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The Awakening of Dragons

Chapter Four

Written by Arian Mabe (Amethyst Mare)

Commissioned by NomexGlove

With Darius taken care of, Santino and Brent were on patrol duty for the next few days, the quickest flyers with the best stamina – which was rather surprising when it came to Santino. But the purple dragoness loved nothing more than to hum, the sound of her throat trembling with the subtle vibrations carrying her away. It softened the edge of her worry, though Julie had admitted, while she was calling people to let them know where their loved ones were, that she had also told Santino’s partner (or ex-partner? Were they still together? Kind of? Sort of?) that she was there.

She didn’t know whether she hoped that Sebastian would show up, but, ultimately, it was not Santino’s decision, not as information, passed on by Julie and filtering through to those that she had not been able to speak to, the ones not listed as emergency contacts, was disseminated. She tried to set it from her mind, but Seb always had a way of dragging it right back up to the forefront of her mind.

It all happened in a moment.

Santino froze, the water lapping at the edge of the lake, the cliff face towering above them, casting them into its freezing shadow. For a moment, neither dragon nor human breathed, though Sebastian was the first to take a huge, shuddering breath.

“Oh fuck… Santino… She was right. I knew what I saw.”

Santino snapped into motion, a broken cry ripping itself from her lips, but the dragoness’ heart was too frail and fragile to take another iota of heartbreak – the heartbreak of losing her lover that she had been shoving down for months on end. She’d laid a clutch and she’d been without the man who had made her heart sing, though that was way too corny and cheesy for her ever to say aloud to Seb. Still, she’d caught herself in the dead of night, her sleepy gaze lingering on the couples amongst them, wishing that she still had that closeness, that that kind of relationship was still hers to hold close, to cherish.

She had not even had a chance to say goodbye. But maybe she wouldn’t need a chance to say goodbye.

“No!”

She jolted into action, lunging forward, eyes wide, wild. Her heart pounded, roaring into motion, thoughts screaming, yet she could not force her limbs to move quickly enough, not even as Sebastian stepped back, his hands raised as if to protect himself.

“Away from here!” She bellowed, wings flapping, sending sweeping ripples across the surface of the water. “You’ve got to get away – if you stay, you’re going to end up like me!”

Sebastian’s jaw dropped, though with the buffeting force of the dragon’s wings, it was all she could do to stay upright, sort of, lips moving soundlessly. Anything she had to shout was whipped away by the dragoness trying to dissuade her, trying to force her back, though something roared in Sebastian’s ears that was not the dragon.

Her head fell back, ears ringing, eyes wide, straining against the blue of the sky above. Something was wrong, something very wrong, yet all Sebastian could take was great, deep, shuddering breaths, his lungs feeling as if they were growing larger and larger with every breath he managed to drag in. It scraped and pushed – and then Santino was there again, the purple dragon anxiously pressing in, trying to push him away, though all Sebastian, finally, could do was cling onto their partner as if for dear life.

Even with scales, it still felt so damn good to have the dragon in his arms again. And that was enough, would have to be enough, if only for the moment. The rest could be worked out later.

“Sebastian – you have to leave! Now!”

Santino thumped her tail forcibly into the ground, sending up a spray of pebbles that had not been all worn smooth by the passage of time, one foot in the cool water of the lake. The mountains rose forlornly behind them, yet she could already see it in Santino’s body, the shift of it, how h was already down on all fours, as if being there was a more comfortable position, naturally, than being upright.

She tried to snap her fingers, forgetting for a moment that she had feet instead and could no longer so easily “snap” her partner out of it, dithering, pushing, not wanting to hurt him. She was so much bigger than Seb! What if she squashed him or hurt him in any way? Yet it was not as if she could exactly not try to snatch him up in her claws and drag him away, somewhere, anywhere, all to get him away from the place where he would become just like her. Yet that would have run the risk of harming Sebastian, especially as the man transformed in her hold.

Or…she could let it happen. If she did that, Sebastian would end up as a dragoness, one just like her, and they could be together again. She hated that the thought even crossed her mind, shoving it away as quickly as it had appeared, snapping her jaws closed around a snarl.

“Santino?” Seb said faintly, on his knees, his hands on her leg, balancing there. “This… This is crazy… I… I don’t feel good. I feel weird.”

