mial appears on the outside of the house, so it is up to Aurin whether or not to answer the door.

"Yeah, I came to tell him. Also, I heard I'm not contagious anymore, the miracle worker said something about somebody dropping a natural-formed shren into the middle of a council meeting and nobody catching, can you confirm?"

"My representative must not have gotten to me on the list of people to call with news, yet. I haven't heard anything about that."

"Tea?" asks Alys, leading Mial past the necking Aurin-and-girlfriend towards the kitchen. The fireplace has long been replaced with more modern equipment.

Aurin starts coughing, which is a really unfortunate thing to start doing while one is making out with one's girlfriend. The girlfriend splutters.

...Okay, maybe he regrets his choice of delivery a little.

Aurin is back one cup of tea later. "Inconsiderate ass of a cousin," he says, "may I ask why?"

"I'm sorry I made you choke all over your girlfriend," he says, "that was inconsiderate and unnecessary. Do you actually want to know why I'm staying a shren?"

"Also asking why you were unnecessarily inconsiderate, but yes, I do actually want to know."

"I was unnecessarily inconsiderate because I'm getting wound up in advance about the amount of shit I expect to catch over this decision," he says, "and I unfairly and impulsively decided to tweak you about it, so, sorry again. I'm staying a shren because... well, first of all because if the miracle worker is to be believed we're not contagious anymore, that's what pushed me into a definite permanent decision."

"...well, that's good, but one would have naively expected it would never matter again, so..."

"Yeah. Okay. You are without a doubt going to call me fucking crazy, but: I don't really care that much about whether or not I can fly in my natural form," he says. "I don't miss it or anything. By itself it is a non-issue to me. So with contagion out, the only remaining reason to stop being a shren is purely to get out from under that word and all the nasty letters to the editor and estranged grandfathers and internal emotional conflicts that go with it. And if I stop being a shren for that reason, I'm letting the word win. In a sense I'd be agreeing that a shren is such an awful thing to be that even if I don't care about the actual impairment, I still need to stop. And of course I can't do that. I have spent my entire life not doing that as aggressively as possible. I'm not about to quit now."

"She took the miracle," he shrugs. "But she seemed to get why I didn't."

"...seemed to," says Aurin, shifting uncomfortably.

"...What?"

"I just - have you given any thought to whether Finnah might have, like. Thoughts. That are specific to having been the one who got you."

"...I really don't - Finnah has got drunk around me, you know, right, we sometimes do the thing where we go to bars and hit on girls and then whatever the tastes of the girls somebody wins? I should not be repeating the words of Fourth Glass Of Redreed Pineapple Cocktail Finnah. But such a Finnah has existed and said words."

"Well. Thanks for pointing me to that potential complication," he says. "I guess I'll... I don't even know if I should talk to her about it. But I'm still staying a shren."

"Don't tell her I mentioned it."

"I mean... maybe it will cancel out a little with the not-contagious thing?" says Aurin dubiously.

"On the other hand," he says, "with the not-contagious thing, it becomes totally safe for me to obnoxiously walk around in natural form. I mean, I'm going to wait for the not-contagious thing to be confirmed common knowledge first, I'm not about to take stupid risks with other people's wings. But I can't imagine anybody'll love me for it, even so."

"Oh, hell, Mial, why would you do that? You'll just spook people."

"Well, I'm only going to do it once their reason to be spooked has been thoroughly proved gone," he says. "And I'm not gonna do it all the time. But sometimes I just feel an intense need to be obnoxiously a shren."

"The language hasn't caught up yet, I'm not sure it's going to. Somebody tells their forty-year-old that it's okay and there's been a series of miracles and Draconic still says aieeeeeee and then you walk down the street...?"

"Oh, fuck Draconic," Mial growls.

"I did not solicit contractors to install it in my head, I'm just saying!"

"Ugh. You have a point. I will limit my obnoxiousness strategically," he says. "Maybe I can call up the miracle worker and ask him to fix Draconic while he's at it. Now that would be the obnoxious act of shrenhood to end all obnoxious acts of shrenhood. Near-literally. But," he sighs, "probably there are some people who are actually attached to the way it works now."

"I might wish it worked differently but I don't think I want anybody fucking around with it," says Aurin. "It's - it's basic."

"It hates me and I hate it back," says Mial.

"You've needed it a few times. It's - it has other words too."

"I'm not sure it's worth it."

"Please don't do rash things with - with community resources."

"I'm not going to fuck up Draconic for everyone," he says. "No matter how much I want to."

"Okay, good."

"I'm just saying, if I had the chance to speak a language that didn't hate me... if I could just for fuck's sake change 'shren' so that it meant, you know, dragon whose wings don't work. Which is what you get if you explain shrens in any sensible way to anybody who is not contaminated by this fucking vicious mind control device we call a language."

Aurin does not have anything to say about this, he just sort of looks at Mial and sighs slightly.

Yes. Sigh.

"Anyway, any further evidence that the mind control device doesn't impose sanity that you have to share?"

"Nope."

"Do you have six more people to cause to spit-take or do you want to play a board game?"

"Who else am I gonna tell? Grandfather? He didn't even call Dad about the miracles. Dad had to hear it from your mom."

"Yeah, she mentioned. There's still some chance that he's planning to turn up dramatically after enough time has passed that he figures there's no way you're still a shren," Aurin says, pulling a board game from the shelf for such things at near-random.

"How much do you want to bet?"

"Last time I made a bet with you I was out five aaberik that had spent a few decades markedly deflating," Aurin says. "I don't know if it's likely and I'm not coughing up any coins over it, but you can't rule it out yet."

"I'm not holding my breath."

Alys leans into the room. "Mial, my representative confirms what you said the miracle-worker reported, in full."

"Thank you, Aunt Alys."

"I've burned enough newspapers to have an idea. Half size and a bit."

"Which at your age would be, yeah, about thudia-size."

Snort. "A thudia whose wings don't work. Well, I won't be a hundred and seventy forever."

"And then instead of passing for a thudia you can look like a small child! Fun."

"I'm pretty sure by that point word will have gotten around that The Last Shren is unusually tiny."

"Silver thudias will have to deal with fleeing dragons wherever they go."

"Oh no," he snickers. "I feel bad for them but at the same time weirdly vindicated. Like the first time somebody wrote in to complain about an article that didn't even allude to shrens just because he recognized my name."

"How is that vindicating? The thudias thing, not the name recognition."

"Roughly the same principle, even if less directly. 'Watch out, everybody, the Last Shren is tiny and silver!' It's, well, recognition."

"With you starring as the terrifying monster. I don't see the appeal."

"If people weren't so inclined to see me as a terrifying monster I wouldn't need the recognition," he says. "At least not the same way. If existing in public as a shren was not, itself, an obnoxious act of shrenhood, I wouldn't be so compelled to find vastly more obnoxious ones and do those."

"Your psychology is a strange and twisty thing."

"So we have established."

"I know not what strange and twisty passages the information might have disappeared into," says Aurin.

"Hey, it's not my memory that's in dispute here."

"Yeah, yeah." Aurin finishes setting up the game and moves a piece.

Mial makes a move in response.