[ She looks up. Finds herself studying him carefully, this man who is also the Dragon, someone her mother spoke fondly of when she curled up with them both in a cramped bed whose mattress had been near-nonexistent. ]

The woods. [ Maggie offers simply, calmer now; more sad and uncertain than she was minutes before.

Her hands come up to wipe at her eyes again, but this time, she finds that it's harder to fight the tears when they just fall anyway. ]

Sometimes, we'd hear her. But it also wasn't her. Out there.

[ Plaintive whines. And the following silence. ]

And then she came home one day and asked us if we wanted to go in a hike.

[ Then, softer: ] And if we wanted to see what we could grow up to be.