Santino growled, stomping a foot.

“That’s because I’ve got to get you out of here! Alan says anyone who stays here for too long with transform – you’ll be like us! Dragons! I mean, we don’t know how it all works yet – but I’ve got to try to get you away! Come on – get up!”

Yet it was already in full swing within Sebastian, the molecules that made up his body shifting and changing, enlarging his body as he panted, holding his trembling hands to his face. It was rapid and steady and Santino gasped, reeling away as if she’d been burned.

Quick! Why was it so quick? She darted her head out, wanting to do something and not knowing what on earth she could do, something to stop the horror from happening, from feeling as if everything had ended up leading Sebastian into a trap. Would Seb even still want to be with her after everything that had happened? There was no way for her to tell and a big part of the dragoness didn’t even want to find out either.

Her family was coming though, filling the sky, settling her heart, though it had to have been her bellowing roars that had called them there. They clamoured down in a flurry of colour and flapping wings, struggling to control their descent at a decent pace, even as Sebastian’s shirt ripped down his back, a line of spines showing, however small they were.

“Alan!” She cried out, dragging the dragon with the most knowledge over to them. “You’ve got to do something – can we take him somewhere, stop this? We’ve got to try!”

Yet Alan had had a dragon slip through their net only that morning, currently still sitting with their father, and didn’t know what to say, her mouth opening and closing slowly. She didn’t have all the answers, shaking her head, wanting to give them and coming up with nothing.

She didn’t like feeling useless. She didn’t like it one bit, the sick churning writhing sadly in her stomach as if it was curling through her guts like a worm. Santino shouted something that she did not catch and she held up a claw, staying her frenzy. She had to try too, yes, even if she was shaken by the idea that there was so much more for them to know, while she had not found nearly enough of it out from the caves. But it was all Alan and them had.

“Hang on, we’ve got to think logically here,” she said, a little more comfortable once she’d found her voice. “Sure, we can start by taking him away – but will it be too late? How are we even going to move him…”

“Sebastian! His name is Sebastian!”

Alan gave Santino a look, the intensity of her cry sawing through her.

“I understand that you’re concerned, Santino, but we can’t rush anything. We don’t want to make it worse…”

“Make it worse?” It was time for Seb to speak up, though that was difficult with his head shifting, becoming more and more draconian by the second with a layer of scales of a nondescript colour beginning to form, one after the other. “What do you…mmmph…mean? This… Dragon? Am I…dragon? No…”

The transforming man moaned, though no one could blame him for the fear in his heart even as Santino snapped and lunged, tail cracking out with her eyes wild.

“Come on, come on, come on…” Santino fretted, snaking her head back and forth. “Alan… You said…we could do other things with our breath, the ones who weren’t breathing fire, at least not yet! I can do something with that, surely, dragon magic? I can stop this!”

The decision had already been made, Alan shouting, stretching a wing out before her as if to stop the dragoness, yet Santino was not to be halted when it came to doing absolutely anything that she thought might work to save her partner. Seb would not be hurt by the transformation, but they thought it took some time and he had to have been close enough within their territory for some time already for the transformation to be taking place. No one knew, not then, why it was so quick, quick enough for them to see, yet her gut twisted with the frenzied urge to do something, to do anything, to see to it that Sebastian came through it well and happy, one way or another.

The rush came upon her and silvery ribbons of a softer kind of breath than fire pulled up from the back of her throat where it was emitted from, cool and wafting, curling around her teeth. She felt it rise, infusing her with a sense of power that was not pure strength, eyes fixed on Sebastian, kneeling before the lake. Sunshine danced on the clear water, the striking shadow of the cliff cutting across the water to his back, but Santino knew what she had to do.

“No!”

It was too late for Alan to stop her, the dragoness pulling on the desire to heal, to make whole again, inside her, trusting instincts that she didn’t even know were there. That was all she could do, all she could hope for, heart hammering so loudly that it felt as if it was pounding its beat solely against her eardrums. It did not flow from her like a fiery swathe of breath, what they could use to keep their nesting mounds toasty through the claws of winter, but lighter, gently, like a living mist.

