"Well, the thing that happens when a dragon dies of old age is that all their magic spontaneously evaporates," she says. "And the thing that happens when a baby dragon dies for seemingly no reason is that they never had any to begin with. Dragon magic comes in a bunch of different sections, and one of them has the job of keeping the dragon alive, and that's the one that loses magic first if there's any magic missing. I learned how to replace that section with ialdae first, because that's how I cured shrens; their problem was that their stay-alive sections weren't quite full and their magic was pulling all the strength out of their wings to make up for it. But then one of the cured people had all his dragon magic vanish because he was old, so all he had left was the ialdae in the stay-alive section, and I had to figure out how to replace the rest so he could talk and shapeshift and breathe fire and so forth again."