James Maxey - Dragonforge

She leaned her snout against his and pushed. Their cheeks rubbed against each other with a slow, firm pressure. Her smooth scales were the perfect surface for his own scales to rub against, the most satisfying thing that had ever touched his hide. She continued to slide along him, her cheek slipping along his neck, until their shoulders met and each had their head nestled against the other's spine. Her aroma left him dizzy; the warmth of her skin and the firm yet yielding texture of her muscles beneath caused a thousand tiny storms to erupt within him. He felt full of lightning-energized, but also on the verge of being torn apart.

At the thought of being torn apart, he pictured Nadala's fate if they were discovered by other valkyries.

"We can't do this," he whispered. "I don't care if your sisters rip me to shreds; if they harmed even a scale on you I couldn't live with myself."

"We can't do this," she whispered back. "But not because I fear death. I don't. I've always been willing to die for a cause. Now I'm willing to die for you."

"Oh," he said, feeling the storms within him raging even stronger. "Then I guess we can do this."

"No," she said, pulling back, stepping away from him. The sudden absence of her warmth left him shivering. "We can't do this because I don't know how."

Graxen was confused. "You don't know how to love?"

"No," she said. "I mean, yes, I believe I know how to love. Perhaps. I don't know what love is; it's more the domain of poets than warriors. I only know that I want you more than I've ever wanted anything."

Graxen was now even more confused. "Then, what, exactly, is it that you don't know how to do?"

Nadala looked away demurely. She said, in a low voice. "I mean, I haven't had training. In reproduction."

"Oh," he said.

"Those initiated in the process are under strict vows of secrecy," she explained. "But perhaps the biologians…?"

"No," Graxen sighed. "I've heard… whispers. But I've never received an education in these matters either."

"Then we're shackled by our ignorance," she said, sounding bitter. "That veneer of culture I mentioned has separated us from our animal natures.

Graxen nodded. "Perhaps we could simply proceed and let our instincts guide us?"

Nadala shook her head. "It may be just stories meant to frighten us, but I've been told that mating without the proper training can lead to injury. I want you, Graxen. I just don't know what to do with you."

"I, um, am very good at research," Graxen said, thinking of the Grand Library back at the palace. Certainly some biologian had recorded the technical details of reproduction among those countless tomes. "I'll return once I learn the details."

"How long will this take?" she said.

"A few days, perhaps?" he said. "That should be time enough…"

"I don't know if I can wait that long," she said. "I feel as if I'm going to be torn apart by the desires within me."

"I understand better than you think," he said, though the storms within him were fading now that he had put his mind to the thought of research. "I promise to read as quickly as I can."

She wrapped her wings around him, still facing him. It wasn't a correct fitting somehow; their bodies felt pleasant pressed against one another, but somehow mismatched. Whatever the actual reproductive act entailed, Graxen suspected they wouldn't be facing one another.

Wordlessly, she pulled away. Her eyes glistened as she studied him for a long moment, then leapt, straight up, climbing toward the sky.

He thought of the beaded belt in his satchel; the gift could wait for another time. A moment later, a small leather pouch fell from the stars. He caught it in his fore-talon. The satchel smelled like she smelled. He opened it to find a neatly folded square of translucent paper, the black outlines of letters visible through the surface. He didn't open it. He felt so full of Nadala's presence that he wasn't yet prepared to replace the words she'd spoken with the words she'd written. The melody of her voice was still fresh; he would hold onto it as long as he could.

Soon, her dark form vanished into the night. He watched the stars for a long time before spreading his wings and drifting off into the sky, light as hope.

Chapter Fifteen:

Broken Sky

Jandra kept a soft, even glow around them as they traveled. They rode in silence through long and twisting tunnels of black rock. Bitterwood sat astride the long-wyrm behind Adam, while Jandra rode Hex. The journey had taken place so far in an uncomfortable silence. Bitterwood and Adam had barely spoken. Jandra was herself an orphan; if she ever met a surviving family member, she couldn't imagine remaining silent. Vendevorex had informed her that her parents had died in a fire while she was an infant, conveniently leaving out for fifteen years the detail that he had been the one who ignited the blaze. Beyond this, she knew nothing of her family. She didn't even know if Jandra was a name she'd been given by her parents or a name Vendevorex had chosen for her. He had told her that the name meant "God is gracious" in some old human tongue, which hinted that he hadn't chosen it. Vendevorex didn't believe in gods. Indeed, he was openly scornful of religions and the supernatural in general.

"The world thinks we are supernatural beings wielding powers drawn from some invisible world," Vendevorex had said when he had first given her the tiara ten years ago and began training her in his art. "In truth, there is nothing supernatural about our abilities. The invisible world we manipulate is the very foundation of what is natural. It is a world of magnetism and light. All matter as an assemblage of infinitesimal building blocks. In time, I'll teach you to manipulate these blocks with the assistance of equally small machines." As he'd spoken these words she'd placed the tiara on her head and her world had changed. She became aware of a fine silver haze that coated every inch of her skin-the residue of Vendevorex's powers. Vendevorex had opened her hand and allowed a trickle of shimmering powder to drift from his fore-talon into her palm.

He'd told her, "I will show you wonder in a handful of dust."

She pulled herself from her reverie as the tunnel they traveled through joined with a larger shaft. The shaft was almost perfectly rectangular. She could see from the gouges in the rock that this tunnel had been carved by some machine wielding massive steel teeth. She could still see traces of the iron scraped into the rock, now turned to rust by the ages.

Adam broke the silence. "I've been told this was all carved by men, long ago," he said. "The world wasn't always ruled by dragons."

"The very rocks that surround us disprove you, Adam," Hex said. "The libraries of the biologians are filled with fossils of the giant reptiles that eventually became the dragon races. We inherited the world from these ancestors. The evidence is clear that humans are merely apes who've gained the ability to speak only recently, from a geological perspective. I say that with no malice; it's simply a truth written into stones. A few radical biologians argue that the ruins of the world show evidence of a once dominant human culture. But if your kind was ever more technologically advanced, it must surely have been under the guidance of dragons. If humans were as advanced as some argue, how did they possibly lose control?"

Adam shrugged. "The goddess judged the time of human dominance to be at an end."

"The goddess?" the elder Bitterwood scoffed, his voice low and firm. "We worshipped Ashera in the village of my birth. I was later shown that she was nothing but a block of polished wood. The carving was destroyed and the world carried on. The seasons still changed, the rains still fell, the sun continued to rise. Everything we were taught about her power was demonstrated to be a lie."