by Loki Renard
“No, you’re not.” She said it so matter-of-factly, rejecting the possibility outright. “You are not over a thousand years old. That is ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous or not, that is how old I am,” Casimer said smoothly. “In our realm, age is highly honored. Unlike humans who grow weaker with time, a dragon only becomes stronger.”
“So you don’t die of old age?”
“Die of old age?” It was Casimer’s turn to snort with disbelief. “To say that here would be like saying, do you suffocate with too much air? Age brings more wisdom, more physical prowess, more power. That is not to say dragons do not die. There are many things which can take our physical forms. Injury, of course, being first among them. There are various illnesses too, unfortunately. Most dragons do not reach a thousand years old.”
“So you could live forever?”
“Eventually I would become something other than myself,” Casimer explained. “Somewhere around five, to perhaps ten thousand years of age I would lose myself and become an eater of worlds. I would have all my dragon instincts, but no walking form and no powers of speech.”
“That sounds almost worse than dying,” Mika said softly.
“It rarely happens. The world eaters are, for all purposes, immortal. But they are also exceedingly dangerous. Your father would know that better than anybody. He was the last to have contact with one.”
“Really?”
“You know so little,” he sighed. “Your parents did you a great disservice by keeping your true nature from you, and the truth of the world from which you came.”
“They probably thought it was best for me.”
“Probably,” Casimer agreed.
“So you won’t become one of those eaters of worlds?”
“Not for a very, very long time, and I doubt it will happen at all. The generals will not allow it.”
“How will they stop it?”
“Even the greatest king can be assassinated,” Casimer said. “The last three leaders in my lineage fell to the sword of their own guard.”
“That’s awful!” Mika screwed her face up. “Why?”
“To stop the king from turning into a beast of incredible hunger and destroying the city and those who live in it. The birth of a world eater is the rising of a kind of god, and comes at the cost of much life. This city has stood for almost ten thousand years because of the blades of those assassins. My bladesman is also my bodyguard. For the moment his blade protects me. In the future, he will turn it upon me.”
“No!” Tears welled in Mika’s eyes. “He can’t!”
Casimer pulled her close and hugged her. In an instant she had become inconsolable, sobbing with every bit of energy she had. He was surprised by the emotional force of her reaction to the topic of his passing. There was fondness between them, of course, but her tears betrayed much deeper emotions still.
“You are the sweetest thing,” he murmured, kissing her tears away. “Do not be so sad. It will not happen in your lifetime.”
“But I don’t want it to happen ever,” she sniffed. “I don’t want anything bad to ever happen to you.”
Casimer felt something inside him shift, some intangible switch that he had not known nested inside him, which made him feel a rush of sudden tenderness he did not know he was capable of. This girl, this innocent who gave herself to him in service of her desire, was not spreading her legs because of some human compunction. She had fallen in love with him.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I should not have told you that. It does not matter what my end will be, Mika. It matters what my life will hold.”
“It matters some,” she said, sniffing.
“Pet, I adore you,” he said, his tone fond and loving. “You have such a limited notion of time. You have not had even twenty years in which to come to terms with your existence. And yet you rush for everything, for sex, even for the knowledge of death—though that is still so far off for both of us. Do not mourn the future. You have yet to understand the moment.”
In the mid-distance, the orgiastic cries of the mating dragons floated through the air as another male spent himself inside the Lady Sapphire.
Mika managed a tearful little smile. “We’re talking about dying and in there, someone is being made.”
“Mhm, that’s the way of things,” Casimer smiled back. “Do not worry, pet, we will have a full and long life together, I promise you that. Now, I must attend to a matter of state. Go back to the bedchamber and rest. I think you need it.”
She nodded a little and turned to follow his directions. Casimer watched her go, his heart welling with emotion. She was beautiful and she was entirely his. He wished he could spend more time in her training. There was still so much they did not know about one another, still so much to mutually discover. Perhaps it was the scent of dragon sex in the air, but he suddenly found himself impatient, as he had not been in hundreds of years.
“You cannot rush this, Casimer,” he murmured to himself. “There is only one chance for a first time.”
Chapter Twelve
Solemn with what she had just learned about the true age of the man she loved, and the fate that would ultimately befall him, Mika returned not to the bedchamber as he had ordered, but to her favorite spot in the garden, a place where she could be alone and think. There was a view of the city she was forbidden to visit, and of the horizon beyond. This was a big world, one great continent according to the maps she had seen in her visits to the library. She was allowed to see such a very small part of it. She was a prisoner, and no matter how much affection she shared with Casimer, she could not forget that.
“Not a prisoner, a pet,” she said, mocking his deep voice to herself. “So it’s totally fine that you’re penned up here like an animal all the time.”
It really wasn’t fine. Mika was frustrated at her limitations. She had been on the cusp of discovering the world beyond her front door, and enjoyed less than a week in Ibiza before being taken into the custody of the king. She was at an age where she should have been exploring, and yet she was cooped up worse than ever.
Sniff.
