A part of me wanted to use my wings to fly back to my tower, though given that I'd have to land up top unless I wanted to show anyone who might be looking far more than I wanted them to see, I wasn't certain if that was a good idea. Even without the possibility of giving an intimate show, there were a few practical considerations, as well as the question of whether I wanted to scare the people living there by letting them see a strange, almost monstrous, creature land on top of the tower. If my wings' appearance had turned out feathered and somewhat angelic, I might have considered it but given that my wings looked like a cross between those of a bat, some strange reptilian creature from before time and a stingray with legs, that didn't quite work. Sure, the wings were beautiful but it was an alien beauty, something that strongly spoke of something 'other', without any connection to myths or legends from before the change, at least not to any famous enough for me to be aware of.

So, instead of letting my wings carry me back, I had to resort to floating with my cloak. Somehow, a method of travel I had loved deeply and seen as an incredible marvel had suddenly grown stale, leaving me utterly unsatisfied instead of content and happy. Maybe that was just the way it was. If you had been used to eating only tasteless cold gruel but were then given some hearty stew, you'd see the stew as an utter delicacy but if that stew was then replaced with something even better, something like pizza, lasagna or whatever your personal example of the perfect meal might be? In that case, the stew might turn unappealing, something only eaten to sate the basic necessities of life while yearning for that pizza you can't have.

It was the same with locomotion. At first, I could only walk and run, but my strength and agility gave me the mobility to parkour my way around before I learned to shadow step, which added an entirely different dimension to that. Then, I had managed to enchant my cloak in a way that let me fly, or as I now thought of it, let me float, allowing me to take to the skies where I largely felt at home. But now, with the wings in play? It was an entirely different experience, as if I had merely been a visitor of the skies but now, I was a creature of them, entirely at home. Which would, sadly, mean I wasn't at home on the ground any longer, though I hadn't noticed a shift in that, so maybe I was the avian equivalent of an amphibian, equally at home in the sky and on land.

So, I used my cloak to return, pondering the best way to deal with the problem of needing open-backed clothes to let my wings out, something I usually wasn't too keen on. Maybe I could use something akin to a swimsuit, with a single strap going up between my shoulder blades, though I'd have to find a way to make sleeves work with that. Or I would have to go sleeveless, maybe throw on a cloak to conceal that fact a little and let my wings bunch that cloak up in the middle, maybe even use my cloak of levitation for that.

In that sense, the wings were a little annoying, any garment or armour I could wear while allowing for the wings to be used needed to have an open back, leaving preciously few ways to have that garment encircle my torso unless it was something with an included belt. That, in turn, meant any kind of armour was essentially impossible and, to make matters worse, I had no idea just how durable the slightly raised ridges my wings had retreated into were. Sure, they might be strong enough to withstand abuse but I might have to test that, just as I might have to test how sturdy the wings were in the first place and what I could do to restore them if they got injured. Or, more likely, when they got injured, I was fairly confident that it would happen at some point, I got in too many fights for anything else.

For a moment, I had the amusing image of using the wings like some sort of poncho, wrapping them around me as a substitute for armour, especially if it turned out they were solid enough. They might even work as weapons, the claws at their tips looked to be fairly sharp and quite nasty. More importantly, the wings were constructs of my magic, meaning there wouldn't be any muscle strength involved, instead, their power came from my magic or, when speaking in terms of the system, any calculations in regard to their power should draw on my Intelligence, not my Strength. It would be interesting to test just how true that was and how it worked out, to say nothing of the question of which the various traits I had would apply if they were classified as parts of my magic, constructs of my Astral Power as opposed to actual parts of my body.

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After landing at the top of my tower, I started to make my way downstairs, intent on doing a few tests. For that, I moved into one of the chambers I had set aside for such experimentation, mainly by adding a lot of reinforcement with my magic, mainly Earth, Crystal, Darkness and even Ice and Wind, so that any mistakes could be kept contained. Sure, I had made the room, meaning I'd be able to unmake it but with the structures in place, I was fairly confident that nothing would accidentally get through and even any loud noise would be contained thanks to the Wind Magic, so nobody would be disturbed.

To start, I conjured a chunk of normal Ice and formed it into a roughly humanoid shape before taking off my top so I could let my wings out without causing any damage to my clothes. Then, after taking a deep breath, I struck out with my wing, letting the clawed tip whip forward only to stumble as the wing acted like it was supposed to and put a lot of pressure on the air it was beating against. The wings were made to easily lift me into the sky and carry me, even without rapid flapping so a simply swiping strike like I had tried would always cause me to stumble unless I managed to brace myself.

Still, I had managed a glancing blow on the dummy, cracking some of the Ice and when looking at the clawed tip, there wasn't any visible damage, nor did I feel any pain, making this a good start. It also looked like the movement of my wings was determined by my magic, not any muscles I may have or eventually develop, at least I couldn't feel any strain on any of my muscles, though that might be because I had only struck once. But even earlier, after flying around for some time, the limiting factor had been mental and the rest of my body, my legs, arms and the lack of warmth, not exhaustion in my wings.

But it was only a start, so now I needed to find ways in which I could use my wings to strike without having them act like the wings they were and pull me off balance. For that, I started with simple movements, slow and steady, while assessing how much air resistance the wings met with the different strokes, soon finding that any swing was essentially out of the question. Unless I wanted to strike somebody behind me by bending over and slashing them down, swinging them wouldn't work, not with the way they were anchored to my body.

What had some promise was trying to stab with them, essentially moving my upper body back and forth, allowing one wing to stab forward easily while the other wing pulled back. I needed to brace myself quite a bit, but after some thirty minutes of testing that particular movement, I was starting to get the hang of it and began testing the method on conjured Ice targets.

Luckily, the claws on my wings worked fairly well for that kind of movement, even if they didn't look like they were optimised for it. Soon, as I started to shatter the brittle Ice targets, I began to work on my speed, trying to make each strike faster than the last. At that point, I realised three things. One, the wings were quite sturdy, providing more protection against outside force than my flesh, though I wasn't about to test what fire would do to them. The second thing was that this kind of fighting was highly limited and not really practical. The wings, while a working weapon, limited my movement on the ground a great deal, simply because their very presence altered my centre of gravity and their added drag pulled me off-balance, almost no matter what I did. As long as I was just standing and stabbing, everything was fine but the moment I tried to move at the pace I would usually use in combat? I started to stumble around with as much grace as a drunken bull and given that grace and agility were major parts of my defensive strategy, it didn't look like the wings would be part of this, at least not when I could avoid it.

Lastly, the power of these claws was somewhat underwhelming, they seemed to lack any distinct power, there was nothing that made them 'Dragon Claws' other than the fact that they were at the tip of my 'Dragon's Wings'. From my understanding, a Dragon's Claws were weapons capable of rending anything, ripping through protections with laughing ease to utterly destroy what had roused the Dragon's ire. But these claws, they were, well, they were just claws, without any special characteristics and even their shape wasn't really optimised for striking, piercing or any other type of swift attacking movement, if anything, I would think the claws were made to grip something and make sure whatever I had a grip on wouldn't get away. That realisation brought with it a few, somewhat unsatisfying, answers and a lot more questions. Maybe I would understand later, or when I managed to fully transform into a dragon, once that form was finalised.

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