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“Danathius! Some 'mage'! How droll, to call oneself a conjurer when all you do is sit and ponder weary ancient tomes and tepid maths!"

The young mage Danathius began to sweat. These older magicians didn't start speaking in iambs until they were preparing a finishing blow.

It was a duel between casters. Lee-Ronald Jenkson, his opponent, had been wearing down the defenses around Danathius' sanctum for months. Jenkson had given up true wizarding decades ago, when his studies had led him to an aberrant pocket universe. There, he had met an entity called the Wandering Maw and traded loyalty for power. He had become a vigilante for the Maw and begun hunting down anyone with knowledge and artifacts related to walking among worlds. For every map and portal-stabilizing item he gifted his master, he was rewarded with new powers and new targets, and thus had he become a lethal menace and the topic of angry, fearful conversations among others studying how to walk among worlds.

Danathius had known he'd one day become a target due to his own studies. He had tried everything to prevent the exact scenario that now beset him. Debris from his battered defenses lay scattered around him. A swirling pool of starry blackness limned in sick, crimson light was open in the very heart of his sanctum. And amid it all, the fallen wizard Jenkson, ancient staff and weathered limbs scarred with the proof of his horrid patron - the marks of claws and teeth from when first he'd faced that fiend, the wretched, seared crack through the staff when he'd lost, and the awful, pulsing seal that held it together now and marked it not as a wizard's staff, but as a demon's - standing across from him… and speaking in iambs.

The younger wizard wasn't one to trade barbs, though. In a friendly contest, certainly, he'd try to ply his charms for a crowd and get some laughs or jeers, but whenever he was faced with threats to his life, or worse, to his library, he focused the whole of his considerable mental prowess on solving the problem at hand. Their arena was a small one. He assessed the damage and his options with dwindling hope for keeping his collection intact. Jenkson's final push past Danathius' redirecting wards and trap spells had rent holes from three separate entry points directly to the heart of his humble hermitage. Books, furniture, and priceless tools of his trade - homemade astrolabes, many-dimensional gyroscopes, and the like - had simply been bored through by a devouring light, and then the sudden rush of wind caused by so much displaced matter had been stopped like a stifled gasp when Jenkson had appeared and opened this hellish hole in his floor. It would take years and hoards of wealth to replace it, and much was irreplaceable by its very nature. No, there were no sparring words here, and no snarls of rage, but it wasn't for a lack of emotion. It was because all the venom and vim he felt had been channeled into finishing this as quickly as possible.

With his calculations completed, Danathius spread the fingers of both hands outward in a flash. Rings on each finger flung hovering, geometric seams in reality in a ring around the warlock and his portal.

“Distractions are all well and good, young wizard, but without some threat, you're ever just a gnat!" Jenkson thrust his staff forward and launched a wad of blood-red energy towards Danathius. The array of discolored planes he'd summoned spun in reaction and curled faintly like sonar dishes to catch, amplify, and redirect the attack. The projectile vanished inside one and appeared out the next accelerated and at a new angle, to hit another, then another. Jenkson fired again, and again, malicious glee lighting his face as he cackled.

The portals caught the next bolt, and the next, and the next, but something was wrong. What should have sent ten times the warlock's strength back into his laughing face at ten times its speed instead warped around the awful hole at the room's center in a dizzying vortex. Danathius telekinetically activated a spiral of portals welded into his ceiling - never attack a wizard in his own home! - and shot a burning comet of his own spell energy through one, attempting to circumvent the gravitational pull that was foiling his plan. He spun his geometric planes to be parallel to the ground and one another as a set of mirroring and magnifying lenses so that the comet became ten, exponentially intensified through each until it made the space smell of ozone, the entire effort attempting to engulf Jenkson in a broad column of plasma.

It took only seconds to perform the entire feat. Danathius permitted himself a grim smirk of satisfaction as the pyre grew, then grit his teeth and furrowed his brow in a sudden, wrenching effort to bring shields to bear: The gathered storm of red light had erupted in mathematical chaos. Perfect precision was broken and scattered as the mixed energies belched light and heat randomly around the room. Danathius was forced to defend both himself and his precious collection from an explosion of energy like a dying star. The sudden effort sapped his strength and he sagged backwards.

No time for that. He had landed near a set of measuring weights and blindly hurled the heavy wooden chest of them at his opponent while scrambling for his next move. Simple physical weapons had killed many mages who'd thought themselves to be combatting magic alone. Spears, Danathius had hidden spears in the walls, but where was the release-

“Ow."

The world froze. That wasn't Jenkson's voice. Danathius' gaze flew to the source of the noise.

Jenkson was petrified in stark terror. He shrieked, “The Blue Beast! Master, I-!" There was a sickening, but blessedly swift, crunch as a scaled, azure paw much larger than either of the embattled men stomped down, seemingly attached to nothing. The staff of the ex-wizard Lee-Ronald Jenkson toppled towards the portal he'd made. A ghastly, titanic face the color of the abyss itself swam upward to catch it. The blue paw darted out, caught the staff, then balled up and punched the Wandering Maw's nose like one would a shark's. After an abrupt and un-majestic yelp, the Maw closed its recently dead warlock's portal with a zipping sound, and the place stilled.

“Ah, good. Hm. Where did… Hello?" came a voice like thunder. “Little mage. I have a question. Are you alive?"

Shakily, Danathius stood and began patting himself down. “Ah, yes?"

A tremendous, golden eye pressed into view just above the portal being used to allow the giant paw. “Ah, there you are." The hand daintily tucked the staff between two knuckles, then opened, snatched Danathius, and yanked him unceremoniously into the indomitable presence of Torvanskir, The Blue Beast.

In the normal course of an adventurer's life, they encounter dragons. For most, the encounter is brief for a variety of reasons, but the size of the creature is impressed upon the adventurer and there is little time for more detail. A “dragon" was a far-off beast; a fleeting terror; a stark memory of majesty; an ideal called the peak of evolution. For Danathius, especially in this moment, a dragon was a very physical, very close tower of sinuous muscle, an encompassing tapestry of scales and gleaming flesh, a radiating heat and penetrating rumble just shy of unbearable. A dragon was what creature had once filled a cavern that the infant earth had not made sufficiently spacious, and so he had crushed it outward with forces both physical and magical, making smooth shelves and ribbed architecture befitting his majesty.

A dragon was Torvanskir, the Blue Beast, who had stomped Danathius' nemesis like a roach and was now using the dead warlock's demonic staff to pick his teeth. He was ignoring the combination of fear and discomfort with which Danathius was meeting this usage, as Danathius was still tucked in remaining digits of the paw doing the picking. The dragon's lip pulled back to reveal fangs more than half the height of the mage's body, inches from him.

