It was about an hour after dusk that I started my work, sitting in the middle of the frozen stream, right where it originally tumbled across the edge and down the cliff, though given its frozen state, there was very little tumbling right now. Just a cliff of ice, sculpted in a flowing and natural fashion where water sticking to the rocks below had frozen before starting to accumulate layer after layer of ice until the entire waterfall was frozen. It looked quite fascinating, especially when the light was hitting it just right, reflecting and refracting off the ice to create a myriad of colours and patterns. Even I, who disliked anything relating to light on general principles, could see the beauty in this, though that didn't change the fact that I welcomed dusk a great deal.

Now, I was trying to form the right wings for me. Not just wings, that would be trivial, but the correct wings, the wings that could carry me through the sky and into the future, towards whatever came next. This wasn't just about flying, as I now realised, it was also about a certain need to self-define and self-identify, otherwise, the wings I created would be wings, they might even work as I intended, but they wouldn't be 'my' wings.

And so, instead of simply going ahead and creating a simply set of wings, I decided to go inwards and start with an observation of what I knew about 'my' wings. Given that, to my understanding, a few of the visions I had experienced in the past, especially those concerned with the crossing of divides, worked on a level beyond the physical, essentially examining some sort of combination of my Mind and Soul, understanding them should give me something to go on. Dreams, those visions, memories, all of them could, and maybe should, be part of what made the wings I would create mine, as would my aspirations for the future.

There were the strange, yet mostly mundane dreams I faintly remembered from my childhood. Dreams of bouncing, of flying and other assorted strangeness, though as I went through what memories still remained, I quickly realised I wouldn't be able to get all that much from them. They were too old and distorted by time to find any coherence within them, especially as I couldn't be certain what might be relevant and what was just a dream and nothing more. If there even was such a thing, at this point, I was essentially flying blind and without wings to soar with, leaving me little more than a ballistic object hoping that gravity wouldn't make the landing too painful. Or something like that, metaphors could be quite hard but it was the only thing I had to try and make sense of the kaleidoscope of images running through my head.

Other things were easier to put into perspective, though, given the general nature of those realisations didn't help me much. Sure, it was fairly easy to see that my prevailing love for high places had some weird, metaphysical relation to avians like Lenore, as their perching behaviour was a potent survival strategy. But how that might relate to dragons was an entirely different question. Would it mean that the best places for me were similar to the one I was currently occupying, a place from where I could take flight and gain a lot of speed with very little effort as I dove down the waterfall and along the valley below? Did that say something about the shape of 'my' wings and if it did, what did it mean?

Should I try modelling 'my' wings after those of a hawk or some other perching raptor, optimised to give me speed and control after jumping off a ledge while trying to catch some elusive prey? From a certain point of view, the idea had merit but at the same time, I couldn't help but shake my head at it. If there was one thing I was not, it was a physical predator, if anything, I could imagine myself closer to an owl, still a perching raptor but one focused on stealth and the silent takedown in the night instead of speed and power. Still not what I considered to be my primary pursuit but closer to what I considered my true self, or something like that.

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Or was I going at the entire idea from the wrong direction by likening my behaviour to that of mundane creatures from before the change? If there was anything I considered myself not to be, it was mundane. Arcane Magic had become such a cornerstone of everything I did, so obviously there had to be an element of arcane magic immortalised in my wings, not just from a practical standpoint but also from a conceptual standpoint. It wasn't that I had to use magic to create my wings because I lacked other means, it was that my wings had to be magical to be 'my' wings.

Sadly, that realisation didn't help as much I would have hoped, if anything, it meant I had to discard a few of my earlier ideas and go back to the proverbial drawing board.

Luckily, there were other ideas and memories for me to draw from and these few actually held things I considered to be viable. These came from the few memories I had of actually being a dragon, be it the ritual the Grandmother had used to allow me to help Sigmir get rid of the corrupting curse she had laboured under when we first met as the first distinct memory of that or the crossing of the second divide here on Terra just a few months ago when I had started the quest for my wings.

All these memories had some similarities, especially as there seemed to be some fluid aspects to them, making me wonder if there was a certain fluidity when it came to what would become 'my' wings but that was merely idle speculation. One of these somewhat fluid elements was the colour of my scales, they had been subtly shifting from vision to vision, though it was always some form of silver or blue, similar to the Ice I conjured, but often with different accents. In some of them, the colour was a lot more on the blue side of things, with silver aspects, apparently focused on nothing but Ice, while in others the colours were a lot more varied, with a silver base before shifting in an almost rainbow-like fashion until ending in a black border, outlining each of my individual scales in a fairly fascinating effect.

Similarly, even the basic body plan seemed to be somewhat fluid in those visions. I distinctly remembered tearing the curse out of Sigmir with my claws but in the latest vision, those claws appeared to be a lot smaller, making me wonder if that came from the shift in my mentality over time as I started to step away from the martial training I had received on Earth before the change and towards a purely magical mindset. Maybe there was even some sort of subconscious awareness going on, telling me that Sigmir was more than just a character in a video game, which might explain some of my behaviour. Or I might simply be more broken than I knew, to the point that I didn't consider a romantic relationship with what I should have considered as little more than a work of fiction as strange. Maybe because I had never thought I could develop a romantic attraction to anybody, so a fixation on something fictional might have appealed to my subconsciousness because it was better than nothing. Or I might be trying to psychoanalyse myself without proper training and understanding, or even access to all the facts, which was probably the most likely scenario. After all, who could claim that they truly knew themself? I certainly could not.

That realisation made me focus on that last memory, the one from crossing the second divide. If I was continuing to develop, this would likely be the state closest to the one I was currently in, meaning it would be a good first step to create and, more importantly, understand this pair of wings before making something that would continue to develop and change as I did.

They would need to be directly linked with my magic, not just created by it, as if they were part of my body, not just a shell created around me, which might be part of the reason why my previous experiments had continuously failed, I had tried to create something external to my body, not additional parts of my body, even if they were made from Ice, Snow and a whole lot of magic.

Finally, after thinking for most of the night, as I sat there in the amazingly cold wind howling up the valley and bursting across the frozen waterfall, I made a decision, hoping it was the correct one. Sadly, I also realised that I wouldn't be able to try just yet, not with dawn lurking just beyond the horizon, waiting to set the world alight and disrupt my concentration at the most inopportune time.

But that was okay, there would always be a next night and I wasn't in that much of a hurry.

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