by Dante King
To take my mind off what I might be about to see, I looked over at the Titan next to me. Sonos—or Claire, I supposed, at that moment—felt me staring at her. The one eye—the greenish blue one—that was visible to me as we flew toward Augury Grove snapped up to look at me.
“You have a question for me, Mike?” the dragon said, voicing Claire’s words.
“I was just mulling over whether—if I knew how and had the power—Noctis could get to the size that Sonos is now,” I said, projecting my voice over the rush of the wind.
Claire considered this as both dragons banked gently to the west, heading deeper into the mountain forests that surrounded the Drako Academy.
“Perhaps,” she said after a few moments, “though you still have much to learn before you have this ability. Very few dragonmancers ever master this particular skill.”
“So I hear,” I said. “But I’m not most dragonmancers.”
“You sound very sure of yourself,” the Seer said through her dragon’s lips.
“Who’s going to have faith in you if you don’t have faith in yourself?” I countered.
“A very fair point.”
We began to descend. In the distance, I could make out the cliff on which a patch of land had been cleared from the forest that backed it. Augury Grove: the home of the Seer.
“I have lived for a very long time, Mike,” Claire said. “As a matter of fact, I am one of the very few who remember a time when male dragonmancers still walked amongst the people.”
“That was millennia ago,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“I knew you were old as hell,” I teased.
The Titan grinned, showing off rows and rows of saber-sharp teeth.
“It is my great age and longevity that have allowed me to gain and master most of the powers that are available for dragonmancers to learn,” she continued.
“I bet you’re a fucking handful in battle then, huh?” I said.
Claire shook Sonos’ head from side to side. “It is not my place to play the part of the warrior,” she said. “I do not take life. Not unless the future holds no other alternative—and that is a rare and cruel future indeed. I am the Guide for that which might come. I am the Keeper of that which has passed.”
“In a nutshell, it’s your job to try and steer the Mystocean Empire’s ship through the choppy uncertain waters and into a nice placid, calm future, is that right?” I asked, dodging my head out of the way of some wandering flying insect.
“In a nutshell,” the Seer replied.
“So, if you have known a time when male dragonmancers were strutting about doing their thing,” I said. “That would mean, presumably, that you’ve seen dragonlings being born before?”
Claire nodded Sonos’ car-sized head. “That’s right. I was only a child then, but I remember it well.”
I swallowed. My mouth was suddenly dry. I wasn’t sure if it was the rushing wind as we flew along or the trepidation I felt at potentially seeing Saya and Elenari give birth.
“What was it like?” I asked as our dragons began to circle toward the glade.
“Glorious,” the Seer replied without hesitation.
“Really?” I asked, unable to keep the incredulity from my tone.
“Really,” the Seer said through the mouth of her dragon companion. “I have to thank you, Michael, dragonmancer and bonded companion of Noctis.”
“Thank me?” I asked. “For what?”
“For allowing me to bear witness to such a thing once again. For allowing me to once more live in a time where dragons can hope to prosper and flourish.”
I shut my mouth, pondering on whether the magnificent glory of this scenario was going to be lost on me. Was the Seer just waxing eloquent about something that might be, in a word, gross?
We spiraled downward, getting closer and closer to Augury Grove.
I guessed that I was about to find out.
Our dragons set claws to turf a few moments later, amidst the heady, heartening scent of fallen apples and meadow grass. With a slowness born of trepidation, I slipped down from Noctis’ back. I didn’t summon him back into the crystal but let him wander off at his leisure.
The Onyx Dragon walked away and flopped unconcernedly down on the edge of the cliff with his head hanging out into the void. He was a cool customer, was old Noctis. Anyone looking at him would never have been able to guess that something truly remarkable, centering around the continuation of his species, was about to go down.
“It is nothing more and nothing less than life,” he said simply to me, and fell into a comfortable doze.
I turned my attention on the Seer’s little cottage. It was the sort of thatched architectural delight that would have looked good adorning the front of those twee little boxes of toffees or shortbread biscuits.
I strained my magically enhanced ears, expecting to hear the grunting, roaring, cavewoman-like sounds that heralded an incoming baby—or dragonling.
But there was nothing.
No sound of intense labor. No swearing or crying. No guttural cries.
The door to Claire’s cottage opened, and Claire herself walked out.
“What the… I thought…” I twisted around to look at the massive, shaggy Luck Dragon, but Sonos had lumbered away to curl up in the shade of a large, twisted apple tree. “I was flying next to you, wasn’t I?” I asked, turning back to the Seer.
Claire grinned. “You were flying next to Sonos,” she said simply. “I was merely sharing his mind. He allowed me to take control of his body, while he sat back and observed.”
“Pretty trusting of him,” I said.
“We have been bonded for many years,” Claire said. “The trust that I share with him transcends any trust that I have known with any other living thing. We have no secrets.”
I nodded and then looked pointedly toward the cottage behind her.
“Everything all right in there?” I asked.
