Adrissu scoffed, hoping his ridiculous grin was imperceptible from where his face was buried in Ruan’s shoulder. After a moment longer, he pushed himself back up and carefully eased his softening cock out of Ruan, both gasping at the sensation. His release leaked steadily out of him, oozing from between his legs onto his sheets.
“Wait here,” Adrissu said, leaning out of his doorway to peek into his study. Vesper was coiled on his desk, peering curiously in their direction—he rolled his eyes and, ignoring her, flicked his wrist to send the clean cloths that were stacked neatly on one of his work tables sailing through the air across the hall and into his hand.
When they were both cleaned up, and the mess magicked out of his sheets, Ruan moved to gather his clothes from the floor.
“I suppose I should get back to work,” he said, a smile slowly returning to his face. Before he could get far, though, Adrissu had grabbed him by the waist and hauled him back to bed. Together they tumbled onto the clean mattress, and Adrissu pushed himself against his back and enveloped him as much as his elven body would allow, as if he were in his draconic form and curling around his hoard.
“I think you’re done for the day,” he murmured. Ruan settled against him as he laughed. The sound was sweet and clear, more pleasing than any music Adrissu had ever heard.
Chapter Seven
Severalhourslater,afterRuan left to prepare for his imminent journey, Adrissu was left with the cold, sinking realization of what he’d done.
For nearly three years he had fought against every instinct to be with the human. He had promised himself that he would never allow the weakness of indulging in his base instincts, of letting Ruan get even the tiniest foothold in his heart. Now he sat miserably at the edge of his bed in nothing but his dressing robe, alone with the knowledge that he had finally broken against the unfair, unfathomable magic that had drawn him to Ruan in the first place.
“One more day!” he muttered to himself, shaking his head. “You only had to hold out one moreday.”
Vesper had made her way across the hallway and was now peering up at him curiously, her black eyes gleaming. She was concerned about him. He ignored her, but she slithered up into his lap anyway.
There was nothing to be done. He knew that when Ruan returned he could not hide behind the pretense of trying to keep the human away, or pretend that their fated connection did not exist. All he could do was resign himself to it, and wait.
Why did it have to beRuan? It could have been any other dragon on the face of the planet, and Adrissu would have been able to accept it eventually. It only made sense for dragons to be drawn to their own kind. But a human?Thishuman? Half the time he couldn’t say he even liked the man; but whatever damned magic allowed fated mates to exist in the first place kept drawing him back, over and over again, no matter how rationally he had tried to convince himself that it would never work out—that there was noreasonto want to be around Ruan.
The dark thoughts rattled around in his head until well past sunset, when his tower had gone pitch black in the night. Finally he roused himself enough to bring a flickering orb of flame into his hand, deciding that he needed to clear his head the best way he knew how. He descended to the first floor, where his trap door to his cliffside lair was hidden, and threw himself down it.
It was a sheer drop only another flying beast could traverse: it would be impossible to climb up from below, and a fatal fall for anyone coming from above. The tunnel went straight down and was narrow at first, allowing him to step off and free fall for a moment in his elven form; but through his own painstaking design, it began to widen into chasm, so that as he finished his transformation into his natural, true form, it was wide enough for him to spread his wings and slow his descent enough to safely land within the confines of his lair.
The drop was familiar to him and had no sense of novelty anymore; but it always sent a thrill of excitement through Vesper that he felt in his own chest. Stretching all of his limbs, he carefully opened his claws where he had been holding her, and deposited her on the stone floor. She slithered over to one of the many marble dwarven statues that he had set up in this chamber, curled around the arms of her favorite—a dwarven king with a hammer held out like an executioner’s ax—and blinked up at him.
I’ll return, he said to her, and her tiny serpentine head nodded once. On all fours he moved through this chamber, lingering for a moment in the chamber where his stores of gold were piled, then headed for the opening.
It was just wide and tall enough for him to move through, leading out to a cave mouth hidden near the midpoint of the cliff face that could only be seen from dead-on. Travelers on the road above could not see it, even if they peered down from the very edge of the cliff, and no ships out at sea would have any reason to come close enough to the towering cliffs to spot it. Until mortals developed better means of flight, he had no concern that he might be spotted entering or leaving his lair, especially in the dead of night.
The sheer drop down the cliffside was always his favorite part: the cold ocean air against his scales, the smell of salt filling his nose, the snap that shook him to his core when he finally opened his wings after so long of being crammed into his tiny humanoid form. To stretch his wings as he plummeted down to the ocean was incandescent.
Just before he could plunge beneath the surface, he gave a powerful flap of his wings and began to ascend once more. The wind whistled across his body as he lifted himself higher and higher, until he was far above the cliff. When the trees of the land below were impossible to pick out as individuals, only large shapes of greenish color in the darkness, he began to fly out over the sea.
There was something primal about flying, about being out in the open sky like this. Dragons were intelligent, of course, and some of the most powerful beings in existence—but something about the lives of mortals seemed so much more complicated than dragons ever seemed to be. Here, there was nothing but the stars above him and the sea below. Adrissu wasnota beast, but here he felt like he could be one: a simple creature with simple desires and a simple life. He could forget, or at least pretend to.
He flew aimlessly, sometimes dropping down enough to let his wings skim the surface of the water, and sometimes soaring so high it became hard to breathe. There was nothing but the pure instinctual pleasure of flight: the adrenaline of nothing at all around him, nothing supporting him but the strength of his own wings.
It had been too long since he’d been like this, he thought. He had been Adrissu for too long and allowed it to cloud his thinking. This was who he was: Zamnes, a dragon with the world at his fingertips and an eternity ahead of him. He could live like this, away from Ruan. It may not be pleasant, but it was possible. It all seemed so much more simple in the sky.
He flew until the first hints of sunrise began to spread across the sky, then he started to head back to his lair. He hadn’t kept track of where exactly he had gone, but finding the way back to their lair was one of the most basic draconic instincts. The magic that suffused his body would guide him where he needed to go.
The sun had only begun to peek over the horizon behind him when he could see the cliffside of his home in the distance. He was entirely at peace as he coasted along toward it, thinking of the nap he would enjoy atop his hoard when he was back in his lair.
And then an arrow whistled past him from above, nicking the thinnest part of his wing. Snarling in an instant rage, he halted himself with wings outstretched, hovering for a moment to find the fool who had tried to shoot him. He could just make out a humanoid figure at the very edge of the cliff, looking down, pulling back a bow—and, realizing he’d spotted them, scrambling away.
Zamnes, Scourge of Polimnos, had not been sighted in nearly thirty years. He would find the unlucky idiot and ensure that no news of his flight spread to interrupt the peace. It took only a few thrusts of his wings to ascend the cliffside and look down on the archer that had tried to shoot him.
It was not a lone figure he spotted: on the cliffside road about a hundred feet from the edge, four densely-packed wagons pulled by mules had stopped. Humans screamed and fled from the wagons, and even the beasts brayed and wickered nervously. But between him and the caravan was a tall human, trying to nock another arrow with trembling hands—and running up behind him was Ruan.
Ruan.The caravan. Zamnes roared with anger, embers fluttering from his mouth as he barely contained his fiery rage. Damn the human, damn the caravan, and damn his own terrible luck.
He could not kill them all now. He could not kill Ruan even if he tried—he had never tried, but he felt the truth of it deep in his bones, inscribed there by the magic that had drawn them together in the first place.
“You idiot! I told you to leave it!” Ruan was shouting, glaring at the human who was now clearly too afraid to fire his bow once more. His sword was drawn, and for all the tension in his face, his hands did not tremble as he shifted to an offensive stance and stared Zamnes in the face.