“You're doing this on purpose."

“Everything I do has more purpose than most entire human lives." The Beast snapped the stick in half, inhaled its released gout of magic through his nostrils, and turned to face the human he'd casually pulled across hundreds of miles in an instant. Hot breath that smelled of brimstone and cinnamon poured over Danathius' face and penetrated his robes. “Present company certainly excluded, considering…" To complete the sentence, he simply held the mage away from him to give the best possible view of his body. It was a body Danathius knew well, having had quite a bit to do with its size.

After taking a moment to dramatically pose in imitations of human bodybuilders, the ancient beast continued. “Hello, my little mage. I have a criticism of your dwelling place."

“I am honored to receive interior decorating advice from the keeper of such an expansive home." He stressed the word as he gazed about, noting the unnatural curvature of the cavern. Danathius had previously used deliveries of magnificently potent mana potions as barter for Torvanskir's willingness to be included in a grimoire of dragons the young mage was compiling, and thus have his detailed measurements taken. The Beast had hardly been diminutive when they had met, but afterwards, he had become gigantic. Danathius blushed faintly as he realized he was calculating estimates of Torvanskir's growth since their last meeting based on the relative sizes between the dragon's knuckle and his torso. And he was applying the results of those calculations… imaginatively.

“Interior? Faugh. No, no." Tor reared up to a bipedal stance and stretched enormously and thrust both arms high overhead, which gave Danathius a (slightly inverted) view of latissimus dorsi and twinned trapezius muscles, one pair stretching across shoulders like ox carts, one pair corded and wrapped like the cables of a suspension bridge to support the breadth of wings strong enough to bear aloft this many-tonne body. Just when Danathius began to get ahold of his shallow panting and dilated gaze, the beast crossed his arms over his front to stretch the opposing muscles in his torso and limbs. The mage was brought - still captured in a hand - up against a bunching bicep that towered over him and within inches of a flexing pectoral plenty wide enough to sleep on. His eyes caught on a vein as thick as his arm pulsing shimmering, fiery blood just under the surface.

“Grrg y'r mrgnrffcnt," he managed, with his face smooshed against a throbbing wall of blue flesh.

“Hm? Accurate. The dimensions of your home, though, are what I find irksome."

“Th' dmenshhns?"

“I was hard pressed to track your location, as it had been so long, but then I thought to myself that if I were a human - perish the thought - who knew the ways of properly honoring dragons, I might scale my abode in recognition of one. It is a pathetic idea, though an ingratiating one, and so I thought, 'Ah, but is the little mage Danathius so pathetic? Surely not. He must know that if he is to be associated with me even tangentially, he is correct to be praiseful, but not pathetic.'"

As he spoke, he at last relaxed his flexed posture (which let Danathius breathe somewhat normally) and began to slowly pace his palatial mountain home. The last time the mage had been here, it had looked like the classically described dragon's lair: magical tools, gems, and wrought gold collected in a great mound of a nest only dragons could possibly consider comfortable, with favorites given nooks for easy access. While the Beast had doubled in size in every spatial dimension, the lair had been expanded perhaps twenty times over. Though he had seemed to fill it at first, that had been a trick of Danathius being so abruptly snatched from his own home into this one. To support the ceiling of the newly hewn space, the fragments cleaved from it had been melted and worked by dragonfire into organically shaped architectural ribs and columns. Stone ridges displayed trophies, though the trappings seemed comparatively bare, given the expanded capacity. The cracked staff from Jenkson joined an armory of destroyed weapons, circlets, and helmets taken from adventurers who had attempted to make names for themselves. A library of scrolls, tomes, and what appeared to be freshly inked pages was tucked into an alcove like an office. There was a new, somewhat macabre display: a series of dragon skulls, some with obvious damage to them, arrayed so they appeared to be averting their gazes from the central mound, as though unable to look upon the Beast who slept there.

“And yet, when I narrowed the scope of my search to match the measurements that you most recently made of me - which are again obsolete - and reminded myself to eliminate regions of the earth uninhabitable to fragile creatures, I came upon a hovel the dimensions of which matched my breadth, length, and height perfectly." He held Danathius before him and stared gravely. “Two garden plots matching my wingspan. A front path not unlike my tail. A bedroom the precise replica of my jaws, albeit not so detailed and expressed as wood and" - he ran his wet tongue across his teeth, tone thick with implication - “upholstery." His voice deepened and slowed as he watched Danathius fidget and redden. He tilted his paw, directing Danathius' gaze down his chest, down his rippling abdomen, down to the mound of a genital sheath and beneath it, two heavy, swinging, wrecking balls of testes. “And a bathing chamber, exactly the volume of both my combined-"

“I don't have a bath that big!"

Torvanskir erupted into bellowing laughter that roared and echoed and billowed through his home in warm, mirthful gales. Danathius was cherry red and painfully aware of his very physical responses to the implications. His house was not modeled after Torvanskir's measurements, but it rankled comically that he had felt the urgent desire to go home and triple check.

“No, no, of course not. I did search the spheres, but only because I had forgotten how close by you are. I hope your guest wasn't of consequence. I have become accustomed to crushing enemies underfoot, since our last meeting, and he struck me with some object when I arrived."

Danathius froze. He had thrown the weight set, not Jenkson. “Uh, nope. Nope, he was just. Just some guy who made the mistake of hitting a dragon."

“A dragon?"

“His inimitable majesty the Blue Beast, Torvanskir, I mean."

“Quite."

“So… I am of course honored to be invited so personally to your home, but curiosity begs - why?"

“Ah!" the dragon harrumphed. “The insatiable appetites of mages! I humble myself this sickeningly, to make jokes and small talk, and am bustled on towards matters of substance."

“I - wait, no, I mean, um, how, uh, I can-"

“ENOUGH. Things being what they are, time itself has less patience than your human quicksomeness, and thus there is work to do." The Blue Beast's bluster was obvious, but even so, Danathius couldn't help feeling a pang at having lost a chance at camaraderie… wait, no. He rolled his eyes and snorted. This was still part of the teasing. Was 'quicksomeness' even a word…?

“BEHOLD." Danathius was prepared for another gloat, but what he saw next forced his jaw to drop despite himself. A vast expanse of cavern wall had been repurposed as a chalkboard. Mathematics and diagrams and star charts danced a static tarantella across its surface. Each sequence of equations was neatly arrayed, not in the stoic rows and columns used by his human professors, but with elegant directionality from conclusion to conclusion. Unaware of himself, Danathius began to untangle and comprehend it, and found that despite the depth and complexity of the calculations, it was a story being told, a narrative, and not one he needed to be convinced of by hoary men in chalk-stained robes, but one that revealed itself to him with intentionality, with drama, with excitement! It was entrancing, it was shocking, it was deeply perfect and beautifully aligned - it was…

“Dragon math," Danathius whispered, like a prayer.

