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shehungers · 27 days ago

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AMBROSIA

dragon-hybrid knight x mage!reader| 18+| 15k

One day, you are approached by two informants of the Witch Queen of Noss. They come bearing gifts of wealth and opulent fruit. The fruit, you are promised, from her orchard is enchanted with her magic and she welcomes you to Noss to take it.

Guided by the loathsome Knight of Noss; a half-human, half-dragon abomination and the Witch Queen's butcher, you set out on the long journey. Along the way, you are kidnapped by the Sisterhood of Gosha, a group bent on dethroning the Witch Queen, and are given a guarantee to what you desire in exchange for helping them.

Their condition? You must seduce the Knight of Noss.

story warnings; dead dove do not eat, explicit sexual content, dubcon-ish, armor is on during sex, blowjob, premature ejaculation, cumshot on thighs, size kink/can't fit, descriptions of genitalia (dragon), dark fantasy, mc is morally ambiguous, manipulation, possession, heavy implications of torture, mentions of abuse (not to mc), mentions of animal death and cruelty (infrequent, mostly metaphorical), extreme body horror + grotesque details, extremely prose + detail heavy, vague magic system, this is an exploration of morality + choice + consent.

dividers by; @/strangegraphics & @/omi-reaources

proofread by my beloved @hantaslittlearsonist

shout-out to @noctis-kingfisher for lending me a tiny hand as well.

this story is purely a work of fiction. I do not condone the attitudes and actions of the characters therein.

this concept piece has taken me two months of writing and pulling out my hair. if you've enjoyed reading, PLEASE leave me feedback and reblog!! I desperately want to hear what y'all think of this labor of love!! 🧡💛

The Witch Queen of Noss had sent two informants to your doorstep with gilded chests braced in their arms, and an enormous black carriage waited at the edge of your hermitage pulled by six lustrous, silvery-gold stallions.

“She has searched for one of your magical prowess with seemingly no end for many centuries now. She says that your magic has a different smell to it, chews differently on her teeth. There's grit to it, feels unrefined in her hands and cuts through her bloodstream. She says you've got that raw magic ability. She likes it and wants you as part of her council.”

Of the two informants—one man and one woman—the man was the only one who spoke throughout the encounter. Or, more appropriately, he was the only one capable of doing so. Since the woman’s face, previously pale, now glowed scarlet and her eyes watered. Her arms trembled as perspiration turned her hairline oily.

This was as opposed to the man, who stood with a straight, rigid back. Dry in the eyes and on the skin despite having the appearance of a malnourished beggar. One of the wretched trying to wedge his fat tongue down the slender necks of empty beer bottles for any residual taste.

He did not look like the sort to find employment in the Witch Queen’s house.

Then, you took a real good look at his eyes which were brown, bulbous, staring-back things with a faint black film spread across the exposed parts of the organ.

To those who could not see, he would have been mistaken as marked by wyrmwort spray for chasing ladies in the night, or yet another unfortunate diseased by plague. But, the appearance of it was far too thin and had spread too uniform across both eyes for it to be of natural causes.

“It's bad taste to possess your own subjects in hopes of influencing an outcome, don't you think?” You spoke in pitying tones, both for the man unlikely to have consented to the possession, and the Witch Queen who had already revealed her desperation to you. “A normal man swept off the streets wouldn't be able to describe magic as he had just now. You are old, but not wise.”

“Wisdom falters in the face of might. Those who are wise eventually wither and rot, and the world soon forgets them. But, might? Power? It creates mountains and canyons, the very stars in the sky. It leaves scars like fissures in the land, in the weak, and you are always remembered.”

The Witch Queen bobbed the man on translucent black threads of magic, which wound him in dissipating mist. She commanded his left arm to rise. It did so with the unnatural, jerky stiffness of a ball-jointed doll. He was gesturing to the woman struggling adjacent to him.

“I have searched far and wide for magic of your caliber. It is simply unfathomable to me that you have chosen to hide and squander it.”

You were no longer looking at the man, but at the woman trying to strategically balance the chest on one arm, while opening its great maw for you to see inside.

Gold and silver medallions spilled out of it, plinking on the flagstone walkway underfoot. Faceted gemstones in regal rings and dripping necklaces gleamed with pristine, polished finish. There were even chess pieces among the contents, crafted from ivory, eyes embellished with orange-pink sapphires.

This chest alone contained wealth far exceeding that which belonged to rural kings. It was enough to feed the entire ruined city of Rûregar in the northeast region for seasons. And yet, the Witch Queen wielded this bribe without shame, in the failing arms of this woman burning and sweating under the yellow beat of the midday sun.

“Why do you hide?” asked the Witch Queen in the man’s slow, imprecise rumble. “Such raw, delicious power. I will admit that had it not been for my knight, you may have stayed concealed. But, dragons are most intimate with magic. They know it so viscerally, sensually, even, that I used to find myself envious every time I looked at him.”

In your recent past before self-imposed isolation, you’d heard rumors of an abomination. The grotesque spawn from a human father and dragon mother, so the story was told. An imposing butcher arrayed in black iridescence. Armor made of dragonscale and adamantine, brandishing a massive blade made of the same stuff.

Some stories insisted upon his existence being one of restlessness and carnality. Seasons turned to decades of waiting and engaging in the most perverse acts; savage romps with both humans and beasts alike. For his bloodlust best stayed dormant that way, and he went unchecked by his Master until he stood center in the great orchestra of war, severing spines, bodies in half with a single sweep.

Other tales were whispered to you conspiratorially after some coaxing with free booze and attractive enchantments. The word was that the knight didn’t exist at all, that there was no body inside to pilot the heavy suit of armor. It was all illusory; a cunning, convincing lie perpetrated by the Witch Queen to hold her throne and residence in Noss.

But, you'd already seen through one of her tricks. You doubted that she could maintain an intricate ploy such as that for over a millennia.

“I hide because,” you paused, eyes cutting across the man’s shoulder towards the black carriage when you caught movement around it belonging neither to the stamping stallions nor to the frazzled coachman trying to wrestle them into submission by cracking the reins. “I hide because there is nothing interesting and I am bored. I spend my days enchanting the soil and watching flowers grow. I change the color of waterfalls, and I gossip with the birds in exchange for seeds. My rice is plentiful and I always have wine to pour. My bed is the most comfortable place to exist in any realm.”

The Witch Queen reciprocated such ordinary sentimentality by using the man’s arms to open the second chest, revealing to you fresh, honeyed overabundance in the shape of a toppling mound of fig fruit.

Your curiosity pushed you to take one in each hand, mentally measuring their weight and studying their magenta roundness. You relished their succulent sweet, woody aroma when you pressed them under your nose. And, when she told you to eat them, you did so by sinking your teeth into both, alternating your bites between them.

They tasted of nostalgic summertimes carried on a balmy breeze. Each bite into the figs was decadent and pulpy with pale pink nectar overflowing the impressions your teeth left behind in its soft purple flesh. It was the most delicious thing you'd ever tasted.

“You should feel honored. Fruit from my orchard is forbidden. It receives all of my love that cannot be given unto others. I have grown my fig fruit from seedlings in enchanted soils, and quenched them in elixirs of life. My magic dwells within the orchard, in the air and all of the trees. It is a soft susurrus through the leaves and grass. It ripens my figs and allows me to keep my throne and my vitality. Noss shall never see another queen.”

“Where is your magic?” You did not taste it in the fig fruit in your hands, nor in others that you grabbed out of the chest and ripped with your teeth. Suddenly, you were captivated by the thought of the Witch Queen’s power being within you.

Would it chew like pork fat between your teeth, or lay across your tongue like thick oil, or snap and fizzle against your cheeks until they reddened raw and bled?

You ground another mouthful into watery mince. Let it slide down the back of your throat. “Where is it? Your magic. Where is it?”

“It waits for you.” She answered through the man, whose voice was starting to crack and unravel. The cords in his throat pulled taut, strained as though played across with the bow of a stringed instrument. His leaning house of bones had started sagging more left, and the skin under his eyes drooped like red sandbags. His eyes were slowly receding into the back of his head. “Come to Noss. Come to Noss. Come to me. Come to me. Come to me and taste my orchard. Lysander will guide you.”

You were fast to sidestep from the spilled chest of figs and the sinking body of bones and shriveling innards. Closer to the fatigued woman who'd fallen to her knees on the scorching flagstone walkway.

The chest she still clutched was so heavy that it pinned her folded legs to the stone, melting the flesh off her shins, and the polished brilliance of the gems and coins inside had burned her face and neck to stiff brown leather, and baked her eyes a blackened prune color.

