Page 30 of Davoren
The opening that revealed itself wasn't a door or an archway. It was an absence, a place where the wall simply wasn't anymore, revealing darkness beyond that seemed to breathe with its own life. The air that exhaled from it was warm and thick, carrying scents that made my transformed body sing with recognition—deep earth and sulfur, yes, but underneath that something wild and ancient that I knew without learning was pure dragon.
"This is a dragon's path," Davoren said, his voice carrying reverence I hadn't heard before. "No human has ever walked it. No human could survive it unchanged." His ember eyes found mine, and in them I saw promise and warning combined. "But you're not human anymore, are you, little one?"
The moment we crossed the threshold, the world changed. Not gradually, not gently, but with the absolute certainty of stepping from one existence into another. The mountain swallowed us whole, and I felt it happen—felt the volcanic glass flow back together behind us like water finding its level, sealing us intodarkness that was somehow more complete than the mere absence of light.
My human self would have panicked at the totality of it, the way the black pressed against my eyes like physical weight. But my transformed body interpreted the darkness differently, found comfort in it, recognized it as something that belonged to us—to dragons, to creatures that lived in the mountain's heart and called molten rock home. The golden lines on my skin responded immediately, brightening from their gentle glow to something more substantial, casting light that didn't pierce the darkness so much as negotiate with it.
Davoren's marks blazed brighter than mine, the patterns on his chest and arms creating a lightshow that painted the tunnel walls in amber and gold. We became our own light source, marked creatures moving through unmarked space.
The tunnel itself defied every underground space I'd ever experienced. This wasn't carved or constructed—this was a natural lava tube, created when the mountain was young and violent, when rivers of molten rock had flowed through this exact space before cooling and leaving behind this perfect, smooth-walled passage.
"No human could walk this path," Davoren murmured, his voice taking on new dimensions in the enclosed space. It didn't echo—the tunnel seemed to absorb sound rather than reflect it—but it surrounded me, came from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. "The air here is wrong for human lungs. Too much sulfur, too little oxygen. The pressure is wrong. The temperature would cook human flesh in minutes."
As if to prove his point, I became aware of how easily I was breathing, how my transformed lungs processed this alien atmosphere like it was made for me. Because it was. Because I was made for this now, rebuilt at the cellular level to exist in spaces that would kill what I used to be.
His hand never left the small of my back as we descended, that constant pressure that was guidance and claim combined. The touch seemed amplified by the darkness, by the way the tunnel forced us close together. Every few steps, the passage would narrow enough that his chest brushed my shoulder, or widen enough that he had to adjust his grip to keep me centered. Each change sent fresh awareness through me—of his size, his strength, the controlled power in even these small movements.
We were descending into the mountain's heart, and every step felt like shedding another layer of the human world, another tie to what I'd been before the bond claimed me.
That's when I noticed the gemstones.
They studded tunnel walls like frozen stars, raw and uncut but impossibly beautiful. Rubies the size of my fist glowed with inner fire when our light touched them. Sapphires deeper than midnight seemed to pulse with their own rhythm. Diamonds caught our illumination and shattered it into rainbows that existed in spectrums I couldn't have seen with human eyes. They weren't decorations—they were part of the mountain itself, grown over millennia in conditions no jeweler could replicate.
"Dragon's hoard," Davoren said, noting my wonder. "Not gathered but grown. The mountain makes these for us, payment for our guardianship." His hand traced one particular cluster of emeralds, and they flared brighter at his touch. "Every dragon path is different, unique to its creator. This one is mine, has been since I first claimed this mountain."
The intimacy of that—of being in a space that was essentially inside him, part of his essence made physical—sent fresh heat pooling between my thighs. I was walking through his secret self, the passages he'd created when he was young—or younger, at least. When he'd been alone for so long that he'd made the mountain itself into a companion.
The scent grew stronger as we descended—sulfur and earth, yes, but underneath that something that made my mark pulse with recognition. Dragon musk, maybe, or just the concentrated essence of what Davoren was when he wasn't wearing human shape. It filled my lungs with each breath, coated my throat, sank into my skin until I could taste him on the air. The enclosed space amplified everything—his body heat radiating against my back, the whisper of his breathing that seemed to match mine, the way his presence filled the tunnel until there was no room for anything else.