Torvanskir sucked in air proudly. “After our last dalliance, I found myself fixated on the spheres above and beyond this little rock. You burn brightly, little mage, but hardly so brightly as those."

Danathius could have melted, but held himself together with muttered gratitude. He kept his gaze locked on the wall of figures.

“It so happens that I am able to consume vast quantities of power even as it is being made. A star is a furnace whose fuel is imminently available to burn, but which is woefully incapable of commanding its own rate of extinction." As he spoke, his body became increasingly tense and his voice more excited. Danathius began struggling to draw breath, trapped as he was in a tightening grip. “I am not so heedless. I am a being of light and intellect far surpassing the limitations of those who have attempted to replicate the sun in a jar, and my body is a vessel far more worthy than any such mortal-made contraption." Danathius wheezed and began slapping at the dragon's knuckle to get his attention. Without looking, Torvanskir continued. “Your enthusiastic agreement is expected and it tells me you must be aware that I lack - faugh! - I lack a critical component to be able to consume…" His voice went low, gravelly, and mountainous. “To consume a star…"

At last, he glanced at Danathius and muttered surprise at seeing that the mage had gone as blue in the face as the dragon's scales. “BREATHE, MAGE DANATHIUS. OPEN WIDE YOUR TINY LUNGS," he commanded, at last setting the gasping man down on the floor of his cavern and letting him walk on jellied legs.

“Okay. I'm okay. Woooo… okay. So you'd like to eat a star." Danathius was still seeing this as an intellectual pursuit. A plan for something that might happen far in the future if a great many prior steps were taken.

“I shall."

Danathius glanced back up at the wall of carved calculations. When he stepped back and put it into perspective, the glorious and clarion narrative he'd been so fervidly lauding in his mind was really… the Blue Beast opening up a portal, shoving his mouth up against it, and sucking the actively combusting star down his gullet. Like drinking the juice of a particularly large orange through an interstellar straw. It also seemed like the star maps were for the very near future, but there were a number of important calculations still missing - at least as far as the human could tell.

“Does it… at all concern you that there are consequences to the cosmos for having one of its spheres displaced?"

“TAWDRY. PIDDLING. Look in front of you at the here and now. Imagine, young mage, what such a meal of mine might afford you. You recall our prior meeting. You know of my prowess." Torvanskir loomed over his guest with a tyrannical grin. He expertly made his body ripple, one feature at a time so that the trail of motion tugged Danathius' gaze as though on a leash. Though the power they held was merely a physical manifestation of colossal magical strength, they both knew equally well that to the mage's young and intimately experienced mind, the physicality was a potent aphrodisiac. The Beast shook the earth with a thump of his mighty tail and crouched down low, like a cat preparing to pounce. Golden eyes scintillated with voracious need and a thundering heartbeat raced through vasculature across broad shoulders and arms and chest. “Imagine if I consumed a star."

Danathius made a valiant show of recovering his wits and put out an open palm, asking succor. “Please, give me… a moment." He stood, then closed his eyes to center himself with a breath. Moments later, his eyes flashed open to show brilliant spectra of blue like facets of insect eyes, each revealing a different image of a different page of different open books. His body arched backwards as the strain of the spell forced a tetanic seizure through him. Every muscle in him tensed fiercely and he silently cursed himself for not having put more value on physical fitness. The pages in the images flipped, the arrangements shifted in interlocking and anastomosing patterns, and their knowledge flowed into him, categorized and streamlined without the brutish necessity of recompiling it and inking new tomes.

A minute later, he very carefully relaxed each of his own muscles in turn. He winced as some of them twitched with painful spasms. The images in his eyes blinked out one by one, spiraling and fusing like soap bubbles until his pupils had returned to their normal black, and he loosed another deep breath.

“Apologies, Torvanskir. I needed to re-familiarize myself with astrophysics and astronomy."

“And you have now done so?" Torvanskir asked with earnest curiosity.

Proudly, Danathius began to explain. “Refraction, diffraction, lensing, and really leaning into the idea of looking through a book. Poring through pages, no, but boring through the-"

“Fascinating wordplay, I'm sure. I, however, recommend an epistemological hygiene unblemished by lesser minds, by deriving all your maths from first principles." Danathius scowled and considered arguing about the value of empirical science, but realized immediately it was not an argument he would win. The dragon continued. “As you can see, the problem isn't the theory, but the practice, specifically of stabilizing the portal I have outlined."

“Well, and the directionality as the stars move, and the effect of, uh, it's sort of, you know how gravity is modeled as spheres on a circus trampoline-"

“Childish."

“It's like you're trying to crease the trampoline to guide one of the spheres along the crease and into your mouth, but that warps the fabric around the crease, so anything near it, especially when that ball starts rolling."

“Obviously."

“And then you'd be the sphere, which, what!" He giggled spastically at the thought. “A star-eater? A planet-eater! To even keep existing here, well, I mean, obviously, dragon hearts are the pinnacle of energy density - the elemental breaths simply aren't feasible otherwise. It's why we use them to contain all the apocalypse-class aberrations, so for an entire star, it… it…" he slowed briefly, brows creased in thought, “It would be something like a dragon heart made of dragon… hearts…" His eyes shot upward to the shelves high above, decorated with the skulls of defeated challengers.

Instead of interrupting, this time Torvanskir merely purred. The mage's jaw slowly parted like he wanted to say something, but only a whimper came out. Quiet, low, the dragon said, “Other dragons have feasted on the hearts of their competitors before. I have done one better. As I learned with you, why feast on something once when it can serve you forever? I have made them… part of me."

Among ways to give the mage clarity of thought, the image of Torvanskir sliding a series of other, magnificently powerful dragons down his throat and his resultant growth did not number. He had to pause again and keep his eyes from going hazy with the fantasy. Determined, though, he eventually careened onward with his comprehension. “And then, assuming all that, you'd have to un-crease the trampoline so that you haven't destabilized the universe! or else, maybe it's not a crease so much as - oh! You don't want a crease, you just want a sort of elastic channel, but keeping that stable, I mean, heh, anyone who's tried to hang a painting knows how weirdly hard it is to fight gravity that long even if the total load is light, and this is like the painting is made of cannonballs - the amount of power and focus you'd need..."

“Mage."

“F… focus…" Danathius stuttered again to a halt. His eyes were wide. His tent was pitched.

