She is so much smaller than me, so much weaker...
Yet her kiss breaks me in a cruel instant.
My inner fire has always been strong. Butthis… this is an inferno. One I pull closer, yanking her body into mine as my aching tail finally gives in to its long-held-back desire to slither around her breasts.
I use both arms to crush her into me even tighter. I am burning alive beneath her lips, and I still cannot get close enough.
Plaintive mews fall from her mouth as she undulates her hips. I am fully awake—not in the stone sleep—but my staff has turned to granite. The drag of her slit over it is both the best and worst thing I have ever felt.
I do not wish for her to stop. And yet... it is the most painful torture. I do not merely want the slide of her crevice over me. I want inside of her.
I wish to fuck her. In this bathtub. Upon my throne. Against the sleeping glass.
Everywhere. Anywhere. That is where I wish to take her, with her soft thighs around my waist and her lips pressed to mine?—
A pounding at the door shatters our kiss.
“Sovereign,” my First-in-Command says on the other side. “The horde has finished First Meal and awaits your words before our raid.”
Sovereign...
I’d nearly forgotten our scheduled reckoning. A band of seafarers crashed upon our shores on their way to the Convergence Games in Pridehaven. Then they dared to attempt the wasteland crossing by foot, despite being warned—and offered rides at triple the price—by our Mountain Goat ferry service.
Of course, they must be dealt with. Swiftly, lest other travelers grow bold enough to evade our fees.
Shame dampens the fire this Eryx Oblation has sparked inside me.
“I am not weak,” I inform her.
“I didn’t say you were.” She blinks at me with such guileless innocence, I wonder if she practices it in the mirror.
“If you wish to serve as a vessel of my release before my flight, you may.” I meet her faux-innocent, weak-eyed gaze with my much stronger one. “But no matter your sexual cunning, it will not sway my hand when it is time to sacrifice you to Eryx for the good of my people.”
Her soft body was wrapped so tightly around mine, then, suddenly, it is gone.
Using my chest to push off, she launches herself to the other side of the tub with a dramatic double-stroke of her arms.
“Go, then. Have a nice flight, terrorizing people born unlucky enough to be unable to afford your absurd travel fees.”
“If they are too poor to pay and too slow to outrun our wrath during the day, they should not travel. For they are too weak.”
I rise from the tub, water sluicing down my body. I hate that my staff remains fully extended, despite the shame I feel for this overlong dalliance.
The Eryx Oblation quickly averts her eyes from the length she was grinding against moments ago. Yet somehow still manages to shoot back, “Whatever helps you sleep at night—oh wait, I mean during the day.”
She’s being obstinate again in that sarcastic way I do not like. And never should have indulged.
Dark thoughts swirl in my mind as I pull on my flight leathers. “It was unwise to end your punishment before the ascribed time,” I growl. “Once again, you prove why our rituals must be followed to the letter. Mercy is for the weak.”
“Or, you know, the kind of people who actually have a conscience. But potato, potahto.”
I stop in the middle of putting back on my dagger bandolier to demand, “What is potato?”
“No idea!” she bites back. “It’s just something humans say to point out we’re saying the same thing.... I think it’s a food, maybe? And I’m not even sure I’m using it right—hey, weren’t you saying something about needing to leave?”
I do need to leave. Forthwith. I should have already reported to the front gates to lead our launch.
I have no time for further argument with someone who will be dead by my hand in two more nights.