Claire grinned at me, as if she could read my thoughts. She might have already known what I was going to say, come to think of it.
“Yes,” she said. “Everything is fine—better than fine, in fact.”
“The girls…” I said.
“Elenari and Saya are fine,” the Seer said. “See for yourself.”
As if on cue, the door to the cottage opened once again. My two friends, and fellow dragonmancers, came outside.
My mouth fell open.
I had not really known what to expect, had not spared too much thought on how the whole uber-fast magical pregnancy might have affected them. I probably would have been expecting the two of them to be flushed and swollen. Staggering, maybe. Creased with pain and perturbation. Groaning and sweating, most likely.
What I would not have expected them to look like was—well, there was no other word for it—radiant.
Elenari led the way, and Saya followed just behind. Both women were scantily clad in the same spotless, semi-transparent white shifts that I had last seen them in. Both gorgeous females were, to my complete and utter stupefaction, as flat and toned around the stomach region as they ever had been. There was not a single sign or clue that they had ever been pregnant. The icing on the cake though, was that their skins now shone with a slight golden glimmer. Dressed as they were, they looked like they could have walked straight out of one of Studio 54’s famous parties during 1970’s New York.
There was one other aspect about them that had changed, now that I gave them both the once over. If the glimmering golden sheen to their skin had been the icing on the cake, then the fact that both women’s breasts had most definitely grown slightly perkier and bigger must have been the twin cherries on the sundae.
They looked, quite simply, fucking fantastic.
I must have been gaping like a landed sea bass because the girls both started laughing at the same time.
“What?” I asked, hoisting my mandible off the deck and putting it back into place.
“Your face, Mike!” Elenari said. “You look l
ike you don’t know whether you are coming or going.”
I considered this. “That’s probably a fair summation,” I said. I shook my head to clear it, but it did no good.
“I think,” Claire said, “that our dear Michael here has been laboring—excuse me very much for that pun—under a misapprehension.”
“He has?” Elenari said.
“I have?” I asked.
“He definitely has,” said Saya, with that old, sure sarcasm of hers that I found so attractive.
“I think our male dragonmancer has been vexed over you ladies birthing your dragonlings in the conventional way,” the Seer said.
I gave her a look then. It was a look that could have been carved into Mount Rushmore and still couldn’t have been any stonier.
“I wasn’t aware that there was another way to birth something,” I said.
“That is incontrovertible,” the Seer said, “but that does not mean that it is so.”
I threw up my hands in such a display of perplexed surrender that all three women laughed.
“Ladies, help me out here,” I said. “I feel like I’m about five moves behind.”
I held out a hand and cupped Elenari’s pretty face, running my fingers up to the point of her pointed elven ear and making her shiver.
“You both look absolutely incredible,” I said, shifting my gaze to Saya. I reached out and pulled her to me by her waist. She gave a little gasp and grinned as I ran my hand across her taut muscled stomach. “I just don’t get it. Was it a false alarm, or are there dragonlings?”
In answer to my question, a series of soft screeches came to my ears. They were emanating from the cottage, the door of which was still ajar.
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked.
There was a rustle of leathery wings, and then two shapes shot out of the open door. They were pale gray and tiny, only a little bigger than sparrows, but they were unmistakably dragons. They flew out of the cottage on tiny, fluttering wings and perched up in the apple tree that grew out from the thatched roof. They peered down at the four of us assembled below them and screeched happily a couple of times.
My young…?
It was a fucking odd thought on about sixty-seven different levels. First, foremost, and at the top of that list was that I was a dad—a father. That bit of information took a while to dissolve into my gray matter, before I could really consider any of the other points.
I had responsibilities now. Real responsibilities. I was responsible for the lives of two other creatures. My offspring.
And that brought up the next point: my offspring would seem to be dragons.
Essentially, flying lizards. Highly intelligent, borderline invulnerable, extremely dangerous lizards, but lizards nonetheless.
It was a lot to get my head around.
I watched the little creatures as they snapped and played with one another up in the tree. There was no denying it, they were pretty goddamn adorable. I felt a smile creeping over my face.
With so many questions whizzing through my head, it was only right that I ended up asking the most mundane one.
“What are their names?” I said, tearing my eyes away from the dragonlings and looking at the Saya and Elenari.
“Names?” Saya said.
“They don’t have names yet,” Elenari said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Newborn dragons do not get their names until they are bonded with their very first dragonmancer,” explained Claire. “That is the way of these things.”
“But—I—you can’t just—they need names,” I insisted. “Look at them. I’ve only been watching them a few minutes and you can tell that each of them has its own personality. They need names.”
Saya and Elenari were looking up at the dragonlings and seemed not to be listening to me.
“What sex are they?” I asked Claire.
“You have two little males there,” the Seer said happily.
“Two males,” I mused, watching the dragonlings fluttering around as they chased one another across the thatched roof. “Then I’m going to call them Wayne and Garth, just for the time being. Just so we can differentiate one from the other.”
Claire spread her hands and smiled. “You are their father, you act with a father’s prerogative.”
