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The girl sat at the window, staring silently out of it. With every passing second she was becoming more agitated and anxious, though her demeanor never changed. She remained expressionless and sat as tall as she could moment after moment. Her eyes were the only things to betray her mood. Those eyes that were so normally a bright green, fiery with her fierceness and yet soft and gentle with her innocence were now so downcast, dull, and drab shade of green that they were almost gray.

As rain began to fall the girl leaned forward and pulled open the window. The water suddenly began pelting her skin, clinging to her hair, her eyelashes, her lips. That feathery red hair was dampened and made a earthy brown by the rain that had begun to engulf the girl. Those locks, each one made of fire, and yet as soft as the down of a newborn swan, were made coarse and bland. The raindrops that had clung to her eyelashes began to slide down her porcelain doll cheeks so that she looked as though she were crying softly. The lipstick she wore stained the rain that clung to the girl's lips red, and as the drops fell it seemed she was bleeding.

The girl slowly stood to peer out the window. Something had caught her eye. Something had grabbed at those tiny, frayed tendrils of her mind, or what was left of it, and sparked her imagination and curiosity. She held fast to the wall with one hand and leaned as far out of the window as she could. Something was flying around at the tail of the storm. As the girl watched this, her normal ferocity began filling her eyes again, and a smile played at her lips.

In this moment the door to the room opened and a boy who could almost be the girl's twin stepped in. As he saw the girl at the window, something within him cataclysmed. His soft, blue eyes were suddenly filled to the brim with worry, sorrow, fear, and wrath. The smile that had decorated his face before transformed into a set line, and his movements toward the girl were quick and purposeful.

His voice was pained as he cried out and grabbed at the girl. He pulled her down from the window seat and slammed the window shut.

The girl wasn't phased. Again she was at the window, staring out of it as intently as she had just moments before.

She wanted to point at it and say Brother look! Look at the dragon, the magnificent dragon! But she said nothing, for she was so enthralled, so enraptured by the mythical beast that she could not take her eyes off of him, could think of nothing but him for more than a few seconds.

However, the girl did not need to say anything at all to her brother, for soon the dragon was drawing closer, closer, ever closer to that little window seat on the second floor of the house. The window was flung open wide and the wind – oh, the wind! – from the dragon's wings was strong enough that it lifted the girl and her brother from the floor and tossed them about. When the dragon had finally arrived at the window, the girl saw that he was so large that the tip of his snout barely fit into the window.

The girl was completely mesmerized by this dragon's scales. The color of them, the way they shone in the lights, the way they reflected everything around and made the images more crisp and clear than even reality ever could. The opalescent white scales were like mirrors, but so much more severe. When the girl looked into them she saw everything. She saw the room she was in, and the little house that held it, the land the house was on, the planet the land inhabited, the galaxy surrounding the planet with all its millions of stars and meteors, and lastly she saw the universe in all it's magnificent entirety. She saw each of these things as clearly as though she could reach out and touch them, grasp them in her hands, hold them in her arms and watch over them with all the long and care she had in her.

Her brother, though, saw naught but dull, white scales. His vision had been dimmed with the filth of the world. He saw with his eyes, rather than his soul. He saw only what was right in front of his, not what could be. No, never what could be. And the dragon's jaws frightened him. Those large, powerful, sharp, strong teeth that could slice through him as a guillotine. He was frightened, and he ran away.

The girl saw the beast for what he actually was. She saw a powerful being who was also gentle and kind. A creature of magnificence and omnipotence who could just as easily hold a rabbit in his teeth with love and care as he could crush the house in which this girl stood. The beast was as enthralled with the girl as she was with him.

This dragon, this all-powerful being of immense knowledge, was enraptured with the girl's innocence, imagination, love, care, ferocity. Her mind, which was filled with all sorts of opulent fantasies, was an amazingly pure one for the world in which it had lived for so long. The only faults in the girl he could find was that she cared too much, worried too much, and considered herself worthless. She put others before herself so often that almost all of her problems had been left unresolved.

The dragon saw this as perfection, for true perfection was unobtainable by humans, or beings of any other kind for that matter.

In one fast flowing movement, the dragon shifted so that one of his swirling, ever-changing, rainbow eyes could far more easily see the girl. The girl took a step forward and reached out for a scale of the dragon. She fell into that vast moving iris and floating through the colors. The colors dipped and wove and danced around the girl, amorphous shapes of hues and shades.

Once her hand touched the dragon's scales, though, it all faded. The girl let out a cry as searing pain ate it's way up her arm and began consuming her body. This quickly faded and when the girl opened her eyes once more, the dragon's eye was closed and a great crystalline tear fell from it. The tear shattered with the sound of bells when it landed, and the smaller drops hardened into shards of a crystal.

The great beast had fallen under a vast amount of pain long ago, decades – nay, centuries! – before the girl had ever even existed. He had experienced the cruelty of man back when the mountains still moved and the trees had lives of their own. He had seen the corruption before the fall of magic, and before his kind had left the world. Despite this, he had constantly been searching for one human, one pure-minded and perfect creature, one who would not be sullied by the world and who would not fall into the mass hysteria that might be caused by a dragon roaming the earth once more. In those long centuries he had never found one such being, until now, and this had caused him more and more pain with every passing second.

It was this pain that the girl had felt consuming her, this pain which had filled her mind with images of men in armor, holding swords and shields, and a king on a white horse shouting for the destruction of the great dragon. It filled her with sorrow and horror and she fell to her knees, tears spilling from those eyes of green fire and streaming down those ceramic cheeks.

Moments later a warm light hit her face and she opened her eyes to find rainbows and prisms in the air around her and dancing on her skin, created by the summer sun floating in through the window again (the dragon had disappeared; why and to where, though, nobody knows) playing on the facets of the crystallized dragon's tears which still surrounded the girl. In that instant she knew that she could hold the world in her arms as she seen in the great beast's scales.

She gathered up the tears and hid them away. The most magnificent treasure in the world was hers and she knew that if anybody else were to look upon them, they would appear as stone, nothing more.