"I have come to this place since Taranis took me in. It's so peaceful and quiet. It's hard to be in the city and around the knights all the time, and while I love them, sometimes I just need everyone to shut the fuck up. Does that make sense?" Yelena said as they walked through the soft grass.
"Does it ever," Valentine replied. “It's like how my family is. They have always worried about me, and sometimes it is smothering. I can see why you like it out here. I dealt with it by making really good silencing wards."
Some strange magic pulsed through the ground, and he caught sight of a tall monolith of black stone on the edge of the forest.
"What is that? Can you feel that?" he asked, the thrill of new magic dancing through him.
Yelena laughed softly. "I can. It was why I was first drawn here. I have asked Taranis about it, but he says it was here long before him. He doesn't know who raised the stone, but it feels... Well, I'll let you see what you think."
Valentine loved that she wanted to show it to him, and that she didn't want her ideas about it affecting his impressions of it. He placed his hands on the stone and closed his eyes. There was a current running through it, a slight vibration that set his magic humming. It was ancient, and it almost felt alive.
Valentine rested his cheek against the stone, trying to get more contact with it. He had studied psychometry and was good at it. Not Auntie Ella’s level of good, but good enough.
"Huh, it refuses to be read. Did you try?" he asked Yelena.
"Many times. I don't mind that it's a mystery. Well, some days it drives me crazy, but mostly I just accept it," she said and placed her ear to the stone. "I like how grounded I feel when I let my energy sync with it. I need that some days."
"Me too," Valentine admitted. "I get so deep on a thought pattern or a project that I dissociate clean out of my body, and it always takes me a while to feel like I am back in it."
Yelena opened her eyes, and they were full of understanding. "That is exactly it. Valentine, you do understand that I'm not like the other fae dragons, don't you? That I am really a dragon that is masquerading as a fae? I'm...backwards? I had to learn to be this as you see me?"
"I do. Taranis told me how he found you, and what you went through, to the best of his knowledge. I won't pretend I understand how that would feel, but I know you are true dragon first, and everything else second," he replied, not quite knowing why she had brought it up.
Her fair brows drew together. "It doesn't bother you?"
"No," he answered without hesitation. "You acting like I was going to turn evil bothered me. You being disgustingly sweet and perfect bothered me. When I look back on it, I think I sensed that it was an act, and that's why it got to me. I've never cared about you being a wild dragon, playing human. Somedays I feel like I'm playing human too."
Yelena's smile was achingly sweet. "Then I will show you what I am, and what I can do. I don't know why I am so different. I know I came from the north. Far, far from here, and I was abandoned. I don't have many memories of that time. It means Inever fit with the wild kind, and I'll never really fit with the fae kind."
"I understand that feeling too," Valentine said and dared to put his hand over hers. "We can not fit in together."
Yelena kissed the top of his hand before stepping away. "You might want to stay there."
Valentine watched her walk back out through the grass, her lovely body and hair glowing in the sunlight. The gold turned to silvery white as her magic surged to the surface, and she shifted.
Yelena was all the colors of a glacier. Greys and whites and blues. Valentine smiled when he saw that her silver hand had indeed changed into a silver paw. He couldn't wrap his mind around that and had to stop wondering how the transformation magic would work. Nothing about Yelena's magic was normal.
She turned her diamond-shaped head toward him and looked at him with the same pale blue eyes. The white horns atop her head curled back almost like an antelope's, ending in sharp points. She stretched out her wings, and their color was a pale blue and purple.
The dragon painted on her chamber door was her own. And Valentine had been drawing her for weeks and weeks. How was that possible?
Valentine dared to walk closer and placed a hand over the sudden yanking feeling in his chest. "You are stunning, baby girl."
Yelena opened her mouth, and he saw her fangs, which were sharply pointed and looked almost translucent like diamonds. Valentine had never seen or read about any dragon like her.
She turned back to the trees and opened her mouth. Instead of fire, what came out with her roar was ice.
Valentine stumbled back in surprise, tripped, and went back on his ass. "So that's how you could freeze yourself and not die."
His heart was pounding so loudly, he could hear it in his ears.Yelena's wings and tail began to lift and move in a mesmerizing dance. Magic hummed in the air, and ice gathered on the grass around him in swirling, strange patterns. When she opened her mouth again, it was to make sounds in a calling of high notes like she was a large exotic bird.
"You are...singing?" Valentine couldn't believe it. He somehow knew that this was something no one had ever seen her do before. The patterns in the frost around the glade began to pulse with light and power, and her song made the ice crystals start to vibrate until they were singing a song of their own.
Valentine's eyes filled with tears, overwhelmed by the magic of the moment. He could feel the song as it vibrated through his body. The dragon side of him rolled to the surface, and it watched Yelena's beautiful display.
Mate, it said, full of yearning.
It had been trying to tell him since she had almost cut his throat, and he had tightened the bindings around it so he wouldn't hear the truth.
