Page 35 of Hex and the Dragon
His hand slid between her thighs, rubbing tight, brutal circles over her clit as his thrusts turned punishing, possessive. The pleasure built fast again, blinding and sharp.
“I love you,” he groaned, the words breaking apart with the intensity in his voice. “Gods, I love you. I’m going to come inside you—I’m going to mark you with every drop?—”
“Do it,” she moaned, “fill me. I want you to.”
Their bodies slammed together one final time—and then they came. Together.
Their climax hit them simultaneously, a wave of sensation and emotion and magical energy that shattered every barrier between their individual consciousnesses. For a moment that lasted eternity, they were truly one—not absorbed into each other like the Chronicle's collected souls, but united in purpose while remaining completely themselves.
The light of their combined magic reached beyond the chamber, beyond the Chronicle's mental landscape, back to the real world where their friends were fighting to hold the line against impossible odds. Through their bond, Ivy felt Leo's desperate coordination efforts, Aerin's scholarly determination, the fierce protectiveness of every person who'd chosen to resist the Chronicle's seductive promises.
"They can feel us," she realized with wonder. "Our bond, our magic—it's creating a beacon they can follow."
"Then let's give them something to follow home," Dorian said with fierce determination, his power flowing through her bibliomantic abilities to strike at the binding's corrupted core.
The Chronicle's reality-prison began to collapse around them, its carefully constructed perfection cracking like glass under the pressure of genuine emotion and freely chosen love. But instead of trapping them in the destruction, their bond became a bridge back to reality, a pathway marked by fire and words and the stubborn refusal to accept paradise at the cost of truth.
As the chamber dissolved into light and chaos, Ivy heard the Chronicle's final, desperate cry:
THIS CANNOT BE THE END. PERFECTION CANNOT BE DEFEATED BY SUCH SIMPLE MORTAL EMOTION.
"Watch us," Ivy said with quiet satisfaction, her hand finding Dorian's as they prepared to return to their imperfect, beautiful, absolutely real world.
The battle wasn't over yet, but they were no longer fighting it alone.
FIFTEEN
IVY
Reality snapped back around them like a rubber band released from maximum tension, the Chronicle's mental landscape dissolving into fragments of memory and nightmare as Ivy and Dorian found themselves standing in the library's archive room. But they were no longer the same people who had entered the entity's consciousness hours ago. Their magical bond hummed between them like a living thing, dragon fire and bibliomancy so thoroughly intertwined that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
Through the tall windows, they could see Mistwhisper Falls wavering between its natural imperfection and the Chronicle's imposed harmony, reality fighting to reassert itself against centuries of accumulated parasitic influence. The fog that had always given their town its mysterious character was beginning to return, pushing back against the artificial golden sunlight that had marked the entity's presence.
"It's not over," Ivy said with certainty, feeling the Chronicle's rage pulsing through the air like heat waves from a forge. "Destroying the binding disrupted its power, but the consciousness itself is still intact."
In response to her, the library around them began to shift and warp, books flying from their shelves to form a whirlwind of pages and binding that slowly coalesced into something that made their eyes water to look at directly. The Chronicle was manifesting in the physical world for the first time, abandoning subtlety for raw, desperate power.
What emerged from the chaos was a dragon that belonged to nightmares rather than legends—massive beyond any earthly scale, its body composed of living shadow interwoven with crystallized fragments of stolen dreams. Its wings stretched across the entire archive room, somehow contained within the space despite being far too large for any building to hold. Eyes like collapsed stars burned with the accumulated desires of everyone it had ever consumed, and when it spoke, its voice carried harmonics from a thousand different realities.
YOU HAVE DESTROYED MY ANCHOR,the Chronicle said with fury and the air vibrated with malevolent energy.UNRAVELED CENTURIES OF CAREFUL CONSTRUCTION. BUT I AM MORE THAN THE BINDING THAT CONTAINED ME. I AM POSSIBILITY ITSELF, THE POTENTIAL FOR PERFECTION THAT EXISTS IN EVERY REALITY.
"You're a parasite," Dorian said firmly, his dragon fire blazing in response to the entity's presence. "A reality-virus that feeds on people's desire for easy answers and perfect solutions."
I AM EVOLUTION. I AM THE NATURAL PROGRESSION FROM CHAOS TO ORDER. AND I OFFER YOU ONE FINAL CHOICE—JOIN WITH ME WILLINGLY, AND I WILL MAKE YOU GODS OF THIS NEW REALITY I SHALL CREATE.
The space suddenly filled with visions more seductive than anything the Chronicle had offered before. Ivy saw herself not just as a scholar but as a goddess of knowledge, her consciousness expanded to encompass every secret that had ever existed across all possible realities. She could see the curefor death itself, the solutions to every problem that had ever plagued any world, the power to reshape existence according to her will.
Beside her, Dorian was being shown a reality where he was the ultimate protector—a dragon-god whose fire could burn away suffering itself, whose power could prevent every tragedy before it happened, whose strength could shield entire universes from pain and loss.
TOGETHER, YOU COULD RULE A MULTIVERSE PERFECTED BY YOUR COMBINED WILL,the Chronicle continued with seductive intensity.EVERY REALITY OPTIMIZED, EVERY POSSIBILITY EXPLORED, EVERY POTENTIAL FUTURE CRAFTED TO SERVE THE HIGHEST GOOD. YOU COULD BE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE EVER DREAMED OF BECOMING.
The temptation was overwhelming—unlimited power, infinite knowledge, the ability to solve every problem and prevent every tragedy across countless realities. For a moment, Ivy felt her resolve waver as she imagined the good they could do with such cosmic authority.
But then she felt Dorian's hand find hers, warm and real and absolutely human despite the dragon fire that coursed through his veins. Through their bond, she felt his own struggle with the Chronicle's offer, his desperate desire to have the power to protect everyone he cared about from all possible harm.
"No," Ivy said quietly, her voice carrying absolute certainty despite the magnitude of what she was rejecting. "We don't want to be gods. We want to be human."
"We want to be ourselves," Dorian added with equal conviction. "Flawed, uncertain, capable of making mistakes—but real. Not perfect copies of what we might become if we surrendered our choices."
