by Calista Skye
“We call them geysers,” I tell him, relieved he’s not hurt. “They’re natural phenomena. Not all that common, but well known. This is the first I’ve heard of on Xren, though. How badly did it burn you?”
He looks down himself. He’s dripping with water, and his pants and boots are soaked. The skin looks as blue and fresh as ever. “Not badly. No, it must have been a trap. I intended to trigger it. And I did.”
“Looked like it hit you right in the… well, I’m glad it wasn’t me. You’re a tough dragon, Caronerax.”
“Perhaps. Yes, I am also glad it wasn’t you. It would have burned the skin off you.”
I shudder. “Let’s get away from here before it happens again.”
He peers down into the hole. “I don’t know. It was quite enjoyable. I will make a note of this place for when I need boiling again.”
Yeah, he’s trying to save his pride. But he comes with me to the other side of the bowl, and we climb out of it to the rim.
There’s more shimmery light to the south, which means another lake.
I look up at him. “Do you know we’re being followed?”
“We’re being spied on by two different parties,” Caronerax says with a complete lack of concern, peering ahead with his hands on his hips. “Possibly more. It’s a fact of life for a dragon — we’re scary, but there’s always someone who finds us so attractive they can’t look away. There are spies everywhere. Quite harmless, usually.”
“You’re not worried?”
He sighs. “Right now, I only want to avoid stepping into another one of your geezers.”
“Geysers. Did it hurt you, after all?”
He hesitates. “Maybe somewhat.”
“Want me to take a look? I still have the healing paste, and it works for most things. Burns, too.”
“It’s just… the location of this burn is somewhat disconcerting.” He gestures to the general region of his crotch.
“Yeah, I saw the full power of the steam hit you right about there. Hey, I’m willing to check it out if you’re willing to let me.”
He looks around. “Let’s get comfortable, then.”
As the geyser erupts once more behind us, he sits down with his back to a tree that’s grown slanted.
He pulls at the top of his pants. “Should I take this off, maybe?”
“Hard to do much good otherwise,” I agree. “I don’t mean that in a weird way. Don’t worry. You’ve seen me naked. Only fair that I see you.”
“Then brace yourself. Dragons are probably different from what you’re used to.” He opens some kind of alien zipper in his pants, right above his considerable bulge.
“I’m not really used to anything when it comes to that,” I confess. “I’ll try to deal with it.”
“And the…hm... the fullness of that part is not controllable,” he continues. “Even now, when possibly badly burned, you can see it has some eagerness to it.”
He pulls his pants bit down, and a dark blue, alien manhood stands out of it, ridged and bulbed and hard.
“Oh my,” I gasp. “That’s… impressive.”
“Most things about me are,” he says with satisfaction.
Yeah, it’s breathtaking in both size and hardness and general scariness. It has every feature I’ve ever seen on an adult toy, and one or two I haven’t but which I realize could make me rich if I were to copy it back on Earth.
I swallow in a dry throat. “Where... were you burned?”
“Oh, you know… all over the place.” He gestures to his whole groin and kicks his pants further down his legs. “Though now I see it’s not as bad as I feared.”
“I’ll get the paste.”
I unwrap the leaf. There’s still a good amount of green healing paste left, but I doubt it would be enough to cover as much as half of that thing. “Where does it hurt?”
He looks down himself. “Right… there.” He points with one clawed finger to about mid-shaft.
“That looks a darker blue than the rest,” I judge. “Do you want to do it yourself, or… shall I?”
He lays back. “You’re the expert.”
Oh my. The sight of that incredible thing has all kinds of heat shooting through me and gathering down below. It was plainly made to penetrate and to take ownership. And maybe to give some serious pleasure to the owned party at the same time.
As if to emphasize my fantasies, the geyser erupts again, sending tons of water skyward. Yeah, that’s probably a lot like what would happen to me, too, with this thing inside me.
I’m kind of touched that he’s allowing me to do this. It has to count as a pretty strong sign of trust, and coming from something as distrustful as a dragon, it’s pretty powerful.
I put some paste on one finger and gingerly place it on the side of his hard shaft, which immediately twitches hard.
“Oh!”
“It does that,” Caronerax drawls. “It must like your touch.”
“Uh-huh.” I use my fingertip to spread the paste around, trying to ignore the flashes in my mind, images of me sitting on that dragon’s cock and having it slide inside. “Is that enough?”
“You’re the expert,” he repeats with a quick smile on his face.
“Not an expert on dragon injuries, and now I think about it, it should be pretty difficult for a little bit of steam to hurt a creature that can breathe flames.”
“It should,” the dragon agrees. “But this fragment of poison that you put inside me is clearly making me weaker. Even boiling water can cause me pain now, it seems. I can’t thank you enough for opening that whole delightful world for me.”
I add a bit of paste for good measure, then move up to focus on his chest. The hole is still there, showing no sign of closing or healing. But at least it stopped seeping ichor.
“Again, I’m sorry I did that. If I could get it out, I would. Shall I try? I would probably need to put two thin needles pretty deep inside and use them to search around for whatever’s in there.”
“Where the smallest slip could have them pierce my heart. And I must say, not at all an expert though I am, that it sounds as though something like that could engender more pain.”
I finish applying the paste. “Probably. Just wanted it out there. You have accepted that I’m not trying to kill or hurt you?”
He pulls his pants back up. “For now. Give me the paste.”
I hand it to him, and he returns the favor, applying it to my shoulders and one little dab on my forehead, which isn’t sore anymore.
“Caronerax, are you a special kind of dragon? You seem different from the others I’ve met.”
He sighs deeply. “More endless interrogations. Yes, every dragon is different.”
“But you are more different than most?”
He finishes up. “There. Your injuries are healing, as opposed to mine. The sun is still in the sky, and I see water up ahead. Let’s walk more.”
I guess that’s not a topic he wants to discuss.
We don’t get far before the ground turns moist and we’re looking out at an immense swamp that vanishes into the horizon on all sides except straight ahead, where there is a dark little shadow of dry land. An island, probably. Or it could be a kind of mirage.
The setting sun is reflected in a million little puddles and lakes, and in between them there’s soggy ground and marsh.
My heart sinks in my chest. “This will be hard to get through. A raft will be useless. We may have to try to find a way around it.”
“There will be no going around anything,” Caronerax says with determination. “I always go through.”
“Don’t you usually fly?”
“I did. Now that I’m bound to this grotesquely debilitating ground, I will go through.”
I like his optimism, but I wonder if it might be slightly out of place here. “Do you think maybe that by tomorrow, you will have healed so much that you can change into a dragon and fly?”
He turns around and walks back to the woods. “I suppose
now you want a fire, yes?”
I think that was a ‘no’. “Sure.”
Squinting out at the swamp, I reflect that at least whoever is following us will have a hard time doing that if we end up somehow wading our way through the mire. There are a few bushes, but no trees that anyone can hide behind. That goes for dinosaurs as well.
Except for the alligator kind, of course, if such things exist here. We’ve never seen snakes on Xren, but the giant insects will probably be here in force. Mosquitoes the size of seagulls, probably.
I gather round rocks and make a small circle of them, well away from the soggy ground. I have nothing to cook on the fire, and the walk has warmed me up fine, but I like the light and sounds from a fire at night. That’s the way we do it back in the village, and it’s kind of grown on me.
“Back on Earth I’ll need an open fire in every room to be able to sleep,” I mutter as I make a pyramid of kindling in the middle of the fire ring. “Have to fire-proof everything.”
Caronerax brings a huge heap of dry wood.
“That would be enough for several nights,” I observe. “But better with too much than too little.”
Caronerax sits down against a tree and closes his eyes.
I worry about him. In the beginning, he didn’t sit down at all, but now it seems like he relishes it. Is his face a paler blue, too? It’s hard to tell — he has really dark stubble that’s growing into a pretty thick beard, which I usually don’t like but which is unreasonably fetching on his face. Not that it needed any more manliness, but it makes him look kind of sophisticated.
“Are you feeling okay?” I ask, sitting down beside him on the bed of dry pine needles.
“‘Okay’ can mean so much,” he growls. “Your language is too flexible to convey actual meaning.”
“Because I wonder how far it is to where you want to go. You can do some healing there, right? It’s a part of your hoard?”
He opens his eyes to luminous, blue and yellow strips. “How did you know?”
“It’s pretty obvious. A cache which can help you regain your strength… it pretty much has to be either a full hoard of part of one. I think you’re the only one of the dragons that came here who thought about bringing something like that.”
He closes his eyes again. “I must be sicker than I thought, expressing myself so simply that anyone could understand.”
“The thing is, it would be useful to know how far away we are. I mean, you flew pretty far with me. Do you know how far? Which direction? How fast?”
“The questions never stop with you. I flew somewhat far. In a random direction. As fast as a dragon flies when carrying a round female from a village on a worthless planet.”
I scratch my chin. I suppose pressing him for distances and speed in miles and hours is not going to work. “Okay. Only checking.”
There’s a sharp crack from in among the trees, and I whip around. It’s dusk, and all I can see are shadows that don’t move. “What was that?”
“Not our spies,” Caronerax says, eyes open to thin slits again. “Those are not that clumsy.”
I stay on my guard, staring into the woods. “Do you know who they are?”
“Not exactly. I know that they are unaware of each other. Both are stealthy and focusing only on us.”
“Are they friendly?”
Caronerax ponderously gets to his feet. “As far as I can tell, one party think they are friendly to me, whereas the other is extremely hostile to me and very, very curious about you.”
I back away from the woods, towards the dragon. “Are they close?”
“They don’t need to be. They both know precisely where we are. Light your fire now — help them pinpoint our location.”
“Will they attack?”
Caronerax peers out at the swamp. “That possibility does exist.”
“You don’t seem worried.”
“‘Worried’. I have some idea what that word means, but I have no concept of it. In the same way that until recently I had no concept of the word ‘pain’.”
I’m pretty sure I see movement in there, all over the place. “If they attack, can you beat— oh fuck!”
An orange beetle the size of a coffee table comes zooming out of the bushes, waving long tentacles in the air as it rushes straight at me.
Caronerax calmly steps past me, bends down, and grabs it. The huge insect snaps giant mandibles at his face and poke long, thin spears harmlessly at his scales. He tosses the attacker into the swamp in an arc so big the splash from where it lands is too distant to be heard.
“I think I can beat them,” he ponders as if nothing has happened. “But their capabilities are unknown to me. As are mine, in this form. In my dragon form I could vaporize them both without exerting much effort. Now, it feels like any tiny creature can vivisect me at will.”
“Oh,” I breathlessly say, my heart pounding in my ears. “You took good care of that beetle, anyway.”
“Hm? Oh, that unthinking thing. Not really a challenge at all. It was all instinct, no thoughts. But I note you haven’t lit the fire. I wonder if flames won’t keep those nuisances away. It did last night, anyway. Although it seems a travesty to call something so cold a fire.”
That gets me building a fire in record time, then easily lighting it with the stone-age matches.
I sit down and munch on not-sheep and a handful of berries. I want to ration them in case I don’t find any more out there in the swamp. If we’re able to cross it the way Caronerax seems to think.
I spread the not-sheep fur out on the ground in a suitable place. “Hey, come sit down. The fur is softer than the gravel.”
He comes over, then remains standing for a while, to show me that he decides what he’ll do, not me. It’s a very male thing to do, I feel. And I don’t mind it. A bit of maleness can be good. Really good.
“There are so many things I don’t know about you,” I state after a while. “I know you don’t like questions. But maybe you can tell me? I mean, you don’t have to. I obviously can’t force you. It’s just, I think I like you, and I want to know more.”
He makes himself comfortable. “There is a lot to know. But very well. To kill the time until we can keep going. I came to this barren place about twenty days ago. I brought a cache, which is indeed a part of my hoard. I took the time to get it, where I understand the others simply panicked and took a chance that wherever they were being led would be a rich place where spoils and loot would be plentiful. In fairness, they had reason to believe so. Our enemy, the Inferiors, were filthy rich, and of course the last spaceship they had would be filled to the rafters with gold. That illusion was shattered soon after the other dragons arrived here, I’ve been told.”
I stare into the fire. “Before that, even. The last survivor brought nothing that dragons would value. Except herself, but she died before the dragons arrived.”
Caronerax stretches his long legs. “Right. After we looted their planet, some of us got immensely rich and amassed legendary hoards. Especially our king. But to his dismay, almost all the other dragons left in pursuit of the Inferiors. He was deeply suspicious about what happened to them. He had to know if they would be a threat to him, setting up a rival power. Those things happen a lot with us. And of course, a king without a people to rule isn’t much of a monarch. He sent me to find out whatever I could.”
The fire crackles pleasantly and the smoke drifts straight up, not into our faces like usual.
“You brought a part of your hoard so you wouldn’t need to find one here,” I continue. “Your cache, as you call it. Did you bury it?”
He chuckles. “Many other dragons would have killed you right now for asking that question. It’s not wise to be too curious about the hoard of a dragon and where it might be found.”
“Oh. Sorry, I was only thinking out loud.”
His teeth glint in the light from the fire, but the smile is chilly. “Try to think less about my cache, little Jennifer. Yes, the cache sustains me fi
ne. I am the only dragon on this planet at my full strength, apart from Kyandros and Aragadon, the two in your village. I’m not surprised that they two have done the best. They are both extraordinarily sly and mighty.”
There’s another sharp crack from the woods, and I scoot an inch closer to Caronerax. “So you came here and discovered your missing dragons. Then what?”
12
- Caronerax -
It is a question I have pondered, myself. Of course, after I arrived here, I immediately realized there was nothing of value on this rock. Still, I remained for some days, spying on the other dragons and taking considerable joy in their pitiful plight, caught here hoard-less and getting weaker by the day. After the long flight through the Void, I needed to soar again, to fly above a planet and feel my superiority, enjoying the air rushing past me, the knowledge that any of the creatures here are beneath. So I did, enjoying myself for a while.
Then I started to plan how I could turn the whole situation into something extremely beneficial to myself, something that would set the course for the dragon kingdom for a long, long time.
But before I could work out the kinks in that plan, I felt something big was coming. And it was.
“Then I wandered into your village from sheer curiosity about how my dragon compatriots would handle a battle in their human form. Quite badly, as I suspected.”
“And then you took me with you,” Jennifer says in her clear, bright voice. “I mean, after I shot you. You haven’t really told me why you did that.”
I have pondered it. At the time, it seemed such an obvious thing to do. A ridiculously female creature shot me, and my first impulse was to rip her apart on the spot. She stood there for a split second with her gun in her hand, its wide barrel ripped and curled and broken. Then she fainted and I caught her, I started to feel something new and unpleasant in my chest, I reflexively Changed to dragon form and I took off with her. I flew the whole way with my dragon manhood at full, twitching mast, thinking of the ways I would punish the little female creature.
And then I didn’t do that.
I look away. “That’s right, I haven’t.”
