The response is building now.
I feel it in the spaces where my domain lives—that vast reservoir of Oblivion that required millennia to master. The power is agitated, pressing against its containment with insistent pressure. It wants to act. To protect. To claim in the only way dragons know how to claim.
Mate her.
The impulse crystallizes into explicit instruction. Mating would bind her life to mine. Mating would extend her existence to match my own span—centuries instead of decades, millennia instead of centuries. Mating would transform the depleted reserves her body struggles to maintain into a sustainable state, her bloodline magic stabilizing into a form that doesn’t require physical sacrifice.
Mating would save her.
Her eyes don’t open.
Her body doesn’t stir.
She remains exactly as she has been since I carried her here—unconscious, vulnerable, unaware that the creature guarding her is fighting a battle far more dangerous than any the Choir has presented.
I take a step toward the pallet.
The distance shrinks. Close enough that I smell the ash in her hair, the copper tang of the blood seeping through her bandage, the underlying scent that is uniquely hers—clean sweat, dried herbs, the particular chemistry of a body I’ve mapped without ever consciously choosing to study.
My hand reaches toward her again.
This time I don’t stop it.
My fingers brush her cheek—featherlight, testing. Her skin is cooler than it should be. Not cold, not yet, but trending in a direction that makes my power flare with violent protectiveness. The touch sends information flooding through my awareness: temperature, texture, the micro-tremors of muscles that can’t fully relax, the subtle flutter of pulse beneath translucent skin.
She’s dying.
Not quickly. Not dramatically. But the trajectory is unmistakable to someone who has observed death in all its forms across an immortal span. Her body is consuming itself to fuel magic it can’t sustain. Without intervention, the process will accelerate. Without intervention, she will burn through her remaining reserves in months. Weeks, maybe, if she continues using her power at the rate the Reach demands.
Mate her now.
The instruction is no longer a suggestion.
Mate her. The command is not love. It’s possession at its most fundamental—binding her life to mine so completely that death itself could not separate us without my consent.
I want her.
And she can’t consent.