Did Casimer understand that? She didn’t think so. He was much older, after all, and a dragon. If he remembered what it was like to be young, she doubted that his experiences were anything like hers.
Sniifffffff sniiiffff.
She’d told him a hundred times how she felt, but words didn’t seem to have any effect on him. He just told her to be patient, to wait a little longer, to settle in. How could she settle in a world she didn’t belong in? And how long could she possibly wait? She wasn’t a dragon. She wasn’t going to live a thousand years. She only had a few decades to make anything of her life. If Casimer didn’t let her start living soon, she’d wither and die before ever living at all.
Sniiiffffff.
From the moment she sat down, there had been a snuffling sound coming from the bushes. She had ignored it in favor of her own annoyed thoughts, but it was getting harder and harder to ignore. At first she thought it was one of the Rafikins trying to dig something up, but when she leaned over and parted the leaves, it was not one of the adorable flying dogs that greeted her, but Lythia. The young woman was half-crouched next to the wall, her face red and tearstained.
“Lythia? What’s wrong?”
“Oh, m’lady, I am sorry to disturb you,” the servant said, seeming ashamed to have been caught crying. “I will move on.”
“You’re not disturbing me,” Mika frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing m’lady,” Lythia said. “I brought a punishment upon myself. I forgot how formidable Lord Lazarus can be.”
“Come out and talk to me,” Mika said, forgetting her own concerns. She liked Lythia a lot. Lythia reminded her of her friends back at home. Seeing her upset made Mika upset too. She wanted to help if she could. She held the branches aside as Lythia emerged from her little hiding place, looking utterly miserable.
“So what happened?”
Lythia
stood in front of her, her hands clasped before her, her head bowed. She seemed genuinely embarrassed by what had happened.
“It’s really nothing to concern you, ma’am, it was all my fault,” Lythia said, trying to avoid the subject.
“What do you mean? Tell me, Lythia,” she insisted, using what little power she had to compel the young lady to speak to her.
“I was touching things I shouldn’t have been touching in his chambers,” she said. “He’d warned me several times before about getting my fingerprints on his jewels. He said I was there to clean, not smudge all his things. I just can’t help it, he is one of the finest crafters in the city. He can bring the most beautiful stones from plain rock…”
“So he hurt you?”
“He took his cane to me,” Lythia said. “I deserved it… I…”
“Show me.”
Lythia sniffed and pulled up her skirt. There were several bright red marks placed across her bottom, ridged with puffy skin around the harsh red lines. Just looking at them made Mika angry. Lythia was a sweet, sweet girl. For anyone to have unleashed this kind of punishment was unfair in the extreme.
“You said Lazarus did this,” Mika said. “He’s the one with the black hair and black eyes, right? The one who always looks like he’s been sucking on a lemon?”
“I don’t know what a lemon is,” Lythia sniffed. “But he is a very grave man. Not one to be crossed. He is second only to the king.”
“He’s going to regret doing this to you,” Mika said, scowling furiously. “He’s not going to get away with this.”
“Please, m’lady, say nothing. You will only cause trouble for yourself, and this was my fault…”
Mika was not listening. She was already up on her feet, preparing to find the Lord Lazarus in question. She had been looking for something, or rather, someone to vent her frustrations upon. Lazarus, a man she did not know well, had now become the target of her irritation. And, of course, her desire to protect Lythia was also in play. Casimer punished Mika sometimes, but not in the way Lythia had been punished. Not hard enough to leave angry marks for hours afterward.
After several angry minutes stalking about the castle searching for her prey, Mika spotted the man in question heading from his chambers out across a foyer. Lord Lazarus had a lot of real estate inside Casimer’s castle, befitting his post as second in command, or whatever the dragons called it. Mika had kept her distance from him. There was something about him she just didn’t trust, and given that their first interaction had led to a thick plug and a tail being inserted into her bottom so she remembered her place as pet, she was not keen to make his acquaintance with any kind of regularity. Fortunately he was usually silent when he was in public with Casimer, a dark shadow behind the throne.
“Lazarus,” she said. “Are you Lazarus? You are, right?”
He stopped mid-stride and turned toward her with what could only be described as a look of dragon elegance. His eyes swept down, as if it took some considerable effort for him to lower them to her stature, significantly shorter than his own.
“I am Lord Lazarus, human.”
“My name is Mika. Not human,” she said, taking the same irritated tone as he had. “And I’m here to talk to you about what you’ve done to Lythia.”
“The servant?” He cocked his head at her. “You have some problem with a servant, human?”
“Mika. My name is Mika,” Mika growled. “I have a problem with you, not her.”
“What are you babbling about?” Lazarus snapped impatiently, the force of his irritation almost equaling hers. Almost.
“I’m babbli… talking about you being a bully and a brute,” she said. “I’m talking about what you did to her. I’m talking about how you took a cane to her ass and made it look like hell. I found her crying in the dirt after what you did. She was sobbing in the flowerbeds like a wounded animal.”
“I am sure she was upset,” Lazarus said, unconcerned by what Mika had told him. “It was intended to be painful. Punishment should be.”