“In their wickedness, they chose their own fates,” spoke a dour but potent voice from nearby. You'd been so fixated on the man rotting, deflating within his own skin-suit, and the woman dying on her knees, that you hadn't seen the Witch Queen's Knight approach. “The man was a violent thief. He had burglarized a merchant’s wagon and killed the merchant. Done far worse to the merchant’s young daughters. In the mind of the Witch Queen, there exists no death that she’d find satisfying. He did not always look so humble. She made it so.”

“And the woman?” you asked, queasily.

“Aye, that one was part of the Sisterhood of Gosha. They wish to usurp the Witch Queen by placing an imposter on the throne in her place. Skilled assassins, spies, politicians. Their sbires hide in ordinary faces. We must be wary of all: mothers with infants, beggars, and embroiderers. Even the young girls with flowers in their hair. Now that they know you have the Witch Queen’s favor, they will be coming for you.”

You moved back as he came forward, leaning down with his enormous mass to offer the armored bulk of his arm. “Come along, I will be ensuring your safe travel at the behest of the Witch Queen. I am Lysander, the Knight of Noss.”

The knight anchored himself like that for a long time as you refused to touch him.

He was an abnormal creature: immense in size, his precise silhouette concealed by his invulnerable black armor, but you could see his shape was not entirely human. The length of one of his arms was more than half of your whole body, and at his full height, you expected you'd only ever see the point of his broad chest that began to concave, narrow into a long waist wrapped in cloth and dragonscale.

You became flustered the moment you realized you would not be rewarded with a glimpse of the monster underneath, as there were no revealing gaps in his armor, which was all jarring angles and ungentleness. No war-worn chips or missing fragments, tears in the breathable fabric against the bend of his elbow, or under his helmet.

And, it was his helmet that you found most fascinating of all.

A heavy, sharp design with flattened protrusions pushed towards the back of his head like wings on a bird. The adamantine and dragonscale had been pounded smooth and pinched in the front. There was only a narrow slit across the eyes for him to see out of, and six or seven long, symmetrical vents set along a hinged jaw piece for him to breathe through unless he lifted it.

You wondered what you would see underneath the helmet and emboldened yourself to reach for it. He winced away only when the hinges made a screeching sound of unuse, not as your sticky fingers padded along the piece and raised it far enough to see a dark, textured chin.

“Do you know no fear?” Lysander hesitated to show you his arm again to help you across the thick sea of boiling red-brown flesh and entrails. “You've heard the stories, haven't you? You mustn’t be so brave in my presence.”

If you stayed focused on him, then you would think less of the possibility of human rot sticking to the soles of your boots. A very wrong, gummy sensation that you expected would feel like being suctioned down into a mud pit after a long rain.

“So, it's true you're an abomination? Hideous and monstrous? An unfathomable union between man and she-dragon?”

“Aye. I am,” he said. “That and much worse. C’mere now. Come closer to me and raise your arms.”

Any closer and your toes would touch the bubbling mass crawling over the edges of your walkway, suffocating the fertile soil and grasses you'd painstakingly grown. That would be enough to make you scream, yet you held it in your chest, locked away behind your ribs.

Intrigued still, you asked him, “And it's true that you engage in every one of your carnal whims without second thought? With all kinds? Humans and beasts?”

“Aye. All of it.” He gave you no pleasure or disgust in his response, speaking in a way that sounded manufactured. Unthinking. Detached. “I am insatiable. My carnal lust and my bloodlust. Now, do not tempt me with either. Come my way.”

“And,” you instigated further, enjoying harassing him, “It’s true that it was you who led the Witch Queen here to disturb my peace? You are the Witch Queen’s whore?”

This gave Lysander pause, his adamantine face gazing down at yours. The slits scored into his helmet perpetuated all of the malice he claimed was factual. But, within the shadows inside his helmet, you thought you heard something click and grind—not metal or scales, but his jaw.

“Aye. Truly, I am deserving of your abhorrence. It was I who infringed upon your sacred place as asked of me by the Witch Queen. My dragon half never knows rest and the pull of magic, no matter how small, is ruthless to me and my mind. Your skill is tremendous, but your magic is more so. There were cracks in your enchantment. Magic overflow that slipped free and found me, grasped me, and led me to you.”

More curious than aggravated after his confession, you were docile when he finally took you away from the human puddles and figs wrinkling in the sunlight. He had reached across it all and plucked you up with one arm around your waist before then situating you in both, cradling you in a way that was not unkind, but certainly foreign to him.

“I’m not diseased. Don't drop me.” Afraid that he would, you stayed still and shrank yourself in his arms so as to not brush his scorching armor.

He moved with surprising swiftness for his size, smooth enough that the sound of his armor did not crash through the conversation and distract you. “Have you seen the Witch Queen’s orchard? Is it as ripe with magic as she says it is?”

“It is a powerful place. Invigorating. Raw. Her magic is leached into the soil and is a part of everything. It goes unchecked,” he said, adding nothing else on the matter.

You were settled back on your feet by the edge of your flagstone walkway, right in front of the black carriage’s open door. Its interior was as wholly dark as its exterior and lightless, except for what wan sunshine could slither in through gaps beneath the heavy curtains hanging across the windows.

Lysander’s mass thwarted your view of your doorstep and the informant's amalgam of liquefied parts drying, stiffening, and cracking on the hot stone. You thought about what red-brown clay looked like when it was spread out and left to bake in the sun. It was easier to imagine that was the reality that you would be leaving behind, and what you'd sweep clean with a broom once you returned.

“Inside. We've got a long way to Noss.” He made a gesture over your head with the tip of his chin to the carriage's wide mouth leading into nothing but shining satin seats and floorboards of exquisite deep color that you feared would cut your legs off at the shins.

The air inside was cold against your back, serpentine; invisible coils that caressed your neck and huddled close to your spine through your robes as though trying to steal your warmth for itself.

“And, if I decided I don't want to go? Would you stop me?” you asked.

Lysander’s armor made an awful ruckus as he hinged forward, leveling his helmeted face with yours. You stared through the narrow slot for his eyes with intention and felt your neck hairs rise as two gleaming purple things looked out at you.

“Aye. There is no turning back now. Get inside.”

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Two fortnights into your travels, the Sisterhood of Gosha remained such a perpetrator of evil in Lysander's mind that it was seldom you experienced true rest. His paranoid particularities were most prevalent when it came to indoor accommodations as opposed to lying on cold, dewy grass beneath a backdrop of black-blue sky. Starless. Unending.

He was comfortable with his body open to the great expanse of the world because, in those amazing spaces, he knew he would always prevail. None other than his own kin and formidable magicians could fell him. And yet, now more frequently than ever, he was misplaced—landing in slanted wood buildings filled with small things and far too many windows.

Those things haunted him so terribly that he started encroaching on your privacy by barging into your lodging at all hours, claiming that walls and windows and doors created cramped spaces that made it easier for all the wrong sorts to hide. Imagined wretches, shapeless and malleable in shadows, molded into every little crevice that he could not maneuver.

Often, for this very reason, he would remove furniture from whichever room you chose to occupy. He abandoned them in the corridors for the staff to shove against walls so other guests could get around.

It left you with slim arrangements for sitting and eating. Fortunately, he came with enough sense about him to leave the beds alone, but windows must be locked at all times, and you were not allowed a room with doors leading to adjoining rooms.

One night, while staring out an open window at a blackbird roosting on a rooftop nearby, waiting for the maid assigned to boiling water to fill your bathtub, you thought about defying Lysander and just how strongly palatable an urge it was.

Paltry retaliation that held your stomach in unseeable hands, twisting it around into some awful mass. When the feeling started to subside, your stomach was placed center in those faced-up palms mockingly—a reminder that you could feel things beyond deep relaxation and deep boredom. You were only human.

The maid emerged from the corner after she'd emptied her bucketfuls into the tub, filling your room with pale steam. Wispy stuff that smothered your nostrils in wet heat, gave your skin a greasy shine. It moved swiftly towards the window and fogged the cool glass opaque gray as it passed straight through into the night air.

“Ah, this is no good. You could catch a cold. I will close it for you once you're in the bath,” said the maid, who then spun away with mechanical stiffness upon noticing you unfastening buttons and removing clothing. “I—pardon me. If you'd like to get comfortable—”

“The window is fine as is.”