Torvanskir smirked and stared with intentional rudeness at the erection. “I've heard of science boners among your type, but I had assumed they were metaphorical."

“Y-you want me to be, like a wizard's focus, e-except I'm a wizard. I-I would be the lens for your casting, a direct conduit to, to…" His voice went hollow as the idea raged through him. Danathius' knees failed him and his hands flailed for something to hold onto. He fell into a seat on the sturdy tail that helpfully, possessively looped behind him. He laughed, weakly. “You don't have a math problem. You have a lack-of-math problem. I am the math."

“You use a lot of unnecessary words, but you get there in the end, little mage." He snorted with wry approval. “Acquiring you from a few hundred miles away is, naturally, child's play. Accurately targeting a space beyond that requires a much deeper investment of power."

“Which is why humans have accidentally founded religions while attempting to build appropriate teleportation circles, yes." Danathius tried to stress the implication that entire feats of genius construction and engineering were required, with the consequent implication that trying this from a cave was ludicrous.

“Hm. Humans." The dragon pondered for a moment, seeming sincere in his respect for the concept. He went on, “A star, therefore, being a few orders of magnitude more distant-"

Danathius couldn't help himself. “A few?"

The dragon rolled his hand at the wrist. “A dozen, ish. My target is a robust, healthy adult only a few times more massive than this planet's sun. I will require a focus the strength of which, I suppose you are implying, is equivalent to a small, human structure."

Danathius nodded, eyes still wide and glassy. Only a few times larger than the sun. The thing so massive that planets could not escape it, and would not for billions of years more while it burned itself out.

“Then, we shall construct a small human-structure." The mage's ears quirked at the clear change in punctuation. He focused his gaze to see the dragon pointing at a heap of items tucked against the wall.

“Oh…" He caught a scent that had been building. As their conversation had orbited the realities of the proposition and made it ever more present, Torvanskir's own… somatic interest was becoming clear. Danathius had not thought he could become more aroused, but that scent was too familiar to him. He reached to adjust himself and relieve some pressure, but was quickly stopped.

“No need for that. Strip down, put those on, and we will begin," Torvanskir ordered. He grinned as Danathius blushed at the prospect of baring himself here. Those tremendous, golden eyes didn't even blink. “While you do, consider what would be an optimal anatomical arrangement."

Danathius approached the pile while his ears flared bright pink and made himself consider the items. They clearly had belonged to different sets with widely varying aesthetics. It made sense - the job demanded a load-out different from the wardrobe one would use when, for instance, mapping new landscapes, meeting an enemy, or researching new spells. These were instead, to a one, exponents and multiplication signs rendered in physical form. Nothing offensive, defensive, elemental, auxiliary, or, bluntly, interesting. Well, there was one, but that was less about what it did and more about what type of garb it was and how to wear it.

“Mage, we are wasting daylight." There was a great inrush of air. Danathius turned instinctively to watch as the dragon, who had lain his chin on the floor, opened his maw wide in a cavernous yawn. Great, ivory teeth in their ranks gleamed in the light of the room. Each had its own particular shape, and it occurred to Danathius he had neglected to get a detailed schematic of the jaw. Or he needed a new one. Or he maybe hadn't gotten the interior aspects perfect, so he might have to sit on that stretching, curling tongue and sketch from within…

“Yes, your blueness," Danathius managed through a gulp. He attempted to retain his dignity and some faint semblance of modesty by only removing clothes that would interfere with the new implements. A coil of deftly carved ivory around his upper arm meant his outer robe had to go; a wickedly sharp obsidian pauldron wouldn't fasten securely over his shirt, so it was next, leaving only a tight undershirt that clung to a body damp with sweat after his ordeals; a series of whimsical, cloth loops in chaotic, bright colors had been sewn into what he realized with chagrin was a sort of reinforced stocking, so off came his shoes; and a wooden circlet embedded with gemstones rested where he was not accustomed to carrying a tiara. On top of the rest, no fewer than five pendants hung heavily on his chest and clattered against one another while he moved.

Each one made him feel as though an enormous well had opened within him, or that the well was tapping a deep leyline of energy, or that each well had expanded by some multiplier. His own internal workings and the enchantments he had wrought within them to ensure he was never fully drained rapidly began the dizzying process of filling those wells.

“Mage. You have neglected three items. First, the Scrim of Serenity is a critical conduit between your body and the amulets." Torvanskir indicated what Danathius had thought was just refracted light caught against an angle in the wall. It was, instead, a nearly transparent garment meant to be worn as a wrap.

Danathius grimaced. He had known, but not wanted to admit, that he would have to bare his chest for this - there was no way his undershirt would have survived this encounter, anyway. He stripped it carefully off and wrapped the shimmering, damask fabric of the Scrim over his now bared, slim, and somewhat soft torso.

“The second item of neglect is your strength of physique."

“Hey!"

An amused flash of enormous teeth. “You are lean, but you must engage from time to time in strenuous exercise. I will begin a regimen to strengthen you post-haste. Third, that is not how the Encircled Staff of the Sacred Humor is worn."

“The what?"

A great claw lifted a heavy ring of carved sapphire too wide for the average finger by at least double up from where it hung. It was attached on its outer surface by delicate, graceful, silver chains so light they pooled like liquid. He had in fact been surprised to not immediately feel its effects, but had assumed he was simply overwhelmed by all the rest. It was too small for his ankle, too massive to be an earring…

Torvanskir bobbed his eye ridges with extreme insinuation.

“… No."

Increased bobbing.

“But the chains?"

A meaningful eye ridge bob while his tail tip prodded the man's buttocks.

“Why are wizards so weird?" Danathius complained. At last, though, he could withstand the eye ridge dexterity no longer. Defeated, he turned and doffed his pants as though ripping off a bandage. There was some fumbling and a yelp - “It shrinks to fit!" - and then, after some deep breaths, he turned to face Torvanskir again. The slender chains were surprisingly comfortable, taut around his thighs and rear, while the bright, blue ring shone, displayed proudly on a bed of pubic hair and, in fact, encircling a staff… of sorts.

“Excellent," Torvanskir rumbled. After what felt like an eternity of consideration, the dragon at last reached out a great paw and collected Danathius. “Now then. Where do humans normally wear their foci?"

Danathius had to steady himself as his bare skin was suddenly in intimate contact with Torvanskir's hand. “It's not that important - it can just be held…"

“Nonsense! The flow of mana must be optimized. As a brooch, perhaps?" The mage found himself pressed flat between the Blue Beast's enormous pectoral muscles. He felt like he must be steaming visibly. Torvanskir flexed, and Danathius was squeezed between the slabs of meat. “Or as an arm band? Could you perhaps wrap around a limb, clutching your ankles behind you with your hands?" While he spoke, Torvanskir brought the mage to his bicep, which bunched up in front of him, veins throbbing visibly where they webbed across his anatomy. The mage was laid against it with two clawtips under his armpits to hold him up, while Torvanskir tried vainly to tug his ankles around, like someone awkwardly putting on a wristwatch. “Ach! You are too small, mage. Perhaps, then, not around, but in?"