His dark eyes seemed to hold extra intention as he spoke about painful punishment, but Mika was not listening. She was far too interested in making him admit that he had done wrong, and promise not to do it again.
“So you don’t even care about her, well, that makes sense,” she said. “You have girls you barely know doing your menial work and if they make a mistake, then you just beat them until they cry. It’s so simple for you, isn’t it.”
“Disciplining wayward young women is a simple matter, yes,” Lazarus ground out. His jaw was clenched and he seemed very annoyed now. Good.
It briefly flashed across her mind that although Lazarus was not as large as Casimer, he was still much larger than she. She was banking on the fact that he wouldn’t dare touch her. She was the king’s pet. He couldn’t do a thing to her.
“Well, if you ever lay a finger on her again, you will be hearing from me,” Mika said. “And I might not be some big dragon man, but I can make your life unpleasant if I want to.”
“Of that I have little doubt,” Lazarus intoned. “Of course, you are forgetting that you are also subject to the king’s law.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” Mika said. “Hey… where are you going?”
He had turned and was walking away from her, ending the conversation without so much as a word. How… rude! Mika followed after him, dogging his steps as he left the castle interior and stepped out onto one of the great marble circles that reminded her of helicopter landing pads. Except here, of course, no helicopters landed on them.
“Hey!” She had to run to get around him, stopping him mid-stride as she positioned her body between him and his destination. “I’m talking to you!”
“But I am not speaking with you,” Lazarus drawled. “There is little to say. Take the matter up with your master. I certainly intend to.”
“Oh, you’re going to tell on me, huh? I bet you are. That’s exactly what cowards do.”
Lazarus stiffened, his brows rising toward his hairline with impressive speed. “Coward?” He drew the word out in an icy slow question.
Suddenly, Mika was aware that they were very alone out there. She did not know where Casimer was, but he wasn’t there to save her if this dragon lost his temper. And he did seem to be on the verge of losing it. There was only one thing for it—for her to lose hers faster than he could lose his. It was not hard to find the sparks of fury. She needed only think about her own captivity, and the marks poor Lythia wore on her beautiful skin.
“Why don’t you clean your own damn room!” Mika shouted. “Hitting a girl like that, you should be ashamed of yourself. Only cowards hit girls. She’s half your size.”
The dark-eyed man stared down at her wordlessly. She could tell that he was about to dismiss her again, walk away as if she were nobody, as if her words meant nothing. That made her even angrier.
“You hear me? You touch her again and I swear I will get you,” Mika growled, her temper uncharacteristically high. “I will…I’ll… I…” Her mind was searching for a phrase that would encapsulate what she was trying to convey, but her anger was clouding her mind and there was something else too, a feeling she had not experienced before. As she stood there, stammering with rage, words suddenly came to her, strange words, words she would never have said on her own. She fixed Lazarus dead in the eye and a rough growl came from between her sweet lips. “I will tear you apart… I will rend you limb from limb… I will unmake you and you will regret the very moment of your conception…”
It was much too much, what she was saying, far out of proportion with what she was trying to convey, but the words kept coming, and with them a feeling of power rushing through her body. She didn’t feel small anymore. She didn’t feel weaker than this Lord Lazarus. She felt a growing strength that made her inflate in some arcane way.
Lazarus took several steps back, a worried expression on his face. For the first time, she was seeing some genuine reaction of concern, and she
liked it a lot. This was how you had to talk to a dragon. You could not appeal to his better senses. You had to find the visceral thing of it and speak the words that should never be spoken.
“I will rain fire on you and your home,” she snarled, going with the words though they did not make much in the way of sense. “I will rend your wings and I will tear at your scales and you will kneel before me because you are not worthy even to… aarrrggggghhhh!”
Suddenly she was much, much bigger than she had been, so large that her body took up much of the landing. When she extended her arms, they were two great sails to the wind, and when she tried to speak, she could but roar.
Chapter Thirteen
“Casimer, you must come, now!”
Casimer looked up from his rulings. “Lazarus?”
It had been hundreds of years since Lazarus had used his first name. It had been about the same length of time since Casimer had seen Lazarus look so concerned.
“Please, sire, now,” Lazarus said. “Before she takes flight.”
“Before she does what!?” Casimer stood from his desk and followed after Lazarus. The man had set off at a run, another rare sign of urgency.
“What is going on, Lazarus… what…”
The question died on his lips as he and Lazarus emerged out into the sunshine of a landing pad, where a small dragon was sitting looking simultaneously heartbroken and confused. She was a bright turquoise hue with a golden gaze, and Casimer recognized her instantly. Mika.
Her flight form was small, but it was elegant and beautiful, just as she was. For a moment, all Casimer could do was stand and stare. These human hybrids made beautiful dragons. Her father was a brilliant red. Casimer was not sure how Mika had become turquoise. It seemed to be a color all of her own, the precise color reverse of her father’s red form lightened into a stunning shade.
“How did this happen?”
“She was shouting at me, sire. She became enraged, and then… this.”
