Icannot move.
Not because of the stone-lock. That is gone. My skin is warm, yielding, entirely fluid beneath her palms. My spine moves like heated marble, my wings shift without resistance, and there is not a single mineral grind anywhere in my body.
I cannot move because I am paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of what I have just done.
I have exposed myself.
Completely.
Eight hundred years of carefully constructed isolation, eight centuries of iron discipline and formal distance, and I have just shattered it all with a single confession to a fragile human woman who is currently straddling my lower back.
I have been alone for eight hundred years.
The words echo in my skull like a death knell.
I said that. Out loud. I allowed those words to escape my mouth, to vibrate through the air, to land in her ears where they will remain forever. I cannot take them back. I cannot unsaythem. I cannot rebuild the wall I have just demolished with my own stupidity.
My internal monologue is a catastrophic spiral.
She will mock me. She will pity me. She will gather her things and leave this room and never return, and I will deserve it because what kind of ancient, powerful creature confesses his loneliness to a human he has known for three weeks? What kind of pathetic, desperate fool allows his vulnerability to spill out like that?
I wait for her to move.
I wait for her to climb off my back, to step away, to put distance between us.
I wait for the inevitable rejection.
But she does not move.
Her palms remain pressed against my skin, steady and warm. Her weight is still settled against my lower back, her thighs bracketing my sides. She has not pulled away. She has not fled.
She is still here.
The realization does not calm me. It terrifies me further.
Because if she stays, if she does not run, then I will have to face the reality of what I have just admitted. I will have to acknowledge that I need her. That I am no longer coming to this room for the stone-lock. That I am coming here because when she touches me, the cold disappears. And when she leaves, it returns.
I do not know how to survive that.
I do not know how to reconcile eight centuries of self-sufficiency with the sudden, overwhelming need for another person.
Her hands shift slightly. Not pulling away. Just adjusting. Her fingers press gently into the muscles along my spine, and the warmth radiates outward, sinking deeper into my body.
She is anchoring me.
I do not deserve this.
But I cannot bring myself to tell her to stop.
The silence stretches. Heavy. Charged. Full of everything I cannot say.
And then, finally, I force myself to move.
It is slow. Deliberate. My body responds without resistance, my spine flexing smoothly as I push myself up from the padded cradle. My wings shift, the membrane folding neatly against my back, and I sit up on the edge of the reinforced table.
The movement is effortless.
No grinding. No stiffness. No stone-lock.