Again, Danathius found his gaze tilted down, down, down across the fields of rippling blue of the dragon's torso, to the great, scaled, fleshy sheath between his thighs. The view itself was nearly too much, and then he was slowly falling, guided by that hand, his view only walls and bands of abdominal muscle. His feet touched down against rubbery flesh that gave slightly beneath them and he realized he was standing on the head of Torvanskir's partially revealed cock. The jet black flesh pulsed mightily under his soles despite being only partially aroused. He looked up, up, up to the dragon's grinning, half-open maw and felt that shaft rise inches upward with each throb. Without warning, he was brought to the ventral side. He went rigid - well, more rigid - as Torvanskir began pushing his toes and ankles into the space between scaled, smooth sheath and vascular, pounding cock belly. The heat and musk radiated from him, sharp and earthy and heady. There was a rumble of deep, resonant pleasure as he squirmed, which only drove his feet deeper, to the knees, while chest and face were pressed against the hot, slick crown of the rising shaft and his hips and bare, purpling, straining member slid against that barrel-broad spongiosa. A bead of precum the size of his head bubbled forth, but just before it could soak his face and hair, Torvanskir pulled him away with a badly stifled groan of frustration. “Perhaps later, if I am convinced it would not crush you. Instead! A space where I might be more aware of you."

At last, there was some cruel mercy as Danathius was laid on his back on the ground and a blue foot far broader than his body raised up, then descended over him. Individual digits enclosed him like a cage, then spread, until his neck was braced against the crook between the second and third, and his body was held to the ground by the soft, heavy pads. His gaze upward was filled by mighty thighs, boulder-sized dragon testes, and a ridged, still-growing shaft that he remembered from experience would soon, if given full liberty, reach the dragon's own sternum.

“YOUR LOINS ARE NOW PROPERLY GIRDED, MAGE," bellowed Torvanskir with a wild, rapturous, mad, beaming grin. “WITNESS MY ASCENSION."

Danathius gasped out loud as the dragon's magic suffused him. This was too fast! If he was going to be a focus, he had to be attuned! They wouldn't be harmonized. A focus was more than an object. It had to be held, known, comprehended, and most importantly, it had to be suffused over time with the user's essence. Or… no. He had been attuned to. He'd been inside the dragon before. He'd just now been dragged across the beast's skin - had in fact been in almost constant contact with it since being pulled into the cave. The dragon had been familiar with his essence to begin with, and then had been spending their entire conversation completing the attunement.

The man took a long breath and settled into his fate. Dragons.

Many feet above him, Torvanskir considered his scheme one final time. The planet they stood on spun, and with it spun space-time; the trajectories of light bent across the void and warped in a dance only made slow by the lies of distance; all celestial bodies fled one another as prey scattering before a predator at the center of the universe, but this one fleeing star would feed a new hunter.

The calculations were perfect. Even if they were not, imperfection posed less of a threat of catastrophic failure than uncertainty. The arrogance of dragons was not bluster or shallow ego - it was a tool and a Knowing that made their defiance of limitation a manifestation of will. There are no cowardly or quibbling masters of the skies. The wildness of magic, its heart, its essence, and what made dragons pure, permeated creatures of it, demanded certainty of action that tolerated not even the acknowledgement of a threshold between thought and action.

Not needing to articulate this to himself, Torvanskir, the Blue Beast, the Storm Azure, the soon to be called Star Eater, felt his muscles swell against the boundaries of his flesh. He pictured his prey dashing through blackness as wolf might envision a hart through the woods. His great golden eyes glowed and his pupils dilated in fierce focus. His jaw dropped open in slow motion. With a roar that shook the mountain, he swiped his claws outward and rent a hole in the universe.

Instantly, light a color of white no mortal should ever witness and a flash of scouring heat burst into the room. Torvanskir darted his head forward and dropped his jaw open around the portal. Searing white rocketed into his body with the sound of what has been called the Space Roar.

Beneath him, Danathius unabashedly screamed. His entire being was flooded with Torvanskir's draconic magic. The only thing he wanted to do was seize control of the spell and hold onto it, but he instinctively knew that would be death for both of them. This wasn't his spell. This was the dragon's magic. He had one purpose in that moment, and that was to channel the will and essence of the Blue Beast into stabilizing the portal to the star. What he was doing would be considered by many to be a betrayal of mankind, perhaps of mortals. And yet… it felt, more than anything he could imagine, like fulfilling destiny. He watched as Torvanskir's throat moved in long, greedy swallows, literally drinking down the stuff of a star while his body began to swell. The light of that star would remain traveling across the cosmos for how long? Minutes? An hour? Years? Because here and now, Danathius was focusing a spell that was feeding it to a dragon.

The star's light rocketed into the Blue Beast, lighting him from within. It shone through the patterns of his scales across his body, and he grew. With Danathius' neck secured between two mighty digits, he felt the rest of the paw expand, watched knuckles rise up above his head and - absurdly, in context of the moment - felt his mouth go dry as he saw the ridges of a fully erect, draconic cock blazing like a crucible as it, already massive both objectively and relative to the proportions of lesser beings, burgeoned in visible, flowing potency and in every physical dimension. Tendons creaked and groaned around Danathius's body while above him, thighs grew in moments the way great oaks might in seasons to support the body above.

And Danathius played his part perfectly. Those deep chasms of mana that his bizarre outfit afforded him, despite the demands of his task, did not shudder and strain against the torrent. Instead, he guided their flow and overflow like one would a reservoir in a monsoon. Despite the improbable volume of demand, he tapped the supplies to maintain a constant, steady rate to the project at hand. It was exhilarating, despite the mundane concept of it. He felt like he was riding a storm with the absolute certainty that his craft would not break against the waves.

A dangerous problem began to arise, and one Danathius would have anticipated had he been given time to deliberate. Torvanskir was not growing to become the size of a star. No, he had made clear through his preparations that he intended to achieve his godhood status without sacrificing the planet he stood on. And he certainly was not willing to vent any heat beyond that pouring off him and from the portal - heat, here, was part of the meal. Together, that meant his body, and especially the compounded dragon heart inside it, soared in density, but even his insatiable body could not consume and command everything, and the temperature of his transforming body soared with it.