Yet it was still a kind of mist that she could direct as it curled around Seb, the man trying to struggle up, though he had part of a tail, only a little, and his legs were trying to adjust themselves into a position more apt for a quadruped. His eyes widened, sweeping his fingers inadvertently through the wafting mist, blue and white and sparkling through with shades of teal – a surprising colour coming from a purple dragon. Yet it was not as if the blast of a dragon’s fire matched their scales either, so perhaps that was merely something that they had come to expect from numerous fantasy novels and films about dragons.

Santino pulled back, still breathing out the healing life force, what she thought would return Sebastian to his normal body, safe and sound once again. Yet it all happened before her eyes as if she was watching the scene play out before her in slow-motion, her body locked up and unable to respond, not even to clamp her jaws down against the flow of her breath. It poured and poured and, before her eyes, Sebastian groaned and arched, his back rounding into a draconian ridge.

No!

_ _

She screamed inwardly and Arya shoved her off-balance too late, Santino’s breath winding around and around the man before her. Yet it cocooned around Seb as if it was a chrysalis, a vector of transformation, the man shifting more and more rapidly without them being able to do anything about it. His back burst through his clothes and his jacket, ripping it to shreds, sharp, jagged, yellow spines tearing their way free. He let out a strangled noise, though could barely be seen in the winding of magic, the breath taking on a life of its own, even after Santino had shut it off, forcing had she could back down her own throat. It was all that she felt she could do, but the damage, if it could even be called that, had already been done.

She was unable to stop the transformation and, if anything, she had sped it up. Seb twisted into the form of a dragoness before their very eyes, howling and crying out, though Sebastian reassured them all alter that she hadn’t felt any pain, which had been scant relief for Santino, not knowing if she had pushed too far, done too much. No one was to know when that was happening, the first so rapidly accelerated transformation that all of them had seen.

Yet her back had rounded with large, dominant spikes with a backwards curve to them, her tail shooting out and whipping about like a serpent that had suddenly found itself trapped. The colour of her scales settled into a pale teal with her points yellow, including the spines, the scales larger, less of them seeming to cover more of her body. Maybe it was something to do with the rapid transformation, though that would be seen in time as the dragoness, for that was all that they believed her to be, gasped with her new lungs for the very first time.

“Oh!”

Her voice had softened, yet rang through the clamour crystal clear, eyes wide open and tongue flickering out as it too transformed. A dragon’s tongue was not forked, but they could still flicker it out somewhat like a snake to taste the air and sift through scents differently. Scent, after all, gave them even more information about their environment, though her muzzle was moderate in length, not too wide and not too narrow, her nostrils defined at the tip with a neat tuck and curve.

Santino’s breath caught, heart racing, lifting. Why did it feel so good to look at Sebastian like that? She wanted to stop it all, of course, but she wanted to see too, craning her neck, her lower jaw hanging slack, the dragon’s yellow points pulling up into smooth horns with a curve in the middle, the tip pointing towards the sky. Sebastian had always been looking skyward, as fitting as that little detail was, pointing out constellations, trying to teach her about worlds beyond her comprehension.

Maybe they would have that again, one day. Maybe.

But the dragoness before him, her claws curling down into the ground in a flicker of yellow, forcing the mountain pebbles to shift under her feet, was beautiful. Sebastian was beautiful as a man and as a dragoness and that was something, very much so, that Santino never would have denied, not in a million years. She’d known, when she’d met Sebastian’s eyes back in the park when rescuing Kelvin, that she still loved them dearly, that she was head over heels for them.

That gave her hope, yet it was a strange feeling indeed to let hope rise even as her heart sank, the dragoness standing shorter than her, but resplendent in teal scales with yellow points, the large, sharp spines on her back with a dangerous edge to them. Her tail was tipped with a yellow triangle also, along with her strong, moderate horns, a dragon who should have been proud of her form, though it had never been Santino’s intention at all to drag her down into dragonhood with her.

The dragon settled on the ground, her flanks heaving, her eyes wide and wild, wings splayed out around her, though they seemed longer than those of the other dragons, bigger still, stretched out like the wings of an eagle that could fly for days upon days, taking on long-distance flights. They still, however, bore the typical bat-like features with the spines between leathery membranes, strong and resistant to harm. Santino couldn’t help but notice that there was a touch of purple in the membranes, if she looked carefully, the sight of it warming her heart. Maybe that had been because of her.