I nodded. The names had occurred to me because the two little dragons epitomized, in my eyes at least, bundles of happy-go-lucky energy. They were not even an hour old and already they looked intent on tearing the world a new asshole. Making their way through the world, no matter what stood in their way. They were trouble with a capital T.
I grinned again.
As I watched, the dragonlings suddenly dived off the roof and made a beeline for Elenari and Saya. They began flapping around and circling their mothers, plucking at their shifts and letting out little mewling cries.
“What’s up with them?” I asked.
Saya gave me an old-fashioned look. “They’re hungry,” she said.
With very little fuss and absolutely no self-consciousness, both Saya and Elenari pulled their shifts down to expose their beautiful, firm breasts. Immediately, the little dragons alighted on their chests—one on each woman. The two little creatures folded their wings and began to suckle.
I couldn’t help but stare. I mean, come on! When the hell had I ever seen such a thing as that? It was one of the strangest things I had ever laid my eyes on.
I had always been quite awkward when walking around L.A. and unexpectedly finding a mother breastfeeding her shield in public. It seemed like I was intruding on something old and holy, something sacred almost, and I never knew where to put my eyes.
Now, seeing as I had bedded both these women and made little dragon babies with them, I had no such qualms about copping an eyeful. It was certainly something, seeing an elf and—I suddenly realized that I had never ascertained what race of people Saya came from, due to her looking like an Earthling—an Amazonian-looking woman breastfeeding two creatures that looked like a cross between hawks and monitor lizards.
I wondered what David Attenborough would have made of that one.
“I thought that only mammals drank milk?” I said in an aside to the Seer.
“They do,” Claire replied, her eyes fixed on Garth and Wayne as they continued chowing down. “Dragons are mammals, for all their reptilian looks.”
I didn’t even try to contradict this. It was becoming quite clear that I knew next to fuck-all about dragons. Apparently, reading the Four Eyes comic book series and playing Skyrim could not be counted on as proper studying of dragon lore. Unfortunately.
“Look, I know you probably think it’s weird that I don’t know any of this,” I said, “but where I come from, chicks don’t just get knocked up overnight, go through a few days of pregnancy, and then pop out a dragon each. Even if I could get my head around it—which I barely can, just so you know—they still should at least look like they’ve given birth, shouldn’t they?”
Claire looked at me in that way of hers that managed to tell me that she was a lot cleverer than I was and that I was making a mountain out of a molehill.
“They do look like they have just birthed dragonlings,” she said patiently. “You see the gold skin, the enlarged breasts.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, I do, but I was expecting at least a bit of blood, you know. Maybe hair stuck to the heads with sweat. That sort of thing. Evidence that they had just squeezed a life form out of their goddamn pleasure ditch!”
Claire burst a low and melodious chuckle. She wiped a tear of merriment from her eye.
“Oh, Mike,” she said. “Dragons are not born in the way that we are. “
“They pop out of eggs?” I hazarded.
Claire shook her head and chuckled a little more. “No, no. They generate outside of the women’s bodies, through a magical process that it would be pointless for me to explain. It is…” and she searched for the words that might help her explain this miracle. “It is a coalescing of amb
ient magic,” she said. “Do you understand?”
“No,” I said.
Claire smiled.
“Suffice to say that the essence of a dragonling is conceived and knitted inside a dragonmancer’s womb. The actual forming of the dragon takes place outside, under the open sky. For the sky is a dragon’s true home and the realm in which it is a king or queen.”
I thought I had got enough of an idea of what the Seer was talking about to satisfy myself as to why the girls looked so fucking great then.
“Sounds kind of cool,” I said. “Way less gross than I was expecting. Might have been nice to witness that.”
Claire placed a long-fingered hand on my arm and squeezed my bicep.
“You may yet get another chance to see it,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You will get the chance to impregnate again,” she said, in a prosaic voice.
“You make it sound so romantic,” I said drily.
We watched Elenari and Saya switch the little dragons over to their other breasts. Wayne and Garth made little clucking noises as they nestled into the bosoms of their mothers.
“You have another task before you,” Claire said to me, capturing my attention.
I took my eyes off the girls I had MILFs of and locked eyes with the Seer. I stared into the fathomless depths of those mismatched eyes and saw the future swirling inside, though it was beyond my ability to make out.
“What task would that be?” I asked.
“These dragonlings that were born are unmarked,” Claire explained. “In order to bring them into dragonhood, you will need to find a special crystal for them.”
“A crystal? Why?” I asked.
“For now, the dragonlings do not have any true magic of their own, only that magic which they receive through their mother’s milk. They must be presented with a crystal each, melt it with their dragonfire, and consume it, if they’re to survive and become full dragons.”
“And let me guess,” I said, “these aren’t the kind of crystals that you can just pop down to the apothecary for along with a pint of milk and the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly?”
Claire shook her head. “These crystals are found in one place and one place alone: in the subterranean depths, where the Shadow Nations fled and have been hiding.”