Danathius became aware with a start that some of his automatic wards had already triggered to shield him from the heat. He flipped through his mental catalog of spells, suddenly desperate for the coefficients relevant to protecting oneself from an ongoing lightning strike the size of an adult blue dragon. His concentration wavered as he came to the realization that though the metaphorical craft could stay the course and ride out this storm, the craft was still only piloted by a tiny creature of fragile flesh. There was no spell that would change that - certainly not one that could be cast on a whim. He had to stop the heat from building, not just if he wanted to survive this, but if he wanted to stop the mountain they were inside from becoming a molten catastrophe.

The air warped around him as the raging heat tore through his shielding. If he didn't move quickly, the tools making this possible at all would shatter and turn to slag and ash along with his body. He was defying a dragon, but that was a problem for Danathius ten seconds from now, who was alive. It wasn't the first time he had had to move delicately around the possibility a dragon's plan had failed to consider the limitations of littler beings and geology. He cast a spell he had used a thousand times and was suddenly lying near-naked and exposed against cool, smooth stone, less than twenty feet away. In seconds, the portal destabilized and the unbearable daylight of it guttered out, plunging the room into relative nightfall.

Torvanskir, the Blue Beast, felt Nirvana fall away. Other dragons spoke of being avatars of high winds at sea, of magma shifting entire landscapes, of unceasing infernos, but he was plasma. He was feasting on the seed of the cosmos. He had felt the pure light of the pristine night sky washing through him. He was drinking a direct descendent of the first dawn the universe had witnessed and he was growing, feeling it pour into and throughout him, muscles exulting in their soaring strength, entire body erect and throbbing and each instant he had felt fullness, another chamber of his many-faceted heart had opened and there had been more of him that could contain more and seize more and strain harder - and now the source had been torn from him.

His eyes blazed like twin suns - tiny, minuscule, insufficient twin suns - as they settled on Danathius, the human mage.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE."

“I was dying!"

“THE UNIVERSE IS AT STAKE, MAGE -"

“I can fix it!"

“- AND WORSE, I AM NOT SATED."

He darted his head forward and slammed his jaws shut over the mage. Surrounded, further attempts to teleport away would sputter against his teeth like petulant wine. He pushed the small, naked creature he had so carefully ornamented up and back into his throat with his tongue and swallowed. There was no need for more words. The mage knew the stakes of defying his hunger. He would therefore make good on his promise.

Danathius had spent his precious seconds of freedom as efficiently as he could. As his nude body was pressed between slick flesh and swallowed into the chaos of a magical being's stomach, interwoven shells of magic insulated him from incineration. It wasn't his most elegant work, but the tools he had been given weren't intended for elegance - they were intended for volume. The dragon's innate ravenous consumption and dissolution of magic went to work on them. It wasn't a focused devouring, though. Torvanskir was incensed, yes, but still wanted his astral meal.

Well, Danathius believed he had found a way to concoct it.

First, though, the mage sat a few moments in unmitigated bliss. Inside this creature. Surrounded by its majesty and power. And, blushing to recognize it, but completely bare, fiercely erect, within the Blue Beast himself.

And then, there was the work. Danathius's mind had been on lensing and amplification most of the day as he had prepared for Jenkson's intrusion. Using his hands and his magical senses alike, he located the dragon heart Tor had created by fusing the hearts of his defeated foes. It again thrilled Danathius and made his knees weak to think of those incredible beasts being bested and then consumed to become mere portions of the being surrounding him. A contest, a triumph, and then a long swallow…

He flushed and refocused. The heart was doing marvelously at protecting the planet it called home from its gravitational appetite, but it was still made from grown, natural things that had been forcefully shoved together. The mage held it in projections of his hands and traced the smooth, organic surfaces. As he did, he used the vast reservoirs of mana afforded him by his gear to wrest the cosmic energy swirling around him from its flux and batter it into sheets, like Haphaestus at the forge. Those sheets, he bent into geometries that complemented and perfected the oblong dragon heart. His idea was perfect. He was instantly obsessed with the work. Fill and repurpose a seam, there. Warp a ribbon of starlight into a stabilizing valence, there.

“What are you doing, mage?" Torvanskir demanded. “I can…" He paused, wiggled, and almost subconsciously palmed the top of his still enormously erect shaft as the mage's workings made his circulating energies jump and swirl through his entirety, lighting up nerves without concern for their positions. “I can feel you trace them, but you cannot distinguish the hearts among one another. They are me. They are mine. It is one heart, despite its appearance."

“It is magnificence manifest," returned a telepathic voice, since Danathius had been forced to forego breathing and rely on a clever respiratory spell. “I am merely refining your work.. and reifying it thereby."

The dragon huffed out a gout of star stuff. His heart, which he had carefully manipulated within himself to fuse with the others and become the most capacious energy-storing substance on the planet, was getting tightened, as though hammered on all sides. The sensation wasn't unpleasant, except that it felt like the maelstrom of solar energy inside him was dimming, even though it wasn't escaping and it certainly wasn't entering the mage.

Danathius was sweating bullets now. He was so far beyond the peak of what he had considered his potential that he felt at the edge of the atmosphere, and if he looked down, he would fall to the ground like a stone. But at the same time, he was certain. The oceans of mana filled, emptied, refilled, poured out of him into his workshop of star fuel and dragon magic. He bent energy itself into shapes and set them into place, lensing, refracting, perfecting, and then finally, compressing. He held his hands out to either side of the heart like every first wizard holding a mote of fire. He held this creation of light for the space of only a few heartbeats. It was the greatest thing he had ever made.

“In a few moments, reopen the portal."

“How do you feign to-"

“Master of skies and all things blue and beyond, if it please your infallible will, reopen the portal on my signal." Dragons. Seriously, dragons?

There was a brief pause, and then, “While you are still there, little mage?"

“You will be able to stabilize the portal yourself." Danathius let a little of the confidence of dragon magic bolster his words. His eyes glittered as he beheld his triumph. “My workings are beyond reproof. It will hold."

“Very well. On your mark, then. There is nobility in your sacrifice."

Danathius rolled his eyes, but didn't correct the assumption that he would martyr himself for this. Instead, he struck, and now, it was like the hammer of a god. From all directions, he slammed power into the heart. Torvanskir bellowed at the sensation. Danathius felt his wells of magic fervidly refill from the blow, readied himself, and pushed again. Another earth-shaking roar from the Blue Beast. A third time, Danathius inhaled the seas themselves. His amulets and ring and ornaments rattled with the effort, but held. And as the hammer blow fell, in his mind and with his body, he shouted, “NOW."

