You swivel your head around dumbly as you hang there precariously on the ledge, blinking as you take in your first sight of anything besides the wet, craggy wall of the bluff...and everything except Dizzy-tail.
There seems to be a lot of thistle growing here at the rim of the ledge. While the elevation is far from putting you back at the distant rim of the gorge, it is high enough up that the air feels cooler against your skin than it did down at the falls, and your haunches bunch up against you for warmth as it swiftly dries out the moisture on your scaly, green hide. The feeling reminds the remaining vestiges of your humanity, most uncomfortably, that you are quite naked under the sun; in a moment of madness, you think you might have just climbed out naked on your parents' roof-top, and you are expecting first-responders and police to pull up at any moment to haul you away to a psychiatric clinic. Other queers you met online always did warn you that staying in the closet would make you wacky. You shake your aching head to try to clear it, and with a final, scrabbling lurch, you heave yourself up onto the ledge.
Disappointingly, you find that the slope is far too steep to offer much in the way of immediate repose, so you find yourself beating your wings and scrambling, most uncomfortably, against the thistle-covered, chokingly sandy turf in hopes of finding more level ground or at least something more secure to hang onto. It is a little bit like attempting to climb up a roof-top that is covered in loose, sandy dried mud and pebbles that roll out from under you, threatening to send you tumbling back over the precipice. If anything, the situation is more insecure than the vertical ascent, and no matter how many times thistles bite at your wing-membranes and paws like wasps (for all you know also swarming around you), you have to just keep flapping to remain attached to the slope.
You are covered miserably in dust, with grit nagging at the corners of your eyes, as you clamber finally into the cover of a brittle pine barrens further up the slope, the trees of which have trunks like papier-mache but the roots providing, at the very least, more comfortable places to dig your toes into than a cluster of thistle. The roots of these evergreens seem to be holding some small amount of moisture, likely leftover from seasonal rains. After having made quite an amazing wreckage of some several dozen of the tiny trees that must have been holding up the ledge for centuries, you manage to secure yourself on a minuscule but grandfatherly-looking, old pine that must have been established long ago.
With a grunt, you heave your left wing over a scrub on which it has gotten caught, which stirs up some biting flies that manage to make their presence quite well-known, in spite of your protective scales, before kiting off in the wind, and you manage to get the wing furled comfortably against your side, glad to have at least something covering your hips against further attack. With some annoyance, you realize there are a few thistles and a bit of tree-rubbish trapped between your body and your right wing, which is most irritating as the obstructions are between yourself and the sandy turf, and as you lean up on the part of the anatomy of your foreleg that resembles your elbow, you have to figure out how to move the digits of your right wing to try to winnow these things out. After some straining and nearly igniting a forest fire by coughing up a few balls of flame (which only manage to mostly incinerate the bush that the biting flies came from before fizzling out), you get yourself cleared-out enough that you can lie down with relatively little discomfort.
You realize, as your left wing lies over your nakedness, that this is the first time you have really thought much about your wings. Until now, you have just passively allowed them to hang at your sides, and you have taken it on faith that dragons were built in such a manner that they would not get too much in the way. Well, your ascent up the bluff had forced you to actually put your wings to some amount of use, and you realize, uncomfortably, that you had been too much in fear for your life to really think much about the technical details of how they moved. Now, they help protect your naked body from the chill, covering your outstretched legs down to their ankles like a blanket. After the biting flies and feeling the relatively chill air after the balmy warmth of the lower gorge, you suddenly feel naked and vulnerable, and you pull your hind-feet under your wing for warmth.
{{Where are you, Dizzy-tail?}} you cry out, feeling lonely with your lover suddenly missing. {{DIZZY-TAIL! WHERE ARE YOU!}} you broadcast, not caring who hears you. {{WHERE DID YOU GO???}} you continue to plead at the unresponsive air. He could not have kited off and left you. You know he would not have intentionally left you alone here without telling you, so you ache right to the core of your being with worry over what might have happened to him. Moreover, you are helpless out here without him, still not knowing one thing about the full use of your wings and not having any idea how to hunt on your own for food. You are wracked to your core with anxiety.
{{He can't have gone far}} you think to yourself in denial, {{no, he can't have gone far}}. But you are so exhausted from your last mating with him and then the climb up that wretched bluff. You are about to expire from pure fatigue, and you are deeply in need of rest. Damn, you at least need to breathe. Just to breathe pure oxygen for a moment would be a blessing. {{Please, just wait while I rest}} your thoughts moan weakly into the wind that blows over the slope.
Returning your attention to your body, you realize just how small a part of your "chest" the pectoral muscles for your forelegs actually are. They are almost a subsidiary set of muscles tacked on as an afterthought, but they are also much beefier and stronger, in proportion to your body, than anything a human could boast of in spite of your most amazingly abysmal state of health. They are sandwiched within a double-collar bone type of structure that separates your neck from your wings, and amazingly, you can feel them squeezed inside of the narrow cuff. In your mind, the upper pectoral muscles that control your forelimbs feel like part of your neck and part of your chest at the same time, or perhaps it feels like a completely different chest that also feels like a neck or a neck that feels like a chest or...
You realize, uncomfortably, that how it actually feels to have such a structure is something you can only grasp because you actually ARE a dragon, and human thinking could never describe what it feels like to have one because a human being has never had one. Again, with a nauseating sense of realization, you realize your humanity has been ripped from you and replaced by something alien and--in your fragile and confused mind--sinister, and anything in you that is still human is trying its best not to go mad over the fact that its sense of self is being so horrifically subverted. You have been through too much, now, to go again into a choking panic attack over this. No, you must hold steady, and you must learn to control this body.
Experimentally, you try drumming your wing-digits as you would human fingers, feeling your lower pectorals rippling subtly as you move them. Your right paw strokes over your lower chest as you feel the muscle twitching and pulsing in rhythm with the drumming. You try clenching the digits together, and the membrane squashes like an accordion. You try spreading them apart, and the membrane--which you suspect regenerates easily--is pulled translucent, showing dense spiderwebs of capillaries moving blood throughout the structure. Holding a section of the membrane up to the light of the setting sun, you admire your goddess Hecate's handiwork, for a goddess of transformation must be at the bottom of this. This is all you do for a long while, entranced by the patterns.
{{You have transformed me and brought me to this alter-Earth for some reason, Hecate}} you reflect as familiar stars begin to appear in the sky. {{Help watch over Dizzy-tail, please}}. As you say your prayers, the cool of the evening sweeps quickly down the slope from the arid steppe above the gorge, and you compress your body tightly under your wing, stretching the membrane over you like a pup tent. Helplessly, you resign yourself to spending the night lying on this slope under the dubious shelter of the gnarled, old tree that your body is braced against, and you do your best to snuggle down in the uncomfortable soil.
A reflex to cough strikes you, and you nearly jump out of your hide as a small ball of flame shoots from your throat, and prayers turn briefly to curses while you flutter your slightly stung wing membrane to cool it. Sticking your head out into the chilly night air and wrapping your wing tightly around the rest of your body against the chilly night air, you spend a moment adjusting the pressure on your fire-bladder, and you figure out how to produce a light glow of bluish flame within your magically fire-resistant jaws, making your green cheeks glow like a lamp. With an inward grumble, you pull head back under your wing to trap some of the flame's warmth for a few moments before letting it go out, and you drift off to sleep, weeping softly for your lover.