"Try."
He's silent for a long moment. My hands are still on his back, feeling the heat pulse beneath my palms, feeling the way his entire body is trembling.
"You are asking me to be vulnerable," he says finally. His voice is flat. Controlled. But I can hear the strain underneath it.
"I'm asking you to be honest."
"Honesty is dangerous."
"Why?"
Another long silence. I can feel the tension coiling through his shoulders, the way he's fighting the urge to pull away from me.
"Because if I tell you the truth," he says quietly, "you will leave. And I cannot—" He stops. Breathes. "I will not survive that."
My chest tightens. I lean forward slightly, pressing my forehead against his back.
"I'm not going anywhere," I say. "But I need you to tell me what this is. What we are."
He's quiet for so long I think he won't answer. And then, in a voice so low and heavy it feels like it's coming from the center of the earth, he speaks.
"I have been alone for eight hundred years."
I freeze.
My breath catches in my throat.
He continues, his voice stripped of all formality, all control. "I have built empires. I have commanded armies. I have survived wars and plagues and the collapse of civilizations. I have done everything in my power to ensure I would never need anyone. Never depend on anyone. Never allow myself to be vulnerable to the inevitable betrayal that comes with attachment."
His wings shift slightly beneath my hands. The membrane trembles.
"And then you walked into this room."
I don't move. I don't breathe.
"You climbed onto this table with your small, fragile human hands and your sharp tongue and your complete lack of fear. And you touched me. And for the first time in centuries, the stone-lock did not just ease. It disappeared. Completely."
His voice cracks. Just slightly. But I hear it.
"I do not know what to do with that," he says. "I do not know what to do with the fact that I am no longer coming here because of the calcification. I am coming here because of you. Because when you touch me, I feel something I thought had petrified centuries ago. And when you leave, the cold returns. It's not the calcification—it's the absolute, aching absence of her. And I do not know how to survive that."
The silence that follows is deafening.
I'm still straddling his back, my hands resting on his warm skin, my heart pounding so hard I'm sure he can feel it through my palms.
The heat beneath my hands pulses. Steady. Rhythmic. Alive.
I open my mouth to respond.
But I don't know what to say.
Because he's just laid himself bare. He's just shattered every carefully constructed defense he's spent centuries building. He's just admitted something so raw and vulnerable and terrifying that I can feel the weight of it pressing down on my chest.
And I don't know what to do with that either.
So I do the only thing I can.
I stay.