The portal opened. With a pop, the mage appeared atop one of the skull trophies on a high column so he could see all of what was happening. Inside Torvanskir, fusion began. Like an atom bomb, the impossibly compressed energies destabilized in perfectly designed steps, but this wasn't just some explosion - this was the furnace inside a star rendered in miniature. Torvanskir's own reserves erupted with the output, filling the cavern with blazing blue fire that washed over and through him like a mantel. Wind rocketed around the space and blew trophies from their perches - save for where the mage held himself stable. The star eater tore open the portal again like slashing through so much paper and stuck his throat to the opening.

Again, light exploded through him, but the outpouring of heat and the strain to hold still were vastly relieved. Instead, the feeding and growth were smooth, constant, inevitable. Danathius simply sat back and watched with more than a little pride. His accoutrements had, depending on their make, all either crumbled, turned to slag, or vaporized entirely, leaving him actually nude, instead of merely mostly so. Except, of course, he noted wryly, for his Encircled Staff. Said staff would likely have lost its rigidity in the face of his intense focus moments ago, but thus ensorcelled, it had slackened only fractionally. He watched as Torvanskir gulped, grew, gulped, grew, never pausing, never ceasing, and that turgidity returned in an instant, but there was no embarrassment for it. Why shouldn't the entire body exult at the sight of something this enlivening?

For the dragon's part, it was just as it had been before, but moreso. It was like squeezing a muscle so hard that it hurt and then feeling that ache vanish as new fibers rippled into being, until they themselves were flexed beyond their limit, and the cycle continued without end. Indeed, every muscle on him was tightly flexed - a landscape of mounds along his flanks, deep ridges and plateaus across his abdomen, rolling hills of biceps, triceps, brachialis, deltoids, trapezius, all immaculately defined and bearing themselves into ever starker relief. And still he drank. And still he grew. And Danathius watched, not missing a single second of it, etching it into his memory.

It might have been minutes or it might have been hours. The portal gradually shrank, its own making and preparation having depended on a particular astronomic mass existing at a particular location, until Torvanskir was grasping at it with two paws and inhaling mightily like someone getting the last bit of a beverage with a straw. Finally, he physically pushed the tiny, vanishing circle of light into his maw and down his throat with a gulp.

The cave that had seemed - blasphemously - empty and yawning when Danathius had been yanked there earlier now struggled to contain its occupant. The dragon could not lie down sideways. His mighty tail curled along the floor and then up the wall. As he panted, it made a current in the air. The entrance - one that a horse-drawn wagon could have easily passed through without a thought - was too small for him. He swung his head towards the high shelves where he'd placed his conquests' bleached skulls and found Danathius perched on one. The bones looked like those of juvenile wyverns to him. Torvanskir felt deep within himself to where his many-layered star-heart now pulsed. He grinned enormously. It had felt right, consuming them. He plucked the skull and the mage with it between two talons, flexed his bicep, and rested the trophy on top of it. Minuscule. He balanced Danathius there and examined his own body with his fingers and claws, feeling the duality: Yes, his shoulders were each the size of a grizzly bear, but he knew that each could overcome armies. Yes, his thighs rivaled the columns holding up bridges, but he knew he could crack the planet and drink its molten core if he so chose.

As it should be.

He turned to Danathius. His eyes blazed with brilliant, golden light. His entire body was aglow with power. It shimmered and flickered, making shadows dance on the walls of the cavern as his magical form adapted to containing this new incandescence. “Mage," he said, in a voice that somehow filled every register at once. He let out a long, low rumble, then swallowed and worked his throat muscles as he recalibrated. He said again, “Mage," this time far nearer his original voice. “I am more than brimming with need." He placed a broad hand on the top of his massively bloated, ridged length, which was now as broad as the mage was tall and itself glowed at each ridge, throughout the bulb of its knot, and within its tip. A rush of crystalline precumthat flowed forth from it coruscated in its own light. “As are you." He gathered some of the syrupy stuff on one finger and lifted it up, over Danathius, to let a near-scalding bead of it flow over the human's body, drenching him. Danathius welcomed the blessing. He was at once painfully aroused and brilliantly jubilant, almost giddy. He was the first human to witness a star dragon.

“You're magnificent," he whispered as he readily summoned two enormous, ghostly images of his own hands and set them to work on that shaft. He had to readjust their sizes twice, and then two weren't close to enough. He brought forth a second pair, then a third, so they could appropriately explore and measure and worship the rest of the colossus.

Torvanskir let out a throaty rumble like an avalanche. The touch of those magical hands was delightfully more tangible to him than any delicate human flesh could possibly manage through his scales. He flexed and rolled his body as they seemed to pour over him in waves of greedy, eager, searching digits. His biceps mounded up as he pulled his elbow in tight to his body, then raised his arms up overhead to press his own fingers against the cavern's ceiling. Danathius used one of the summoned hands to catch himself. The dragon mused as he stood - the motion causing his shaft to rise up as well while it throbbed and gush precum in a line before him - that certain previously-flattering descriptors were now insulting to him. “Boulders" of muscles? He muttered, “Boulders indeed. Boulders as small as moons." He flattened his palms against the roof and considered how deep this place was. Not very. Therefore, a little landscaping wouldn't hurt anyone.

His triceps strained. He grinned to himself when he felt the grips on his shaft tighten in hedonic surprise as Danathius realized what was about to happen. He watched vasculature pulse and throb like little rapids glowing with starlight as those broad muscles readied themselves to move a mountain. He settled his stance and took a moment to thrust his hips against waiting phantom hands, making nuts each larger than the largest wine tuns sway ponderously, then pushed.

The mountain glowed a dull red, groaned in protest, gave a series of sharp cracks that surely were heard many miles in every direction, then gave way like rotten wood. Torvanskir casually displaced metric tonnes of earth, stone, and vegetation, and pulled himself out into the night air like a primordial Titan hatching for the first time.

“There… room to breathe," Torvanskir sighed with a smile. He settled himself into a relaxed, reclined posture, entire body exposed against the slope of the mountain, and let the mage have at him. Danathius did so with unrestrained zeal. He climbed up the dragon's shoulder to worship at his trapezius, then jaw, then lolling, lusty tongue. Meanwhile, ghostly hands felt firmly up under armpits, over shoulders, around the trunks of muscle wrapping the dragon's wings to his lats and pectorals. They spread fingers across the well-stretched landscape of his chest, down his ridged torso, over thighs that had just cracked a mountain open. They felt along the hilly ripples of serrati and obliques, the cabled tendons of trapezii. With a muted whine out of the back of Danathius' throat, they massaged and hefted those rolling, roiling testes where they pooled over and between the star dragon's thighs, and all the while, a constant, steady flow of palms and fingers stroked the generously textured, beautifully vascular pillar of an erection. Sensing his worshipper's need, Torvanskir daintily plucked him between two fingers from where he sat and placed him on his outstretched tongue. The slick muscle was hot to the touch, but no longer lethally so. The breath permeated him with its deep scent and the saliva coated his body instantly, making him feel as if he could easily simply dissolve within the sensation.