"You're trembling," he observed, his thumb tracing small circles on my lower back through the silk dress.
I was. Fine tremors ran through me, part arousal, part anticipation. The tunnel was changing around us, widening gradually, and I could taste something new on the air—heat that wasn't just warmth but presence, power that made my transformed body sing with recognition.
"We're close," he said, and his voice carried satisfaction and promise in equal measure. "Almost there, little one. Almost to the place where you'll learn what it truly means to belong to a dragon."
The words sent flame straight to my core, and I stumbled slightly, would have fallen if not for his steadying hand. He caught me easily, pulled me back against his chest for just a moment—long enough to feel him hard against my lower back, long enough to know his control was fraying too. The contact lasted only seconds before he set me back on my feet, but it was enough to make us both breathing harder.
"Just a little farther," he promised, his voice rough with want. "Then I'll give you everything your body has been screaming for. Everything and more."
The tunnel opened without warning, stone giving way to vastness so absolute my mind couldn't immediately process it.One moment we walked through enclosed darkness, the next we stood on a precipice that jutted out over impossible space. My legs locked, every instinct screaming danger even as my transformed body recognized this place as home in ways I couldn't articulate.
We stood at the rim of a hidden caldera, a perfect bowl carved into Mount Kerynthos's peak that shouldn't exist according to any map I'd studied. Below us—far below, though the distance was hard to judge in the strange light—a lake of lava sprawled like liquid gold poured into a god's drinking cup. Not the violent, spitting lava I'd expected, but something almost peaceful. The surface rose and fell with gentle breathes, occasionally sending up bubbles that popped with sounds like distant thunder. The heat that rose from it should have been unbearable, should have cooked us where we stood, but instead it felt like the warmest bath, like being held.
The lava was contained by a perfect circle of obsidian that formed the caldera's floor, black glass so pure it looked like frozen night. The contrast was stunning—that golden, living light against absolute black, creation and void existing in perfect balance. The obsidian had been worn mirror-smooth, and in its surface I could see the lava's light reflected and multiplied, creating patterns that shifted with each bubble, each breath of the molten lake.
But it was what lay above that stole my breath entirely.
Looking up, I could see straight through to the night sky. The volcano's mouth opened in a perfect circle high above us, and through it the stars burned with intensity I'd never witnessed. No clouds, no atmospheric interference, just pure starlight pouring down into this hidden sanctum. The opening was wide enough that I could see constellations I recognized—the Dragon, the Lovers, the Chalice—but they seemed different here, closer, as if this place existed partially outside the normal world.
"The mountain's true peak," Davoren murmured beside me, his voice carrying the kind of reverence people usually saved for temples. "Hidden above the false summit that humans see. This is where the mountain touches the sky, where earth and heaven meet."
My eyes had adjusted enough to see more details now, and what I saw defied explanation. The caldera wasn't empty—formations of crystallized lava rose from the obsidian floor like frozen waterfalls, each one catching and refracting the light in ways that created smaller auroras of gold and amber. Steam vents released perfect spirals of glowing mist that danced up toward the stars before dissipating. And there, in the absolute center where the obsidian floor was most perfect, was something that made my mark pulse with recognition.
A depression in the stone, circular and shallow, perhaps twenty feet across. It looked like a nest, if nests could be made from geological features. But it wasn't empty. The depression was filled with something that glowed with its own soft light, neither liquid nor solid but something between. It looked like spun gold had been crossed with cloudstuff, then given its own inner fire to make it luminous.
"Solidified dragon flame," Davoren said, following my gaze. His hand found mine, fingers interlacing with the certainty of possession. "The rarest substance in existence. When a dragon's fire meets perfect conditions—the right stone, the right temperature, the right intention—it doesn't burn. It becomes."
The reverence in his voice made me look at him, really look at him. In this light, with the lava's glow painting his skin gold and the starlight catching in his white hair, he looked like something from the old stories. Not the sanitized fairy tales humans told, but the older ones, the ones where dragons were forces of nature given consciousness, where they could create or destroy with equal ease.