Such a frank refusal was met by the maid lightly pacing in place, long skirts fluttering and winding her ankles. “My apologies, but the knight would disagree with you. It was difficult for the owner to convince him to let me even see the inside of this room to fill your tub. I fear what he may do if I do not…”

The longer you listened to this madness, the more desperate you were to disobey Lysander. In your hermitage, you’d gorged on absolute freedom as if it too had been in endless supply like your wine and rice, forgetting that the world beyond your barrier could not be as ungovernable as you were.

“Lie to him then, if it's something that bothers you so much,” you told her. It seemed so inconsequential to you, but the maid’s entire body jerked with emotion, the intention to turn around to look you in the face.

She did not, likely thinking of how close you were to full nudity at that point. “I—did you not hear that I'm afraid of him? We all are. We do not want to wear away his patience.”

“Then, tell him I've kicked you out before you could close the window. Surely it's easier to ask for forgiveness for something you weren't given the opportunity to do.”

This pacified her, albeit poorly, as she continued to fidget as though she'd forgotten how to do anything else. Her acquired silence were moments spent conjuring up ways to challenge you more on the matter, whereas you used it to search the endless depths of pocket space on your robes until you found what you were looking for.

A very generous nugget of gold was placed at her eyeline and at first, when she gasped, you thought it’d been more of a throaty scoff of affront. But, then, she snatched it from your hand, examined it closely, tried to magnify imperfections and falsities in it with just the twitching wet globes in her head.

She would find none because you'd been careful. It had taken you hours to transmutate it from an oddly shaped stone you'd found while urinating behind thorned brush just off the main road where the Witch Queen’s carriage traveled, into the smooth, glowing prize that it was now.

“Is—is this real?” asked the maid.

“Of course it is. I made it myself,” you said.

The maid tucked the gold into her apron, curtsied in the wrong direction, and hurried from your room. You tracked the swift patter of her feet across the floorboards until they faded, intermingling with all the rest of the sounds permeating the inn.

That calming, faraway ambiance was as fast to fracture as your respite was, however. From down the hall, metal scraped and rattled and approached your door quickly. You were fully unclothed, having gradually added each piece into a neat stack set aside, and gathered bathing soaps and balms and fragrances to take with you into the water. You dropped those on the floor and darted across the room.

You envisioned the Knight's neck slanted, pressed to his shoulder within the confines of his armor as he strided to your door, as most establishments never anticipate having to accommodate dragons or creatures larger than orcs.

You yanked the linens off your bed and wrapped yourself in them just as he opened the door.

He took in the unusually revealing sight, not moving for a long time. Some of your lasting uncertainties about him went away that night, while new ones surfaced.

How humorous was it that the Knight of Noss could be disoriented by a meager state of undress?

How concerning was it now that he truly knew you existed?

He could no longer starkly ascribe you as ‘the disgruntled magician’. No longer were you just the robes you wore. You were all asymmetry, gooseflesh, shedding hair, and tough calluses from years of wandering hard terrains in the same boots.

Your utter humanness in that moment of stillness had softened you to him, even with your dour expression and acerbic tongue.

“Some knight you are.” If you couldn't crack his armor, you wished to do so to his pride. You weren't malicious by nature, but embarrassment and unknowable things made your skin itch and bittered your mood. “Out of here, fool!”

“Allow me to intrude for a moment. I'll check now before you bathe.” He said this somewhat laboriously, as if suddenly struck through the back, winded by surprise and pain. “Step aside.”

You dragged layers of linen with you to the door and stood in his way. “No. You intrude too much. I went into isolation because people intrude too much and want too much. Begone, Knight.”

“Will you check the windows yourself tonight, then? You've got more to worry about than just thieves and cats getting inside. Open windows while you sleep thins the veil between our realm and others.”

When you pushed him out with half the weight of your body against the door, he went willingly into the hall with its low ceiling and compact walls. The sight of his armored mass in the incommodious space, tight and bent like items crammed inside a box, made you claustrophobic.

“That’s just old superstition,” you said.

“Aye. That it may be, but all superstition stems from a single truth. And visitors in the night coming through open windows is no superstition.” There was no denying he was right in saying that, but even so, you would not give him pleasure by letting him back inside. “It's a meager thing I'm askin’ of you.”

“Fine. I'll be sure to check them.”

Had Lysander been a true dragon without the innate patience and good-naturedness of his human blood, your flippant response would've been perceived much differently. An egregious act of disrespect to a superior being, of which dragons largely believed that they were. But, for all of the harsh edges of adamantine and dragonscale he wore, and his precise, guttural intonations which always made your chest quiver, he was remarkably even-tempered.

At first, when he did not immediately go away, staying hunched over in that strange wadded shape of black iridescent protrusions and looking straight at you through the slit in his helmet, you thought you'd finally agitated him inside that suit. Yet, as the moments passed without change, you grew increasingly aware of the scratchy linen against your bare skin and warmth reaching up your neck.

He could've been admiring your frame drowned in heaps of fabric, or observing the soft, swaying glow on your shoulders from nearby candlelight. If the grotesque stories about his unappeasable lust were to be believed, surely the opportune silence was his sizing you up, comparing you to his past conquests.

The most despicable part of leaving your isolation was all the wondering you did now. When before you'd been kept far too busy by vicious snapdragons in the garden and birds gossiping on a branch overhead about the baker’s wife and his cousin.

But, once you thought of the Witch Queen’s succulent figs, and the magic you’d been promised a taste of, suddenly your focus returned. Everything else was mediocre.

Lysander could think of you however he pleased.

“Goodnight,” you told him.

“Ah,” he livened at your voice, “aye. Goodnight.”

Afterwards, you discovered the bathwater to be lukewarm and beyond the possibility of enjoyment, but scrubbed yourself clean with soap and coarse sugar anyway. You let your hair halfway dry by leaning back in a chair, head tipped out the window to catch the nighttime breeze. It moved lethargically, cradling your scalp with cool fingers and flicked pearls of water dangling off strands back onto your face.

When you had tired of that, you left the window alone, enticed into doing so by lasting threads of defiance. You snuffed out candlelight and laid wide awake under the prickly linens for a short while.

Light feet shuffled down the hall. The smooth undersides of their leathery soles were an effortless glide across the floor boards. Explosive laughter pushed through cracks in the walls and the gap under your door, reaching you from across the inn where the guests inclined to nighttime wakefulness congregated in the common room. Its carefree nature, buoyant in the way of a life loved and well-worn despite hardship was contagious.

You smiled.

Outside, a beggar serenaded the moon peacefully, uncaring of just how badly he truly sounded. A bird startled from a high place close by and took flight. Meanwhile, in some distant alleyway, tomcats yowled and fought, and would likely die fighting. You closed your eyes.

The next time you opened them, you were not in your bed at the inn.

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Hunsiya was the name your captor gave you though you hadn’t asked for it, mere moments after rousing into some state of wakefulness. Your face and tongue were swollen from having been slouched across your thighs for an indeterminate period of time, nose heavy with pressure, hands anchored behind your back by glowing gold twine that pulsed with enchanted heat.

You could feel the magic coming off of it and rolling around the dim room where you were held hostage in. It permeated the space with smothering density, swathing you in prickly warmth and cold like a coat made of sanded down briars. The downy hairs on the back of your neck stood up; tiny spines, for magic of this magnitude could only mean there were many magicians present within the Sisterhood of Gosha, and you hungered for what they had.

“Mortal magic eaters are an impossibility, and yet, here you sit before me! Terrifying!” Hunsiya pierced a chunk of rare meat with her fork, raising it up, a toast you didn't reciprocate. “It was worth us waiting to catch you, because you did all the hard work for us, didn't you? Letting us right in and commanding a dragon. Not an easy task, my friend.”

She had removed your bonds and led you to a different room. Bursts of orange lantern light made it bright, forcing you to blink rapidly as your eyes reddened and watered in an effort to acclimate. You were situated in another chair. Lush cushioning pulled you deep into luxurious softness that molded your thighs and gripped them unrelentingly. Strongly scented wood polish lifted off the armrests as your fingertips moved across their silky luster.

Your stomach pressed lightly into the edge of a long table with a sumptuous feast stretched across it. Hunsiya only had to make a stately gesture with her arm across the table for you to fill the empty plate in front of you with as many delicacies as you could.

Tender meat dishes oozing blood and oil. Savory, herbal stews. Glazed, softened vegetables. Thick sauces in vessels with pinched spouts. Fruit desserts arranged like tiny islands in bowls surrounded by oceans of hot, caramel-colored syrups. Everything that could go into your mouth without coming back out, did.

Hunsiya watched appraisingly as you gorged. The twirling fork between her fingers told you there were things she wanted to say, thoughts important to investigate, but would doubtlessly mean less than nothing to you if she spoke of difficult things too soon.

So, she bided her time by asking trifling questions to which you only gave half-answers or simply swished your head in response. Once your consumption slowed to pretty cuts, thoughtful shapes in the fruit dessert, lapping at thin layers of syrup on the back of your sterling spoon, her verbal onslaught began.

“The Sisterhood of Gosha wants to dethrone the Witch Queen. But, we want to do this discreetly, without it being known to the city or her council. We will remove her and have one of our own replace her. All this you already know,” she proclaimed, “but, we will have you help us do this.”

Her words were forceful, stacked with ruthless confidence; fearlessness that could've only belonged to someone whom others believed was untouchable.

You knew her type: affable leaders with pitch black hearts and slippery intentions that never truly included the people they'd claimed to love. They embraced and kissed tear-stained cheeks soothingly before sending them away to their deaths. Later, these autocrats sat upon their thrones, which were erected upon a foundation of discarded loyalty and bones.

“I have no interest in that. Why not threaten to kill me instead?” you asked, now drawing lines through the cooling sauces with a blunt knife, watching the viscous stuff slowly ooze back into place.

Hunsiya smiled. “Because even I'm not foolish enough to believe that'd get me anywhere. You magic eaters are walking, living, breathing bombs.” She leaned back in her seat to observe your etching, saying after a time, “What if I told you I could guarantee you a way into the Witch Queen’s orchard?”

Your skillful motions in the sauce ceased. “She's already promised me the fig fruit from her orchard.”

“A promise is so hollow, my friend,” Hunsiya insisted with crinkling, deep-set eyes the color of aged honey. Many wrinkles appeared, creating uneven terrain above her cheekbones. The lines in her face were beautiful, disarming and alluring, but not in the least bit kind.

“A promise doesn't mean anything to a person who sees no value in it. A guarantee, though? That has tax. It has weight. A guarantee means that there is work to be done and there's a reward at the end of it. People are much more inclined towards rewards than maybes and promises.”

After such a large meal, you were growing drowsy and distracted. The only thing keeping you awake was no longer having a bed to lay in (you even craved the scratchy linens), and the thought of the Witch Queen’s magic on your tongue being oddly stimulating.

“Perhaps,” you relented begrudgingly, dragging each part of the word in a listless slur. “What does your ‘guarantee’ entail?”

“Nothing too difficult. You're almost there already. You need to claim absolute loyalty from the Witch Queen’s Knight.” Hunsiya said. “Who else better to inadvertently orchestrate the fall of a sovereign than her own servant? Who else better to help you into the orchard than someone who already knows it intimately?”

What foul and underwhelming logic.

It was a further notch in your motivation to end this expedition quickly and return home to your hermitage. You missed the roaring waterfalls with their colorful froth, the news from nearby towns carried by chirruping birds with roundabout ways of saying things, the carnivorous plants in your flower beds bristling at the sight of you nearing with shears to snip their thorns so they'd be more docile and only feed on rodents.

You'd only been away for a short time, but your mind reconstructed the snug shelter where you had lived for countless days.

Inside, you imagined a sheer layer of grime settling across all your things like ugly pale gray-brown organza: tabletops, chairs, bedsheets, and the bath towels with long, wooly naps that left behind handprints when you touched them. You'd have to vigorously scrub every surface, lovingly polish dust off of shelves of baubles and tomes, summon the wind within your walls to push the motes of dirt and time out.

But then, you always recalled the taste of the Witch Queen’s figs; their ambrosial sensations. The smooth, tender flesh splitting against your teeth as succulent nectar seeped into your mouth, spreading numbness across your tongue when the fruit’s overbearing sweetness made your cheeks tingle and pucker.

More than the fruit itself, you wished to sink your teeth into her magic and meld it into oneness with you. Absorb it. Consume.

Consume.

Consume…

“After tonight, he sees you differently. He no longer can witness you as his queen’s newest procurement. Now, you are substance. You are his longing. His painful yearning. He would lay with you if you allowed it.” Hunsiya was impatient, her voice a thunderous demand for obedience. “What I am saying is that he is more than willing to give into your every whim.”

“Dragons are unfalteringly loyal to those that they choose,” you argued. “Even if what you say is true, what he may now think of me doesn't compare to the millenia he's devoted to the Witch Queen.”

Hunsiya’s smile was vulpine; long and cunning in a way of a woman with secrets that you did not know. It sent heat to your head, behind your eyes, into the fingertips busy pounding out a rhythm on the tabletop.

“Fine, then.” You'd entertain her for a while longer. To sedate your annoyance, you reached far onto the table to pluck a handful of glistening, pinkish grapes from the bushel in a woven basket. You ate three. “You're telling me to seduce the loathsome Knight of Noss. How do you propose I go about doing such a thing?”

“Imagine a creature that's never known freedom a day in its life. It knows no existence outside of its cage of expectations and bonds it cannot see nor overcome on its own. What do you think would happen to the creature should it suddenly gain freedom?” asked Hunsiya, now leaning forward on her elbows, over a spot on the table cleaned of dishware and crumbs. “Think about it.”

“I don't need to,” you sipped water from a silver goblet which looked tarnished in the orange lantern light. “Your theory: an imprisoned creature that has never known freedom would go insane should it spontaneously gain freedom. Or, if it's a cute little dog, it’d just die in the wild. But, I suspect you're not talking about a dog.”

“Indeed.” Hunsiya stayed in her huddled shape of elbows and hands, head sideways to contemplate you. “The Knight of Noss is bound to his queen only because she makes it so. You're a magic eater. You've smelled it. You've seen it. The Witch Queen's magic that binds him. Yes, yes, I know you've seen it. And you can break it.”

Of course you'd seen it.

The magic that the Witch Queen used to bind Lysander was unlike what she had used to possess the melted man and the burned spy from the sisterhood.

Magic had a taste and what she had forced upon them was rancid and dead. A nauseating odor which spread through your nose and climbed down the back of your throat, clinging and throbbing like something alive, something infectious and vile. It was necromancy defiled by the lich and wayward magicians who'd sold their goodness in pursuit of something more.

Lysander's curse was that he was a bastard and his humanness could not eclipse the might of the Witch Queen's greed to keep him. She had wisely imprisoned the magical birthright his dragon blood gave him, thus, all he knew was colossal strength and the turmoil of a human heart.

In that way, you pitied him and his existence. You'd thought it the day he had approached you, carrying his burdensome armor and sword and the thick chains of hot white magic that had flickered in and out of existence before your eyes, descending from an empty sky. You wondered if he knew you could see them.

“It is unlikely that he is aware you're a magic eater, nor that his queen’s intentions are not so benign as simply keeping you as a trophy, and yet”—she gave you a derisive sneer— “you’re willingly walking to your doom. You know this, you just cannot resist temptation, can you?”

She found triumph in your silence and went on, “Dragons may be masters of natural magic, but he is no true dragon. He is impressionable, unsure of who he is if he is not a weapon. An enslaved butcher.”

“Free him.” Suddenly earnest, she thudded interlaced hands down onto the table, sending a ripple shuddering through silverware and plates and bowls across the table, up into your arms. “Free the Knight of Noss of the Witch Queen's hold. Do it slowly. Do it wisely. A dragon is most loyal to those who are most loyal to them.”

And, before you could speak your part, the spacious eating room swelled with ragged fluttering that you'd initially thought to be numerous coarse coats being shaken out behind you.

When you looked around, there were dozens upon dozens of blackbirds perched throughout the room, materialized from nowhere and reeking of magic. Their talons grabbed onto and into any surfaces they could find, wings twitching violently as if preparing to take flight, beady eyes aglow in orange light and focused intention.

The moment you sprung upright, knocking over your chair with the back of your legs, hands raised for invocation, the blackbirds surged at you in a hellish cacophony of shrill squawks and flapping wings. Your hands shrank against your head instead, protecting your face from their wind, their claws, as they encircled you, never making contact.

Through gaps in their wingspan, you watched Hunsiya slowly rise from her seat, smiling as though she were seeing off a cherished friend. Her fingers fluttered farewell through the small, moving apertures. Just then, the darkness of the birds and their shrieks closed in, encasing you in their strange smell of stale barnyard hay and uprooted greenery and soil.

Then, there was nothing.

Just as quickly as they had arrived to take you away from the feast and your comfortable chair, they hissed out existence just like a distant, dissipating mirage rising off of hot stone. What had remained of their magical essence was then carried off on the tails of an inky night breeze.

Although this region was in its ripest and hottest season of the year, the air billowing beneath your thin bed clothes made you shiver. You were exposed to the depths of the yawning streets of this nondescript town, lifting your bare toes off of the cobblestone road so they wouldn't freeze. Distantly, and then suddenly close by, you listened to heavy clatters charge through the nighttime veil with swift, monstrous strides.

It was like the earth shook and bent to the ruckus. These wild, fraught vibrations that made your bones ache. Only once he was standing still did that feeling subside.

“You! Where have you been?!” His wrath carried as far and as loud as his armor.

The birds had delivered you to the knight.

“I smell them on you! I smell the sisterhood’s wickedness on you! They stole you away just as I thought that they would. What have they done to you?” Lysander lowered his helmeted face to level to your own, voice dire and taut. “Speak! Your window was wide open and there was nary a thing in your bed except a single blackbird feather. I knew it, then. They came for you.”

You licked your lips. They had dried during your fast flight through the wind and cold, as brief as it was. A delicate sweetness lingered in the corner seams from the fruit desserts; the sticky syrups. “I—yes, I think they did. Maybe they did. I can't be certain.”

“Where did they take you?” he asked.

You tried to act in a way that made it seem as though your thoughts had been left askew, troubling you deeply, “Somewhere dark. Somewhere dank and foul and frightful. I was tied to a chair. I don't remember anything else. Now I'm here, with you.”

“Vile wenches!” he sympathized, perhaps so riled by the brazenness of the sisterhood that he wouldn't think of you anymore, despite remaining at eyeline with you. “There is no end to their evil, their depravity, their obsession to claim Noss for themselves. Those worshippers of a whore goddess!”

You instigated, “Gosha is disgraced.”

“Aye, a fallen goddess,” he agreed. “Mother of harlots.”

Then, he stilled like a forward-facing statue overlooking a wide garden, staring deeply into you, seeing you just as he had mere hours ago: vulnerable and nearly bear.

It was dreadful when he spoke again because his malice had detached from him like a scab. Beneath his vanished fury was an otherworldly patience, gentleness of a kind that couldn't survive in a world like this, much less what you deserved.

“Did you leave the window open?”

Your heart thudded in your chest, a sensation simultaneously unfelt, yet weakening as guilt deluged and rushed you bodywide. It hurt. It did things of its own volition: mimic the pulse in your neck, force a stone down your throat, and push all the blood in your body into your head to make it sweat and throb.

“Are you mad?” This voice was unfamiliar, but it was your own. You loathed its apologetic quietness. You hated him for luring more humanity out of you.

“Aye,” he said with his newfound softness still remaining. He added, “Verily.”

You replied, “I'm sorry,” and only meant it halfway, for what you were about to do was arguably heinous. You knew no remorse when it came to the need of magical satiety, which was something only the Witch Queen’s orchard could give you now.

Lysander was cold in your arms as you reached around the entire bulk of his head, the tips of your fingers unable to fully interlock. The protrusions on his helmet made for a precarious embrace, one which you kept as a featherlight touch in the event he grew to ire and tried to lash out by gouging you on the adamantine and dragonscale wings.

“Does nothing frighten you? What life have you lived to be so unafraid of all that I am?” He sounded stricken, winded by something unseen. Irritation led into confusion settling on the fringes of his words. “Your bravery is in a dangerous place. Have you forgotten the abomination and devil that I am? Have you so easily forgotten my bloodlust? My carnal desires? That neither human nor beast are spared of me when I choose it?”

You kissed his cool forehead, making a sound against the armor before returning to his level and pressing your lips to the hinged jaw piece. He was sure to feel the fog of your warm breath through the scored vents, swirling slow and seductive around his face, perhaps still tinged with the aftermath of your exorbitant meal.

“Is this the same mind that left the window wide open in spite of my warning? If so, I fear for what will become of you. You don't know what you're doing.” He declared, saying this only so he wouldn't be confronted with the revealing silence.

“If you're so fearsome, then push me away. I'll never touch you again,” you said. “We’ll travel the rest of the way to Noss without a word. You'll send me off to your queen, and you’ll be rid of me. Sounds convenient, right? So, push me away.”

He didn't.

Instead, Lysander enfolded you in his arms, pulling you high onto your toes, and against the less perilous points on his armor. He was aware of this threat because he held you self-consciously; close enough to feel the heat of a fire while fearful of it burning him.

For you, the proximity was exhilarating in the way of explorers who sometimes lose their minds to euphoria when they find something no one else has.

For you, this indicated that there were no obstacles barring you from the Witch Queen’s sinful fruits, as the one thing that could've stopped you was holding you flush to his chest of ice and cradling the back of your head with a leathery hand. The claws of his gauntlet were a light scratch on your scalp, but their weight was an anchor straining every muscle in your neck.

He pulled your face into him, into the deeper dark of his mass as the hinges on his helmet let out their shrill outcry of nonuse, and kissed you. It was a fervent moment where his lips roamed yours top to bottom, pressing the corners and the nooks where syrupy residue stuck before letting out quivering breaths against your mouth to diffuse his excitement.

Lysander was up against the halves of himself, both radical tormentors that craved to split him into separate parts so that they may become a whole of themselves. His humanity was devastating, as it was what felt the most and desired so hopelessly to draw you in and never let go. His dragon blood was passionate, but it was wise and used to waiting for these fleeting morsels of good fortune which willed him to live on.

You let him kiss you through his turmoil while using this to your own advantage. Your fingertips moved inside his helmet and touched the skin of his jaw. The feel of it was unusual in that it did not mold or divot with human fleshiness, rather it was perfectly solid like a rough stone, tapering down into a fine chin lightly knocking your own.

The skin was craggy and heavily scarred with rounded, uniform indentations larger than the pads of your fingers could fit. Something had existed in place of these scars at one point, leaving behind disfiguring injuries and memories equally as torturous. His lips were of lesser toughness than his face, thick and slippery smooth with moisture from your breaths and saliva.

It was you who withdrew then, satisfied with the taste you’d given him and his yearning. He had little fear of being seen by you in this lightless hour, so he didn't immediately withdraw into his enormous adamantine husk by covering himself with the slotted vents.

“Forgive me, I should have resisted. I reacted poorly to your words, but I was not dishonest in what I did,” said Lysander with somber candor. Although he no longer held you in his arms, several of his long, leather-clad fingers wrapped your wrist in warmth. “It was wise of you to stop. When you touched me, it was… unlike anything I've ever known. You would've met my carnal lust, then, and I would not have thought anything of hurting you to fulfill myself.”

“You're pitiful, Lysander.”

They were harsh words spoken kindly. Arising from a place of knowing fear and desperation and profound loneliness so hollow that it leached away the joy of fuschia sunsets, of fresh spring afternoons laying arched with the hillside and smelling honeysuckle, of comforting oneness during gatherings at end week markets where young children wove flower stems in your hair and stuck them in the pockets of your robes.

You had once been part of that world before isolation, whereas it was a world he had never known—not with his servitude to the Witch Queen of Noss.

“Aye, I suppose that I am.”

Then, your eyes cut above his head as the Witch Queen’s bonds blinked into existence: bright yellow-white, interlinked holy halos descending from nothingness. The sheer number of them was what made the sight terrible, far more troubling from the first time you witnessed them.

The chains swayed, clinking into one another against a breeze somewhere faraway before abruptly yanking taut, looking like countless lashes of white light moving in unison. They gave Lysander a start, but he made no sound. His agony was discreet, indicated only by subtle metallic scuffing between armored fingertips as they writhed and soothed with his hand not holding your wrist.

For the Witch Queen to feel compelled to expend this much of her power to demand subservience meant that the magic Lysander had been endowed with was frightful at least.

“I don't blame you for your urges. You're half of a whole dragon, after all.” As you outstretched a hand into the sky, around one of the chains which glowed and pulsated and burned deliciously in your closed palm, you tried to remember the conversation from before. “My magic must not be easy for you to withstand.”

“Nay, what I confessed had nothing to do with your magic.” Lysander surrounded you in his fortress of jagged peaks and impenetrable dragonscale, just as he had before. “Your touch was burning—scorching me, even. I've never felt anything like it. That softness. Such gentleness. You did not touch my skin like someone cursed, like the abomination that I know that I am. I fear I will never feel it again.”

You hardly heard him over the sound of brittle magic shattering into airless black. Clusters of white burst apart over yours and Lysander's heads, flickering out of existence without landing; a false image; fatigued eyes tricked in this is unordinary hour. And then, the Witch Queen’s banshee screams echoed from somewhere far, far away.

────────────────────────

Skewered and halved blackbird remains followed the Witch Queen’s glossy black carriage like a funeral cortège. Some fell out of trees, wings flapping, bodies crumpling out of existence much the same way as burning paper wasting into crisp embers before ending as specks of ash. Magic exhausted. Untraceable. Gone.

Lysander made an example out of the rest; the majority he had slain. Where they landed was where they stayed, turned into cold and unmoving parts of the landscape, making for an audacious trail leading right up to your bumper. This was a challenge he wanted, a chance to prove his malice, retaliate the embarrassment of being outwitted.

The result had been a terribly effective deterrent because in the weeks of traveling in broad daylight by way of the most worn paths, you hadn't seen another soul—human or otherwise. The chittering and scampering of animals dampened against a crescendo of silence, making a pleasant summertime breeze into a violent windstorm through the fluttering tree leaves of the forest, flanking either side of the carriage.

At some point, you had become familiar with the noisiness of the chassis underneath your feet. In particular, how the frame would quiver if one of the skinny wheels struck a craggy rock raised too far above the dirt and detritus, or one of those same wheels slipped out of the well-worn impressions left behind on the pathway by other carriages and wagons hauling special things.

You were often bored as Lysander preferred to stride alongside the carriage, door-side, superbly blocking your exit. It left you with little to do other than speak with him when he could tolerate it. Transmutate strange things you grabbed off the ground and hid within your bottomless pockets while urinating in the thicket and behind trees. The hard wear in the road made success nearly unachievable.

You'd even memorized what movements the silvery-gold stallions made to evoke wrath and whip from the coachman staring down at their backs from his high wooden perch.

Once or twice, you'd been irritated enough by the cruelty and echoing crack of the whip in the sky that you raised roots on the path ahead to catch every wheel so, when they were caught in the thick, wriggling greenery, the carriage would lurch violently and propel the coachman into the throng of horses below.

They were no ordinary horses either, as their ethereal glow and intelligent eyes indicated they'd once carried gods and goddesses on their backs and ate golden apples from orchards across the cosmos. But, they'd been defiled by the Witch Queen’s magic centuries ago and now they were here: bright as the sun and proud, helpless to defy the magic which confined them to this fate.

In return for your kindness, the horses were as watchful over you as Lysander was. They allowed you to stroke their long, lustrous faces and untangle their silvery manes with your fingers until you could let the hairs fall away like threads of tinsel. Sometimes they fell asleep like that, heads hung low, ears flattened outward.

“You've made a great ally in them,” said Lysander one evening. A fire was already going nearby with the bruised and battered coachman huddled next to it, silent and seething as always. You were sitting far away from the flames, outside of reach of the ring of orange, pulsing light when the knight approached.

He held something small and black and dripping in one of his hands before tossing it aside into the brush. Your eyes followed, spotting its landing and rustling among the briars and thick shrubbery, resembling nothing but a shuddering mass in the dark.

“The stallions, you mean?” you waited for the bush to stop shaking before looking away. Lysander had come to join you where you sat on a large boulder, armor grinding as it turned into a typical wadded shape when he crouched low and hunched between his thighs. You never thought he looked comfortable that way. “They were once steeds of the heavens and now they're enslaved by the Witch Queen's magic in much the same way as you are, you know? How could I not be moved to do something for them? Revenge is warranted by things held against their will.”

“Do you pity them as you do me?” he asked.

You leaned across your legs to be nearer to his helmeted face, hoping against futility that, perhaps, you'd discern a pair of gleaming amethysts through all of the shadows. When you did not, you settled into that arched posture, lightly touching across the hinged jaw piece with your fingertips. He no longer stirred when you did this, desensitized to the disbelief that no creature in possession of their own mind would dare to.

“Right now, I'm thinking more about how you're on the verge of wiping out local blackbird populations,” you quipped, but you were worried that it was true. “Leave them, Lysander. The birds are innocent, and even the birds made of magic are at the mercy of their conjurer.”

“Aye, that may be, but do not forget that the Sisterhood of Gosha stole you from your bed in the dead of night. It had taken a single moment of poor judgment for them to do so.” He pressed his face forward against your fingers, as though relishing the thought that your warmth could reach him that way. “Birds are inconspicuous. They are as much vermin as rats and rabbits. The sisterhood knows how to conceal their magic and when they contain it in creature's as small as birds—I cannot always distinguish a roosting blackbird from one exuding magic and malice. It troubles me.”

“That is largely in part due to the Witch Queen’s power over you. You know this.”

Whenever he would sigh, it made a muffled whistling sort of sound that no doubt ricocheted off the adamantine and dragonscale around his head. You imagined it would be a tiring thing to be hidden away inside a helmet, breathing fresh air through narrow slots, forgetting the softness of pillows and a bed partner’s bosom.

But, time passed and you realized that his helmet was as much of a boon for him as it was an obstacle to things he desired.

Inside of that blank space swelled in darkness, you had no way of knowing what expression he looked at you with right now—if he were even capable of maneuvering his tough skin into a grimace or a smile. You had no way of knowing how he’d looked at you after kissing you back then.

“The blackbirds,” he went on tersely, tearing into the quiet moment as easily as he did the poor creatures, “I can’t allow what happened then to happen again. I'll continue to ask for your forgiveness for such minor atrocities if it means you are safe.”

This was like him: roughly shifting conversation away from your prying to get him to divulge a true opinion about his enslaver. He seldom implicated the Witch Queen of evils she committed; how enmeshed she was in the entire fiber of his being. You supposed that if she was all he had ever known, even he himself could not comprehend the wickedness which still imprisoned him.

You fitted fingertips into the vents of his helmet, but your eyes were elsewhere now, up at the empty sky and the razored peaks of tall trees which seemed to grow inward, encircling you. It was as claustrophobic as when you witnessed Lysander bent sideways in manmade spaces. The Witch Queen’s halo of chains remained stubbornly, in numbers so many that it tired you to simply look at them.

Already, you'd destroyed countless but there were countless to go. Time had regained urgency only to belittle you, telling you that you would fail. Those long days from before felt squandered, lost to sultry summertime hazes with no relief and perfumed bathwater filling your head with sweltering fuzz.

You mourned what you should've done but didn't do. Considered solemnly that Lysander might have continued to live on unhappily, yet uncomplicatedly, if you had cast him away from your hermitage and never met him.

At Noss, it was expected that you would be destroyed once you were in the audience of the Witch Queen, for the humiliation you had caused her was unpardonable, no matter how prodigious her lust of you truly was.

You remembered before, when she had been so desperate as to be willing to entice you with a living organism—her forbidden orchard. It was her: breathing her magic, her essence tilled into the soil, her soul within the core of every luscious fruit on low-hanging branches. Her magic was at its apex in Noss, amplified by the orchard.

Your might would not overcome hers alone.

Was it worth it, then? To even hope for a morsel of her fragrant fruit, the magic weaving throughout toothsome meat, ripe flesh bright as jewels.

Was it worth it, still? To be weakened by insatiety because you were a magic eater; one of the most selfish entities to exist in any realm. If it meant a lick, a bite, a taste, a swallow, you were convinced that it would fulfill the savage hunger coiling inside of you like writhing parasites finding ecstasy after being without for so long. It made you fearless. It made things like suicide meaningless; inconsequential for the seconds of bliss before the endless shadow.

Yes, yes, you were exasperated and dismissive even within your own head. This will be my end, that I am certain. I will never see outside of Noss. I will never see my home again. Everything will keep gathering dust. Moths will eat my nice robes; they'll eat my tomes. My garden will rot and die. What a curse, what a shame. What a shame…

You flinched as Lysander’s cold claw, darker than the night itself, stroked the underside of your jaw. He drew your eyes back into his chasm, the hinges raised. They had been soundless this time, or you’d simply become unobservant of most things now that the world was unexciting.

“Are you unwell?” he asked, carefully pacing the words as though unsure of the sort of outcome they'd inspire. He wanted something and didn't know how to ask for it. “Speak. What's troublin’ you? Don't think I've ever seen you quite this way before.”

“It will all end soon,” you said, nebulously, without a trace of fear because your fate was ineluctable. A fish beating its fins upstream against the current only to become exhausted and be seized by the jaws of a bear. The starving rodent, obeying its very nature to seek out food and shelter, finds a house with crevices and pungent tidbits on a spring-loaded trap.

You were the fish, and you were the mouse. You threw yourself into the strong current, snuck into the drafty house with moldy daubs of food tucked away in a corner. It was innate. According to your own will.

But, you thrived in asking questions. That was all you could do. “What will happen once we arrive, Lysander? What will happen to me? To you?”

“I cannot say,” he admitted, “I do not know. My task will be complete once you are delivered to the Witch Queen's doorstep.”

He sighed in the oblivion of night, soul weary, but went on nonetheless, “You and I will be separated, and it will be the same as always for me. I will be sent away to wait until I am beckoned again. I will be dispatched to subjugate insurrections. I will waste hundreds, thousands more with my blade on the battlefield. I will see carnage and only myself still standing. I will see endless patrols in the darkness. I will see the four stone walls of my cell where I am kept. Nothing else. There will be nothing else for me.”

“And, that is what you want? To be separated? For there to be nothing else?”

To this, Lysander receded into his suit, into silence, as though confronted in a way he had never been before. You were pushing him to answer something difficult. Something foreign, selfish, disastrous.

“Nay,” was all he could bring himself to say.

You looked away again, up at the clattering chains, wondering if more of their numbers were obscured within themselves. The Witch Queen was aware of your intentions, gleaning from them that the Sisterhood of Gosha had reached you first, and she would not let you have the weapon she’d adroitly honed over a millennia so easily.

This was what magicians with power to flaunt did best: fought from hidden places with wit, tug-of-war over lesser things. There could never be a clear winner because these grudges spanned eternities; to the heavens and the underworld, along the misty galaxies dotting the cosmos.

But this was Lysander, he was not less nor was he other. The Witch Queen’s cleaver on the battlefield; the appalling Knight of Noss, and he was kissing you again.

You gave yourself to his passion; fragile, fraying restraint like time-worn threads on a garment. He pressed your lips separately, then together, a rough sort of kneading that pinched, numbed, could've swallowed you if that's what he had in his mind to do.

Unlike times before, you didn't busy your hands on his face to map out his odd anatomy. It occupied too much space in your head to visualize, stole away your enjoyment in blind snatches. Whenever you did, you still searched for softness in his cheeks, as his unyielding flesh made him more dragon than human when you felt it. The patterned scars etched into his flesh were repulsive, abnormal, and doubtlessly still made him ache on the worst of days.

Lysander would never be willing to let you see his face because of them, this you understood now.

You reached for buttons to unfasten your robes. Neatness fell apart, layers glided down the slope of your shoulders with silky lightness despite their number, what great weight they should've been. Such boldness invited a whip of black breeze to lash your skin, your bare chest and abdomen. The shiver made you feel attractive, whittled you down into a small thing enclosed by his mass.

The dark felt protective; blending you seamlessly with its opaqueness, camouflaging you from everything but his eyes. Ones which saw you exposed to him. Invited him into you.

He was motionless. A tamed beast presented with raw slabs of crude meat still red and smelling of coins. It provoked innate temptation, both exhilarating and frightening because something needed to be done since it was there, but what would be the cost?

“I'll hurt you,” said Lysander in his gentlest rumble, out of true goodness and sincerity. “If I could, I'd always keep you this pristine and lovely. Unsullied by me, or anyone else.”

His cold leather hands touched your body and stayed nowhere for very long. It gave you a start, a shock down your spine whenever he moved for a different handful of your flesh, curve, and fat. The claws overhanging his gauntlet threatened subtly, but he was aware of them with everything that he did.

“Then, walk away, Lysander. You have that choice here. Possibly one of the few you've ever had, or ever will have.”

It was an awful thing to say.

It was meant to be.

“If you want things to stay the same as they've always been, I'll say nothing else. This will be forgotten. I'll even show you one of my magic tricks; wipe this moment from both our minds. I'll wipe the others as well. All that will be left is formality. Wouldn't that be wise for us in the short time we have left? Just say the word, I'll say my own, snap my fingers, and it'll be done. Simple. Harmless.”

Lysander stroked at you lightly like you were flames spitting at his fingertips, or pin-thin briars he was pulling without gloves. His helmeted face closed in on yours once again, his breaths long and hot; a dragon exhaling from the darkness of its sauna-like cavern.

“And what of the other choice?” His interest was half-hearted, genuine in moments of clarity. “There are always two options. Opposites of each other. What is the other?”

You shifted on the boulder where you sat, rested back on outstretched arms and open palms. The real stone under your hands was unlike Lysander's terrain, lifeless and bloodless. You much preferred the feeling of him.

Your nudity was displayed, posed for him, to lure him into a decision you both wanted. With your unclothed chest and fleshy stomach and hips peeking through heaps of fabric, you suggested defiance to him; something he wasn't supposed to do, but would because he chose it for himself.

“The other option is that you choose this, you choose me. And you would be doomed, Lysander.” Indubitably, it would be an unspeakable betrayal. This reclaim of ownership of a body to do with what he pleased. “Things will be changed. We will never be able to go back to how it was before. You will never be the same. You will never be forgiven.”

“Aye, I will be reproached. I will be disgraced, and doomed as I've ever been.” Then, his armored silhouette eclipsed the forest canopy above you. “So be it.”

Gone were the treetops sprawling explosively into starless skies. Treetops as skeletal spires seeming to reach oneness with the night. His enormous husk of ungentle edges and cold was far blacker, more imposing than the ancients, yet his touch spread warmth through you.

He kissed you fast and fleeting from within his sanctuary, and then under your jaw with an open mouth. Shuddering heat and wetness slowly made a descent along your neck, his teeth a glistening concept though not felt. As he explored you, molded the softness of you with his fingers and pinching claws, he found your utter humanness to be divine. The surreality of it stifled his exhilaration.

His lips smoothed across your chest where heat now rose to the surface of your skin. There he rested, seeking to leach it from you, meld it with himself completely, unbelieving that mere centimeters of bone and viscera separated him from your thudding heart. It knocked rhythmically against your house, could've been a clockmaker’s best work with how strongly it reverberated in his head, throbbed in your ears, propelled blood through all of your incomprehensibly tiny places.

A long tongue with some thickness emerged from his helmet, came out serpentine with winding eagerness. It was split severely, nearly halved, and those halves glided across your breasts in damp, lightweight strokes. They caressed the hard peaks of your nipples, made them so sensitive to his lips, the precise flicking of his tongue, that you moaned. Pushed at his adamantine forehead feebly and clenched your thighs for friction.

Your head bloomed with heat that moved, flowing like lava from behind your ears to nestle between your eyes. Barely a touch and you were already full of perversions, haughty courage, flickering urges pulling wool over your soundness, and you wanted things you'd forgotten were possible to be wanted.

Then, you spoke like you were outside of yourself; a spectator looking in on depravity, “I want to touch you. Show yourself to me, Lysander,” and you used a leg to rustle the heavy fabric and chainmail hanging down the front of him.

By then, he had plunged his face down to your stomach, sampled your bathing fragrances and brine produced from your sweat with his tongue. The halves of his tongue were wormlike, slippery, trying to delve below the robes which kept him from smelling you, tasting your arousal.

You wouldn't let him go further. He was at the mercy of your whims, your leg pestering him to hardness. Strain building behind layers.

“Right now, I know no other tormentor as beautiful and devilish as you. I feel weakened by you and your magic. Intoxicated. You're a trickster god come down to seduce me,” said Lysander, through raspy breaths and stones tumbling in his throat. While he thrust his hips against your thighs, he reached past his coverings, loosened them, and let his cock fall.

You were startled by the weight of it as he continued to hump you, insides awash with cold guilt, wrenching in anticipation for what was to come. This was not what you deserved to receive for your crookedness, but you would take it from him, regardless.

For now, your hunger was quiet. For now, you were distracted by his adoration. How he revered your body, your temple of mortality like it was something truly enviable and memorable.

Lysander’s heavy cock wept invisibly on your skin, unseen to you in the dark. The first strokes you laid on it were featherlight, experimenting, yet all the same coquettish and making his entire body flinch with feeling. A groan started within his chest, deep and resounding pleasure rising high in his throat. It diffused into warm, bestial hums so separated from anything human that it astonished you. Aroused you more.

You couldn't fully grasp his girth, not even partway. Only the head fit in your fingers; a silky, spearhead shape which pulsated, oozed sticky heat into your palm as you kneaded it, smeared the stuff around the large slit with your thumb.