Gradually, over minutes on minutes, Torvanskir's breathing grew huskier. The flexing of his body, at first controlled and teasing to push against Danathius' summoned hands, became a reactive, libidinal motion. His hips rolled against the mountain to thrust his member between two hands while others pushed firmly over his pectorals and abdomen, never ceasing their blissful admiration. At last, the Blue Beast's expression, which had gone at first slack as his arousal grew, drew into a fierce, wild grin, as he felt his orgasm approach. He delicately rearranged Danathius in his maw so that even when he partially closed it to trap the naked man between his tongue and his palate, he could still see beyond the enormous teeth. The mage, who had been painfully aroused and teased mercilessly for so long, nearly reached his peak. Without needing any further encouragement, Danathius grabbed two teeth with his hands and slid his well-lubricated body rhythmically within that encompassing maw in time with his own phantom hands. Torvanskir rumbled out his approval. In Danathius' mind, the dragon's voice boomed, “You will join me in climax as I reshape the land…!"

Claws dug into stone and gouged furrows in it. Light arced through the dragon's body as climax struck. Danathius watched, twitched, cried out in a climax that he felt was drowned in, commanded by, a part of the dragon's own. A geyser of white blasted up, out, over, and through trees, and then was aimed down against the earth by Torvanskir's hand so that mud formed, popped, and hissed as rivers of the stuff forced itself through the ground and drove a channel thick as a tree trunk. The Beast roared in blissful triumph as he loosed his seed on the mountainside in a potent, rushing, river that forged itself, divided into a new delta, and left glowing red and wisps of smoke and flame along its banks.

Danathius shuddered in his own orgasmic ecstasy, feeling the volcanic rush, giddily imagining that it was firing from his loins rather than the Beast's. The flow powered forth for minutes, until there seemed to be a very real and present danger of a forest fire.

Sensing the human's growing concern, Torvanskir allowed the final shudders of his climax to splash out against the earth, then casually beat one wing out and down. The gust of wind snapped branches and guttered the flames like a candle.

He deposited the spent mage's body on his open palm. “Finally, I can think again," he breathed dreamily, deeply pleasured. “Well done, Mage Danathius. Well done." He looked down with a playful smirk. “We shall train you in the ways of terraforming yet."

“Heh, I'm not sure I should even attempt to learn, but I would welcome, um." He grinned sheepishly. “Would welcome instruction from you, at any time." He cast his gaze around their locale. “Where did you bring us? I don't usually go this side of the range. Let me…" The mage's eyes briefly went distant as his hand flickered through the motions for a divination spell. He frowned and carefully repeated the motions. “I… oh. It's navigation magic."

“Hmm?" the Beast rumbled with idle curiosity.

“Navigating based on the star charts has always been my favorite method. And now, heh." He went dumb for a few moments. It had really happened. They'd really… a star was gone. Well, not gone. “Now the star charts are wrong. Mages across the universe will be wondering why their spells are just a fraction harder to cast. We'll need to rewrite libraries…"

“I am well-pleased to have reforged an idiom so staid as 'written in the stars,'" the dragon happily growled. “Speaking of, I wish to test myself. Perhap-"

“BLUE BEAST." A voice crackling with energy demanded to be heard as something humanoid ripped through an unstable tear in the air and hovered a few feet above Torvanskir's eye level and about twenty feet away. Even with the dragon's glowing body, it was difficult to make out specific features, but the themes of deep crimson, black, and flickering, chaotic energy made the identity plain enough.

Torvanskir raised an eye ridge, but otherwise didn't abandon his lazy sprawl. He simply answered in confirmation, “I." The Storm Azure. Star Eater.

“I am the Wandering Maw. You killed my acolyte, struck me in my own domain, and took an artifact from me."

There was a faint pop in the air. The Wandering Maw twitched triangular, upward-pointing ears and turned to where Danathius had quickly ported himself. He turned back to find Torvanskir glowing far brighter.

“I am the all-consuming," the Maw insisted, ignoring the warnings. Tor's body bulged throughout itself, muscles straining against skin as though desperate to express their power. At every dip and in every vein, light raced in, like a furnace kindling itself. “Though the form you see before you is small, I surround eras. I am lifetimes and bloodlines. I am a constellation across the void, and I am ever-expanding. You should bow and scrape-"

“A constellation?" Danathius asked. “Didn't you notice?"

“Notice what?" the Maw snapped, annoyed.

“Nothing. Could you maybe come a little closer this way? I want to see the face of the thing that killed so many of my contemporaries better as it's erased."

The cerulean light building from Torvanskir's direction was quickly becoming too bright to look at even while squinting; then, even with one's eyes closed. The dragon's jaw opened ominously and his lips curled back in primal glee. Bright lines on his throat appeared like vents controlled by shutters to accommodate the force of what was about to project from it.

The Maw scoffed, “I will not be dismis-!"

A narrow cone of star fire erupted from Torvanskir's jaws. The Maw turned and for a fraction of a second, attempted to drink in the plasma, until its body ballooned and was lost in that blinding beam, which Danathius had artfully encouraged to be aimed both at the small god and at a lake perhaps a mile distant. The landscape was lit as though by the sun, and then the lake fared little better than the interloper: Before Danathius' eyes had adjusted, he felt the air shift climatically with a great wind… and then above him, there were clouds; and then, there was rain.

“A fine test subject. Thank you for the targeting recommendation." The Blue Beast beckoned him nearer with a finger. The scaled gargantuan eased himself back against the mountainside, not even having stood up to dismiss that annoyance, and extended a canopy of a wing over Danathius as he approached. The mage thought for a moment, then stepped his way onto the back of one hand and situated himself just above the knuckle, where a ring - perhaps a spell-casting focus - might sit.

There was no need for more words. Torvanskir coughed a fireball upward to pierce a hole in the rain clouds and they both looked up, searching the night sky. The mage pointed, and the dragon nodded. There, before their eyes, one star amidst the rest was twinkling. It stabilized for the space of perhaps thirty seconds, drawing an amused smirk out of the dragon and a deep flush out of the mage. They watched in the rain until it wavered and blinked out. Danathius let out a shuddering breath he hadn't realized he had been holding and looked up at the newly forged star dragon. Torvanskir met his gaze for a moment, breathed in deep, then let his eyelids fall and released a sigh of pleasure that shook the world.