“Seb… Sebastian?”

She approached cautiously, yet Sebastian grunted, staying her with a flick of her tail, accidentally demonstrating remarkable control over her own body even after only a very short time of being in it. Maybe that was a good sign too. Or perhaps Santino was merely clutching at straws. Who could blame her, honestly?

Sebastian’s mind reeled, parting her jaws, feeling out her new teeth with her tongue. It had all happened so quickly, all in a way that she had not been able to control. It had been like a dream, in a way, where she had not wanted to stop it either, even if she knew, ultimately, that the change was not one that she wanted. She licked her lips, the feel of scales so foreign, overwhelmed with so many new sensations that her mind couldn't catch up with every last one of them, not then. That would take time, though there was certainly no going back to the city for her. Her studies too, well… She hadn’t taken all that well to university anyway, to be fair.

She chuffed softly, laughing, as Santino looked on, dithering with worry, not knowing what to do. That would be par for the course, for a while. No one was to blame there. She tried to stand, yet that proved to be more difficult again, slumping down, one leg in the water. The cool of it was almost nice, though just another sensation that her mind, somehow, had to catch up with, keeping up with all the changing things at a pace that she was very much not comfortable with.

It was what it was, however, the shreds of her clothes around her, trying to be embarrassed in her nakedness, as a dragon, but, frankly, Sebastian didn’t find that she had it in her.

A dragoness, not even a dragon. But changing from one sex to the other, when Sebastian had been, well… Santino’s heart twisted, blood roaring, his stomach lurching as if she was about to lose her lunch. Whereas she had been bisexual, Sebastian had been gay. And what the hell did that mean for Sebastian, what she thought of herself and who she was, let alone what it meant for their relationship? When it was placed against Sebastian’s sense of self, even Santino could put aside her longing to have their relationship back, exactly the way it was, in lieu of caring for her partner.

With Sebastian as a dragoness, however, her scales wet from the water, panting heavily, eyes wide, they would have all the time in the world to talk and understand, though not quite in the way that they had wanted to.

Alan muttered under her breath about not expecting that to happen, though the insecurity of not knowing everything and not being able to find the answers as easily as she wanted to claw at her innards. She slunk away, swinging her tail sadly, delving into the caves for research, the cool dark wrapped around her, shielding her from the outside world. They would be fine, she was sure, now that Sebastian had transformed, as the rest of them had been afterwards. That was a good thing, though a thing that would change everything.

Alan groaned. There were too many “things” to keep track of. Maybe she was fighting a losing battle even trying to keep track of them at all.

All she knew was that she had to try.

*

“So.”

“So.”

Like it was that goddamn easy. The dragons sat side by side on a bed of moss, tucked away in the forest, the sound of nature around them. Birds sang and hopped from branch to branch, not at all worried about the dragons in their midst, a squirrel looking for buried nuts while they came to the end of their hibernation. After caring for their eggs, buried, for the winter months, the dragons were glad to see signs of spring coming, fresh buds on the trees and the green of fresh flowers poking through the soil. There was rebirth all around them, if only they took the time to look for it.

Santino, however, didn’t know how to look for it. Sure, she had something in her, something that she had only touched on once with Alan, when they were trying to see what “powers” they had (it seemed like a silly way to put it), but…what good was it? What did it all matter when all she had done was speed up her partner’s transformation? If they even were partners anymore… They certainly weren’t boyfriends. She didn’t know what they were anymore.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, forcing the words out, hating how they tasted in her mouth, leaving a foul lick of bile behind. “I’m so sorry… I thought… I rushed. I thought I could stop it. I’m so, so sorry… I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

To her surprise, however, Sebastian laughed, though the mirth, if that’s what it even was, did not loosen the lines of tension from the dragonesses body.

“Oh, Santino… You were always like that though, weren’t you? You rushed into things without thinking and, really, it’s okay. I’m kind of glad that you didn’t change that much.”

Santino tried a small smile, the tiniest of smiles. It didn’t make her feel any better. Things had gone better than she had imagined, the worst-case scenario being Sebastian not turning up to find her at all, but it was not as if they had gone the best that they could. They still did not know where they stood and maybe they would not, at least for a little while. Not everything was sorted in a flash of light, after all, even if Sebastian’s transformation had raced on practically at that rate.

