You squat once again at the top of the same tower, with the kobolds looking up from below like teenagers assembled for a rock concert, although you know that there has been some mirth among the assembly about your last disastrous attempt at flight.
{{Just pace calmly to the edge, and enter the dive with a clean, poised leap, and trust the wind,}} Dizzy-tail had said.
{{Or what I do is get back very far, and I run for all that I am worth, kicking hard off of the edge. You can see where I have torn it quite a bit, taking off from there,}} Blunt-snout had said.
You retreat back from the lip.
{{He is going to try it my way,}} you hear Blunt-snout saying to Dizzy-tail. {{Respectable enough.}}
Once again, though, you are feeling self-conscious about how your hindquarters seem to sprawl out shamefully in a sort of frog-like configuration. It is unfair. Somehow, Dizzy-tail is a dragon and is lucky enough to look like a mixture between a deer and a bobcat, and Blunt-snout is somehow built like a cross between a charging bull and wolf. What are you, Amber-fields? The frog that goes "ribbit."
Or rabbit, maybe. A scared, timid, plump rabbit...with a wide posterior...and huge, huge, huge, powerful hind-legs.
{{Maybe he froze,}} you hear from Dizzy-tail. {{I'll go get him, I guess, and we'll try again tomorrow.}}
You try bouncing on your haunches experimentally, and you really feel kind of silly doing it. It feels effortless, just to bob your haunches up and down. You stretch up onto your hind-toes, and then you crouch all the way back down. Really, after your last glamorously humiliating flying accident, you've lost all real sense of dignity, so an exercise like this one, which seems to constitute tearing the last remnants of your dignity into pieces, just seems appropriate. You stretch yourself all the way up and then crouch all the way back down. Your try throwing your weight back on them and then pressing up, and you get a satisfying little hop.
After tiring of this, you try something a little bit different. You rear back up onto your hind-legs, and you try resting your weight on them. Carefully, you stretch your legs up, heaving up the rest of your body, with your forepaws out in front of you like a tyrannosaur. This would be the first time in a while that you have attempted to stand up on your hind-legs like a human, and while it made you feel awkward and ridiculous before, you've just given up at this point on the idea of not being ridiculous. As you raise up a little bit in height, you find your posture to be not very much unlike that of the kobolds assembled out-of-view below. Does this make you just an overgrown kobold, rather than a dragon? Does this explain why you don't fly very well?
Well, maybe not. Your forelimbs remain relatively clumsy, compared with your hind-limbs, and trying to even move them independently, rather than in rhythmic, mindless motions like feet, is about as difficult as trying to move one's toes independently. It feels like you should be able to, but the limbs themselves just don't want to cooperate. As if they had a mind of their own, they just stick out in front of you automatically, like the forepaws of a poodle obediently dancing for its owner or balancing on top of a ball.
Continuing your experiment, though, you stick out your wings to the side, being careful not to upset your balancing act. As you stick them out, you analyze, mentally, how the motors that control them are different from those of either human hands or your nearly worthless draconic forepaws. They seem to automatically move in strong motions, the muscles in them being tightly sprung. They easily stick out rigidly to your sides and fanned-out in such a configuration that they feel like they are stuck that way, and it's like trying to close your fingers while also holding them rigid to try to close them again, which happens with a curious sort of popping sensation. With some tense concentration, though, it appears that you can also force them to relax and close a little bit more gently, without you feeling like you're going to wear out some delicate cartilage and get some sort of draconic osteoarthritis or something. After having proved to yourself that you can relax them, you try doing the opposite, letting your mind go and allowing the wings to lock in place at your sides like a rigid, permanent structure.
You give a light kick with your hind-legs, and you go straight up. Your wings catch at the air, and you seem to literally slide back down on the air itself back to the top of the tower, which seems to be like a cushioned slide like you used to play on as a child. You remember sliding down the slide at your school on your feet after it would rain, and it's similarly precarious and exciting. You remember one time that you fell and slightly damaged your arm doing that, which you never told to anybody. You just healed, and then next time after you healed that it rained, you went out and did it again, this time falling at the end deliberately and hitting the ground in such a manner that you didn't get injured, just practicing more and more at your "intelligent falling."
As your mind surfs that memory, you are caught a little bit off-guard as your haunches plop roughly down, and you realize that, while you were sliding down your air-slide, your hind-legs had instinctively tucked up against you as if you were curling up into a fetal position. It's as if, while you were in the air, your mind had regressed into a younger and more child-like state of consciousness, thus perhaps the child-like memory.
And with that, your wheels start spinning just like those of your child self. You start seeing air-slides everywhere. It's like you can sense them shifting about. With every wind-gust and cross-wind, you see the shapes shifting about, and you start betting that you can guess on how you can ride them down. Also, as you watch, some of the slides are rising, and some of them are falling. You almost can think that, if you can catch one of them that is rising on its own, then you would stay in place while the slide went up. It's like a mobile forest of marble-tracks, domino courses, and toy railroad parts. It's like Salvador Dali had created a moving, fluid sort of erector set.
You suppose, then, that using your wings to move yourself up must be like trying to climb up the slide. It should be easy enough. You just have to keep the visualization of slide-world in your mind. At least that's a fair guess. For all that you know, you're just going to crash directly downward and break every bone in your body, leaving Dizzy-tail once again busy healing you back up.
You gather your froggy hindquarters, then, and you direct a hop almost straight up, to where you can see a bright, yellow child's slide spiraling down toward the ground. You start sliding down on it, just like you did when you were a kid, and then...you find yourself falling off of it, another slide catching your wings and jerking your body sharply as the directional flow of air changes. The way that air moves is so strange, you realize. It is like it moves in shifting rivers, and one mass of air seems to move through another like water through an underground tunnel, moving past each other independently but also shaping each other subtly. It's not unlike a liquid, then, except that a liquid is really not all that different from an amorphous solid.
Somehow, these weird thoughts seem to be more rational, to your child-mind, than the assumptions of your adult-mind, which would superstitiously treat the places, where air is, like empty space and the solid things that are moved around by it as if the solid things were possessed by the wind to move around on their own. The assumptions of the adult-mind really are just superstitions, you realize, and now, you are a child in a world where dumb adults and dumb adult rules don't apply. You are a kid playing on the slide, and Mom and Dad aren't around to boss kids around with their dumb ideas of what's important or their dumb, wrong laws of physics that they want to enforce to ruin everybody's fun.
And as your body curls its limbs up tightly against you to make its shape more like that of a glider, you focus again on relaxing your wing-muscles that hold them open like a glider just enough for them to suffer a contraction of your chest. You claw your way up one of the slides, almost as if you were trying to climb up to the top and declare yourself "king of the mountain" but not really caring if anybody else really wanted to be king or not. Again, the idea of someone just being recognized as king was important was a dumb rule. It was the challenge of trying to claw your way up to be king that was important to a kid, whether anyone was watching or not, so you claw your way up, your chest contracting over and over again as you do so. You keep climbing up.
But eventually, it's like progress up the slide gets to be too slow to warrant all the effort you are putting into it. You decide that you are as much "at the top" of the play-slide of air as you need to be, and you find yourself gliding about at the top, looking down on the world. Wow, you climbed far up. As if from half a mile away (could you be that far up?), you can see the blob of assembled kobolds, and you can make out the amethyst dot of Blunt-snout...and where's Dizzy-tail? Oh, at the top of the tower, that's where you spot him. What's he doing up there?
From there, you look off into the distance, and you see: