Page 5 of Wings of Frost and Fury
If the Bone-King finds out I’ve been using alethia, I’ll be punished. He might even forbid me from participating in the upcoming mating season, which will occur two years from now.
Rationally, I know all this. And yet there’s a compulsion in my soul, stronger than my fear of the Bone-King.
I need alethia.
I need to feel the leaves melting on my tongue, one by one. I love the way the herb transforms my vision, letting me see the world in rainbow colors. I crave the incredible scenarios that burst into my mind, and the way my body thrills with every new miracle of my imagination. I crave the heat that flows through me from snout to tail. It’s a sensation like the mating heat, that urges my cock from its concealing slit and makes me spill compulsively all over the floor of my cave.
Discovery is a risk I’m willing to take, if it means I can enjoy the pleasures of alethia again. I’ll retreat, claw the fissure wider, then retrieve the plant that’s closest to the entrance. I’ll deal with the consequences later.
I shift backward, attempting to pull myself out of the crack in the mountain.
My scales scream against my flesh as they’re pried in the wrong direction. I stop moving from the sheer agony of it.
Shit… I think I’m stuck. I strained too hard, wedged myself too deeply in the fissure, and now I can’t get out.
Fuck.
Panic runs over my skin, making it crinkle beneath my scales, and a faint hiss of frost-fire emerges from my jaws.
I was afraid that a few claw marks might betray me, but this is far worse, far more obvious. I’m jammed into a crack that’s known to be infested with fenwolves, and there is alethia nearly within my reach. If any other dragon sees me here, they’ll know the truth at once. They’ll perceive my rebellion against the Bone-King, and they’ll know my shame—that I am addicted to what is forbidden.
I have to get out of here now. I have to force myself backward, even if it rips my scales off. If anyone questions me about the resulting injuries, I can say I encountered a voratrice, one of the tentacled plant-monsters on Ouroskelle, whose barbed tongues can tear the scales off a dragon.
But before I can muster the mental strength to drag myself out, thereby mutilating my own hide, I sense another dragon approaching.
Like all dragon males who have been through their first mating season, I can sense the females of my clan. Mature females can sense males as well, though the range of their perception is much smaller. It’s a primitive remnant of who we used to be, ages ago, when our species was much more obsessed with mating. Over millennia, our mating heats became much less frequent, until now they occur once every twenty-five years. Unless it’s time for the mating heat, we do not feel a sexual pull toward the females.
The mental connection to the opposite sex activates at the start of a dragon’s first heat. In addition to helping us sense proximity, it enables us to perceive familial relationships, such as siblings, parents or offspring, so we can avoid mating with our immediate relatives. This is especially important because mating is an orgiastic frenzy upon the meadows of Ouroskelle, with most females being bred by multiple males during the same season. It’s possible for half-siblings to end up in different nests, so the mutual familial awareness between genders prevents interbreeding. The link is also useful during our hunts or in times of danger.
It’s less helpful when one is engaged in forbidden activities.
This female is close, too close for me to do anything but stay put and hope she doesn’t notice me. If she’s young, and she hasn’t been through her first season yet, she won’t have the same sense of my location that a more mature female would.
I lift my head, watching the sky. A large, golden dragon soars over the mountain slope, high above me.
Good news—she’s one of the younger generation, about twenty-three years old. So she can’t sense me.
Bad news—it’s Mordessa.
Her parents were the dragons who died for their pursuit of alethia. After their passing, she was adopted by a bonded pair of males, Ardun and Ianeth. She’s a good hunting partner, a friend of mine, and she’s been asking me some uncomfortably incisive questions lately. Almost as if she suspects that I’m up to something.
Fuck, she’s banking and turning. Angling toward me.
She sweeps downward on those shining wings and lands behind me.
I raise my neck and swivel my head to look back at her, even though I don’t particularly want to meet her gaze.
“Stuck, are you?” Her rich voice carries a hint of amusement, but there’s sympathy in it, too.
I chose to be here. I don’t want her pity.
“I’m fine. Just a little accident,” I tell her. “I chased a fenwolf in here, but I was too zealous in my efforts and I underestimated the width of my shoulders.”
Mordessa lets out a long sigh. “Ashvelon,” she says, more gently. “It’s not worth this.”
A growl ripples through my throat.
“I understand this behavior better than anyone else possibly could,” she says.