“Still, I should have thought, we’d been trying so hard to keep people away from where we think the magic spreads…” Santino shrugged helplessly. “But it didn’t work, I’m sorry. There’s so much about this place that we don’t know, it really can make you feel small sometimes, tiny. As if we don’t matter.”

“From what Julie said on the phone, about you guys, I think you matter more than you realise.”

Santino gave her a strange look, as if she could not quite believe what Santino was saying.

“Maybe,” Santino said doubtfully. “Alan thinks so. We don’t know know yet though. I wish we did, I think it’s starting to bug Alan too.”

There was time, the afternoon stretching on. Santino let Sebastian rest, foraging for her, enough for her to try out her new palate, though winter berries and roots would not go very far on a dragon’s stomach. They would do for a start and they would look forward to richer pickings in the warmer months when spring came, taking their grace in hunting until then. At least they could more easily cook their meat with a flicker of fiery breath, adding what herbs they had managed to store and dry to it. It made them all feel a little more as they had been, before, in a good way.

They may have been dragons, but they were not pure beast and not human, certainly not. They were their own beings and it was up to them to define exactly what that meant to them.

Sebastian shifted her weight, something she needed to say bubbling up from deep inside. Sadly, for Santino, it was not a love confession, or a confession of continuing love – not yet.

“I guess…” She struggled with the words, rolling them around her mouth before managing to force them free of her jaws, practically with a thrust of her tongue. “I’m a dragoness too…I guess?”

“Yeah,” Santino said softly, twilight slowly pulling at the sky, as if a soft shade was being drawn over it, the stars coming out in the lull of late afternoon teasing into the early evening. “Yeah, I’m sorry. All of us are like that… It happened to all of us.”

Sebastian sighed, slouching a little, her wings hanging on either side of her body, as if she was slumping into the ground. Somehow, she had ended up lying down on her belly, her legs tucked under her, though everything happened naturally, instinctively, without the dragon even having to think about it. Settling in as close as she dared, Santino murmured soothingly, warbling and crooning as if she was trying to soothe one of her sisters. In a way, that was what Sebastian had become. She still held out hope that they would become more than that again.

“Kind of sucks when I never liked girls though.”

Santino nuzzled her softly, laying her wing softly over and around Sebastian’s back. The dragoness, whether consciously or not, leaned into her embrace.

“You’re not a girl, you’re a dragoness,” she said, firmly, decisively, as if there could be no doubt in the matter at all. “That’s different. You’re different. You’re perfect.”

Sebastian’s lips parted as if so

*

With the fire flickering, comforting them all after a rather tumultuous day, the dragons gathered together in their sleeping clearing, with a cliff face to their back and the forest before them, protecting them. It was a spot that they had learned to take flight from without the aid of a cliff to leap from, though it was not easy. They’d always considered that, one day, they might have to do so in an emergency, even if none of them wanted to think about what kind of emergency could push them to that.

Jenson and Darius… They’d talked. A little. Mostly, Darius had tried to work out their new body, but it had been harder than usual, perhaps as they had been sleeping while it had all taken place. That was something for Alan to wonder over, but the dragoness was quiet, her head laid down near Isla-Rae. The smallest dragoness of them all soothed her softly, twitching her tail back and forth over Alan’s scales, letting her know, always, that she was there, was her sister, always there to support her.

No one had come to see Isla-Rae yet, but that was not entirely unexpected. Her family had not been in the country and she’d doubted that they would have been easily accessible, though there had been a couple of friends down as emergency contacts. But after several months, there was little way for her to know where in the country they were or even what they were doing. She knew their curiosity would be raised, however, over what had happened to her and, one way or another, they would find her in the end. It just might take them a little more time and maybe a few more phone calls to get to her new corner of the world, the place that she felt she had made her own.

Isla-Rae watched the others, how Brent and Arya were unsettled, the two perhaps most active dragons unnaturally still, like statues that had been posed lying down, their tails curled tightly around their bodies. Although they did not touch, there was a sense of comfort in how they placed themselves, two tense mounds that slowly softened, as if they were melting under the heat of the fire. Arya’s mother had left, guided down so that she could go back to look after the rest of Arya’s family, though already the pang of missing her caught in her chest.

Isla-Rae would talk to them the next day, but was confident that Arya had more than enough help for the time being with Brent there to comfort her, even if it was harder to tell what was going on with Brent. With their sister dragons around, no one was truly alone. But she had to stay there for Alan, softening her demeanour without the words that Alan loved. She always thought that she was the dragoness who had taken the most to it, not feeling as if she was leaving as much behind as the others, but there were things too that she’d left behind. It was more as if something had clicked in her mind, slotting softly into place, bringing everything into the light for the first time.

It felt right. As long as she had that warm glow of settlement in her heart and her mind, everything else, she knew, would fall into place, exactly as it was meant to be. She had been religious, to a point, before, and a little of that had carried over for her, the idea that there was a higher power and a plan for them. If she was following in the tracks of all that fate had laid out for her, there could be no harm, no harm at all.

She was content and she only hoped that she would be able to help everyone else see the best of themselves as dragons too, bit by bit, day by day. It was a slow process.

Like it would be a slow process, most certainly, for Darius. They shifted their weight, half ignoring their father half the time, though Anniyah respectfully kept her distance, being the wife, that Jenson had married after their first relationship had ended. She’d never meshed well with Darius, though he had somehow managed to accept Anniyah a little more as “the wife of his father” over time. Not as a stepmother, for their relationship had never been such, not when he had his own mother, of course, who loved him dearly. Thankfully for Darius, that was not something that he’d ever had to doubt, which had perhaps given him the courage to head out to say one last goodbye to his father.

Instead, he found himself trying to take in his father’s words, Jenson calm and quiet and softly spoken. He’d never quite heard that from him, always looking up to him, as a son so often did to a father. It was easy to settle into that kind of role too when his father was larger than him still, making him feel like a child again, even if Darius, very clearly, was not.

“I’m sorry, Darius, that you had to come here,” Jenson said softly, though the obvious love for her son shone in her eyes, brimming over in a glitter of emotion. “But I’m glad too… I hope the change to being a dragoness wasn’t too stark for you.”

Darius blinked.

“Um… What’s that?”

Alex nodded, settling in close.

“Ah… I hope that isn’t too much of a shock, Darius,” she said as gently as she could. “It’s happened to all of us. There was not any…hm…correlation between sex when we transformed. The females stayed female but the males… We became female too. All of us.”

Darius’ head snapped back around to his father, eyes wide.

“Wait, so you’re a woman now? Just like that? How didn’t I know? You’re like mom?”

Jenson laid a wing comfortingly over her son’s back and, for once, Darius did not shake her off.

“With so much happening, I didn’t think to explain it, I’m sorry. But how are you feeling about being a dragoness too? It was a big shock to all of us, though we worked out partway through that all of us were becoming dragonesses, not just the women.”

Darius scoffed and blinked, though the roll of his eyes was something human, something that should have been far more deferential when it came to speaking to much older, more refined dragons than him.

“No, I’m a guy, I’m definitely male, thank you. I don’t know what you’re talking about there.”

“We understand if it might be hard to understand and accept,” Alex said as gently as she could, though there was no easy way to break such news, “but you are like us now, a dragoness. We’re all the same, though it may take some time for you to understand.”

Darius cocked his head, though did not back down, a twitch to his tail that promised trouble. In time, he might be able to let go of his humanness, to relax into a softer way of life and being a dragoness, yet with seeing his father after a time apart and the fractured relationship after his father had remarried… Things took time to heal, his mind and emotions resorting to anger in the immediacy of it all.

Darius’ brashness and bluntness, however, would not fade, an intrinsic part of who he was.

“I hate to break it to you…but I’m fairly sure that girl dragons don’t have penises,” Darius grunted. “I have one, unless that’s some sort of freaky dragon thing that still makes me a girl.”

They stared at the silver dragon, unblinking, silence falling over their group. The fire crackled and snapped up kindling, the dryer twigs that Kelvin had been feeding it with Isla-Rae at his side. Alan, who had been so tense and quiet the whole evening, picked up her head, the only dragon to move as the others froze.

“I’m sorry…” Alan said at long last, breaking the silence. “But you’re going to have to repeat that. You’re… You have…a…”

She could not find the words, though what she did know, as she interrogated Darius more than thoroughly, was that the man had not transformed into a dragoness. Of course, Darius was not amenable to in-depth inspections and still had their modesty to hold in mind, though that would most likely slip away in time, allowing them to become more and more dragon-like over time. He did, however, mumble something about “it being out” when he went to bathe, though that was not something that Darius, fairly, wanted to get into. There was no rush to it, but it left Alan brimming over with more questions than ever, wanting to dive right back down into the cave system and pick up where she’d left off earlier.

But could she learn even more about the dragons by simply studying and being with her sisters as they were, together? It was something that had rolled around and around her mind as she considered Darius, all that had been right there before her eyes. They’d all assumed, after their initial research, the old drawings and markings made by dragons long gone by, of other times, that showed them all as matriarchs, as females. But what if there was more to it than that? What if there were to be more dragons?

That would make sense, she reasoned with herself, settling into a restless sleep late at night, though she would surely nap in the caves between her session on the coming day. She couldn’t spend all her time in the caves, but she was more fired up than ever to see what secrets they hid, all that they could uncover, in time. But perhaps she should not have rushed through it. Despite her need to know everything, the hunger for knowledge that clawed at the pit of her belly, there was only so much that Alan could do.

It was about time she realised that, recording the passage of all that had come to them. Still, she really wanted to see what those breath abilities were all about, whether they could even affect the land around them properly…

Her dreams were filled with discoveries, a smile pulling at her lips, even in slumber.

Nearby, Santino and Sebastian sat, looking up at the moonlight, in a companionable, if awkward silence. Truth be told, it was not all that different to how they had been before, still working out what made the other tick, their relationship slow and steady, the kind of relationship that was still finding its feet. It had been a little rocky from the start solely as they were young: they weren’t meant to have all the answers. No one expected them to have all the answers, but sometimes they thought that they should.

“So…” Santino said slowly, breaking the silence, the two of them sat apart from the rest of the dragons. “This is happening then… You’re…here to stay, I guess?”

She said it as a question, though there was no question about it. Seb could not leave, though Santino’s heart pulled to see her partner changed so. Once men, now dragonesses. After Darius’ revelation, Santino could only be grateful for the fact that Sebastian had not been transformed into a male dragon, for that was something that would have raised more problems than it solved. Even if it might have been more comfortable for Sebastian…

Oh, curses, there was really no right way to go about things, was there?

“I don’t think I can go anywhere,” Sebastian said quietly, shuffling her feet. “It’s weird… I always thought it was fun to play a dragon when we had all the guys together to play Dungeons and Dragons… I always wanted a dragon character. Now…”

Santino chuckled softly, leaning in a little closer to Seb. The pressure of the dragoness’ back against her, despite everything, could not have felt more right.

“Yeah… I remember that. You ended up with an anthropomorphic one half the time, one that was humanoid…kinda? Everyone said you were a furry.”

“Hey – you did too!” Seb had the good grace to laugh, bumping Santino with her wing, though the jostle was only partly accidental, still getting used to her body. “You always said that! But, er, guess I did look at rather a lot of dragon art and the costumes those people wore too were pretty cool. Maybe I was a furry?”

“Hey, hon.”

Santino nuzzled her neck, letting the coolness of her breath, the life force within fluttering out in ribbon-like tendrils across Seb’s scales. Sebastian shivered, though hardly realised the motion came from her.

“You can be a furry still if you like, even if you are a dragon. You’re, like, top tier now, or something like that.”

Sebastian chuckled and shook her head, Santino chancing that there was a gleam of fondness in her eye. She swallowed. She hadn’t realised how much she’d missed that, how much she had been suppressing the aching longing for her partner, the light of her life, the one who had made everything slot into place “just so” even while they’d been fumbling along with life itself.

It was good to be together again, Seb nuzzling her back, noses brushing in a dragon’s kiss, if only for a breath of a moment. It was all it needed to be.

“Hey, Santino?”

“Yeah, hon?”

“I still love you.”

And those words were all that made Santino’s heart swell in the glow of the night, the twinkle of the stars above.

She could get through anything as long as she had Sebastian with her.

She’d never be without them again.