Page 20 of Davoren
"A safeword that actually means stop. Not just slow down or ease off, but complete cessation." My hands clenched at my sides. "If I say it, everything stops. Dawn."
"Your safeword is 'Dawn,'" he agreed. "It will halt everything, no questions, no punishment for using it. But you'll also have 'Sunset' for when you need gentleness without full stopping. And 'Dusk' for when you need to pause and discuss but don't want to end the scene entirely."
Three safewords. He'd thought this through more thoroughly than I had.
The contract continued to fill itself with terms. My transformation was detailed in language that mixed poetry with medical precision. Immortality that wasn't quite human or dragon but something between—strong enough to survive centuries, vulnerable enough to feel. Immunity to fire and extreme heat. Enhanced healing that would activate fully once the bond was complete. The ability to take a small dragon formonce the bond matured, though that might take decades to manifest.
"You'll maintain your cycle," Davoren added, and I started at the implications. "Dragons are fertile only during specific celestial alignments. Your body will adapt to that schedule. Children, if they come, will come slowly. Perhaps one every few centuries."
Children. With him. Dragon-human hybrid children that had never existed before because no dragon had bonded a human so completely. The thought should have terrified me. Instead, my mark pulsed with want so intense I had to grip the pedestal's edge.
"Financial terms," he continued, pretending not to notice my reaction. "Everything I have becomes yours. Every treasure, every holding, every coin in my hoard. You'll want for nothing."
"I don't care about—"
"I know." His hand covered mine on the pedestal. "But the contract must be complete. The old laws demand it."
More terms appeared. Rights and responsibilities. Protections and provisions. The contract grew until it filled the skin completely, a document that would have taken human lawyers years to draft appearing in minutes through dragon magic and ancient law.
"Do you understand what you're agreeing to?" Davoren asked, producing a blade from thin air. It gleamed like captured moonlight, its edge so sharp it seemed to cut the light itself. "You'll be mine in ways human marriage could never achieve. Your pleasure, your pain, your very essence will be tied to me."
He paused, then added with deliberate emphasis: "And mine to you. The bond goes both ways. Your happiness becomes my imperative. Your pleasure, my requirement. If I fail you, if I truly harm you, the bond itself will punish me in ways that make human torture seem like kindness."
That wasn't in the visible contract. That was something deeper, older, built into the very nature of dragon bonds. He was as bound as I would be, just in different ways.
"I understand," I said, taking the blade from his hand. Our fingers brushed, and that familiar lightning made me gasp. "I want this. Want you."
The blade parted my palm's skin like a whisper, blood welling immediately. But it wasn't the normal crimson I expected—already it showed threads of gold, the bond changing me at levels deeper than flesh.
Davoren took the moonlight blade with the reverence of someone handling a holy relic. When he drew it across his palm, the cut went deep, deliberate, and what welled up wasn't blood as I understood it. His life force ran like liquid fire, actual flames dancing in the crimson flow, each drop worth more than kingdoms.
"Together," he commanded, extending his bleeding hand.
I pressed my palm to his, and the world exploded.
The moment our blood touched, the contract reacted like a living thing recognizing its purpose. The parchment—dragon skin, ancient and waiting—absorbed our mingled essence with an eagerness that suggested consciousness. Golden light erupted from every word, silver fire from every amendment, rose flames from every clause about pleasure and pain. The frozen flame pedestal melted and reformed, cycling through states of matter that shouldn't exist.
But the light was just the beginning.
The transformation hit me like being struck by lightning while drowning in honey. Every cell in my body suddenly decided to have an opinion about its current state, and that opinion waschange.I heard myself scream—not from pain exactly, though there was plenty of that. More from the sheer overwhelmingsensation of becoming something else while still being conscious to experience it.
My bones were the first to rebel. I felt them crack—no, that wasn't right. They sang, resonating at a frequency that made my teeth ache, and then they began to dense. Not growing, but becoming more themselves, as if all the hollow spaces were filling with something harder than diamond. My spine elongated with a series of pops that should have paralyzed me, but instead sent waves of pleasure mixing with the agony until I couldn't tell them apart.
The mark on my shoulder went supernova. What had been a contained symbol spread like spilled ink, if ink were made of lava and starlight. I watched—actually watched—the golden lines trace down my arm, across my collarbones, down my spine. Each new line felt like being written on by the universe itself, authored into existence as something that had never been before.
"That's it," Davoren's voice anchored me to reality, though reality was negotiable at this point. His hand still pressed against mine, our blood creating a circuit that fed the transformation. "Let it happen. Don't fight it."
Fight it? I couldn't have fought it if I wanted to. My skin was literally rewriting itself, becoming tougher while somehow growing more sensitive. Every nerve ending fired at once, sending signals my brain couldn't properly interpret. Hot, cold, pleasure, pain, ecstasy, agony—all of it simultaneous and overwhelming.
My muscles dissolved and reformed. I felt them unknit and reweave themselves with threads of something that wasn't quite human anymore. Dragon strength, dragon endurance, but kept in my familiar shape. The paradox of it made my head spin—or maybe that was just the blood literally changing composition as I watched. The golden threads I'd noticed earlier spread throughmy entire circulatory system, turning my blood into something that could carry dragon fire without burning.
Somewhere beyond the cacophony of my transformation, Scarlet's voice rose in what had to be the old tongue. The words meant nothing to my ears but everything to my bones. She was chanting, witnessing, recording this moment in magic itself. The ceremony required a witness not just to observe but to anchor the transformation in reality, to make it true and lasting and recognized by the old laws.
My lungs forgot how to breathe air. For a terrifying moment, I suffocated on oxygen, drowning in the element I'd never questioned. Then they remembered—or learned—how to process both normal atmosphere and the sulfur-rich air of dragon domains. The first breath I took afterward tasted like freedom and chains combined.
The changes went deeper than flesh. My mind expanded—not becoming smarter exactly, but gaining space for concepts that human brains couldn't hold. The ability to understand geological time, to feel the mountain's slow breathing, to know that Davoren's heartbeat had synchronized with mine and would remain that way for eternity. I could sense his emotions now, not just through the mark but as if they were my own. His satisfaction at the bond finally completing. His anticipation for what came next. His genuine awe at how thoroughly I was transforming, exceeding even his expectations.
My eyes burned and reformed. When the pain cleared, colors existed that hadn't been there before. The ceremonial chamber revealed new decorations visible in spectrums humans couldn't perceive—dragons painted in infrared along the walls, ultraviolet runes that spoke of bindings millennia old.