The rest of him was unordinary and textured, harsh against your hand as you stroked his length. Flared segments grew severe at his thick base, unsharp ridges grabbed your skin with each pass, creating delicious resistance that earned you his praise with more thrumming; throaty purrs.

A being this substantial was never meant to be experienced by a human, even though he was half-bastard, and despite his unbelonging to either of his bloodlines. You speculated that he'd never been given the option to know any creature so intimately, not with how he shuddered within his jaggedy husk as your mouth sucked the head of his cock, swirling saliva and substance with your tongue.

He would not go far past your teeth, so you did what you could by wetting, prodding his salty slit while both hands wrung his shaft, groped his hefty sac, felt through the coverings and chainmail he had undone for his abdomen. It was strong, clenched, yet jutted out in response to unfamiliarity roaming him. The span of flesh you could traverse without his writhing was the same as the rest of him: scarred and uniform. Something had been taken from him.

“Gods—that’s enough. Enough, now. Quickly. Off of me, you filthy thing!” He was stricken as he spoke, voice urgent and taut, guttural in the way that you liked. You were pushed off of his cock, back down onto the boulder while he rutted hard through your thighs, using all of your flesh and fat and pliability to surround him.

Your body moved like a straw doll; weightless to him, jolting to you. It was over suddenly with a potent groan, his helmeted face thrown up to the sky, and an explosion of hot cum spraying across your thighs. He twitched with more dripping out onto you, but he never went soft.

It had happened so fast that you were left disoriented once everything stopped.

“Lysander—”

“Aye,” he rasped out, winded. “I really am no better than a beast, am I? Forgive me, I didn't know that would happen. You—I hadn't expected you would do that. I never knew it was possible to feel as I just did. What pleasure. What agony. What relief.”

You opened your legs as his spend cooled on your skin, bothered by the way it tightened, dried honey-stiff and tacky.

“The stories about you are all false, then?” you asked, docile as he shucked off your robes and laid them on the ground. A summer quilt spread out over dewy grass. “The stories about your carnality. Your lust for humans and beasts and eagerness to lay with them. Was there any ounce of truth in them?”

“Far be it for me to speak on stories that have grown and aged alongside the trees in this forest. They do me no harm personally, as they remind me that I am still alive. Alive enough to still hear them,” said Lysander, recovered and breathing evenly within his panoply. “You can believe what you'd like.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

“Aye, looking at you, I suppose there could be some truth to it.”

You wished your vision could spear through the lightless world, into the dark entanglement of his helmet to see his expression as he looked at you now. Was he smiling? Frowning? Wincing as the threads of his identity unraveled?

“C’mere, you.” He hoisted you off of the boulder to lay you across the soiled robes he'd put down. Satisfied, he stared at you, long and thorough, at your complete nakedness arranged for him to see. “You're such a sight. I've seen much in this life of mine, enough that I would've believed it if I was told I'd seen it all. You? If part of my punishment was for my eyes being removed, I'd regret nothing. If my punishment were to be death, and my final memories were of this time with you, I'd regret nothing still.”

Shame sobered you. Wrapped your head close like a red burning wreath, singed your ears, and made your scalp itch with prickly heat. Your eyes felt sore and reddened, precariously tilting towards tears, which would've been devastating.

“You can still stop,” you blurted, wincing through a kiss, sharp teeth grazing down the column of your throat. He didn't bite you, only teased the idea with them. Soon, his mouth was on your abdomen, forked tongue probing lower still. “Lysander, you can still stop. Choose differently. Spare yourself.”

“Nay,” he replied, throatiness returned. “I've chosen you. You've bewitched me and I want for nothing else. Allow me to return your kindness.”

There then came clattering beside you, of heaviness falling from a height and vibrating the earth as it struck. It shook up through your spine, danced along the back of your neck with thousands of spindly legs. You squinted at the night and saw something darker, a helmet.

Before you could've glimpsed his face, freezing leather pressed to your eyes, fluttering your lashes. He told you not to look at him in his clearest voice. He almost pleaded for it.

“Eyes closed.” His breaths scorched down your thighs, words damp in the seams. “See nothing. Feel everything. Hear me ravish you, and let me hear you be ravished.”

It was his tongue that went first, laving decadently, thoroughly, bunching the serpent halves together; a well waiting for collection, to be filled. He swilled what arousal he could take from you with his saliva and kneaded you with a short, flat nose. You thrashed your hips against him, away from him, anchored in place by his heavy hands, adamantine gauntlet embedding ten stingers below your skin.

Lysander was unclean with you, indecorous in how he sucked and swallowed, kissed into you, ate as far as he could go with seemingly no satisfaction. It was repugnant and ferine, his most subdued self now at the surface and freed. He went on with that intensity until you trembled, body writhing across fabric and grass as you came up onto bent elbows, feeling through a suffocating void of dark and pleasure cinching around you for the top of his head.

You moaned achingly while trying to perceive what you were not allowed to see. Nothing stimulated curiosity more than what was forbidden, and you fathomed why as your fingertips worked to decipher his features, transmitted the rough etchings into bleary images with no beginning or end.

“Do you fear what you feel?” asked Lysander, without ire, but miserable in his yearning. He gave you permission to translate his darkness, make sense of the pits in his flesh, all of the stony, broken protrusions which had been filed down to stumps and never grown back. They were fused to him, bone and cartilage excruciatingly removed, emerging from the sides of his head and his temples. “Does my hideousness frighten you? Am I the abomination that you dreamed of?”

“I know no fear,” you said, and Lysander’s coarse cheeks raised, folded, and strained against your thighs as he smiled. “To me, you are merely Lysander. Not the abomination. Not that damned armor that you wear. Let that be enough.”

Pleased, he returned to you with fervor, to savor more of your push and pull. The jounce of your hips. Wanting him close as much as you wanted to shove him away.

He was mostly an amalgam of nonsense in your head; physical pieces unable to interlock into anything whole. Complicated.

It frustrated you that he would not let you set your eyes upon his true visage. It frustrated you that he was delaying your gratification because he liked licking, sucking you raw so you'd cry out sharply from your chest and not your head.

But, he had become anxious from anticipation, tormented by inevitability, so he turned you over. Maneuvered you onto your knees, splayed them over the sodden robes and damp grass. His armor grated as he came closer, crunching into that unforgiving form of sharpness and cold, startling you with the heat of his cock filling the gap between your legs.

“I'll hurt you,” was spoken differently from before when he had wanted you, looked at you questionably, tried to use his enormity to frighten you. He was unhindered now. “I do not want to hurt you, but I will. I cannot deny what either of my halves crave. I have tasted excess, the essence from your body and your magic. I am yours.”

“I knew what would come from this, Lysander. I know what can happen.” He could tear you apart, perforate your organs, be inundated by desire and biology so immense that he consumes your body. It was far too late to trade this for another course. “If you're mine, prove it to me. Show me how loyal you are. Don't stop until you've left your mark.”

“Aye, as you wish.” His cock dragged firmly along your abdomen, hot and pulsing, twitching against you like a thing searching for a way in. “You say cruel things with such sweetness. I fear that my madness, my brokenness have manifested you, and when this is over, you'll only have been a figment of fantasy.”

You swayed with him, clamped him with your thighs weakened by his tongue. Lysander’s groan resonated, harsher without the helmet, sharp like his teeth.

“If this is a fantasy, however short it is, we should both enjoy it. Fuck me. I'm yours.”

“Aye. You are mine.”

Those hard-worn leather hands and frigid claws were on you again, spread wide everywhere. He could not grab you, enclose you with his iridescent fortress without gouging you on his spikes. Skin-to-skin, burying himself within you completely, that connectedness would always elude him.

So, he devoured you how he could. Had indulged with his entire mouth, his wild hands, and now his cock. His head was gluey and smeared a sluggish trail to your core where he stroked you with it eagerly. Fluids intermingled: his, yours, sweat, salvia, and earthy condensation. More of his seeped out, warm and heady, a thick layer to cover his cock before he took you.

He nudged himself inside, listened for your brittle gasps of shock to the stretch, the great and unnatural intrusion. They came right away. You surprised him by letting him continue, strained the muscles in your legs to accommodate depth, and whimpered only a little when he started to thrust slowly.

You couldn't route your mind to other things as he did this, moved fractionally to minimize your agony, pushed deeper to gape your significantly smaller anatomy. His jaw chattered from overhead, beckoning either in patience, or stifling what sounds of bliss he really wanted to exhale.

Even when he had rearranged you again, down onto one hip with your other leg settled on his arm, he could only sheath himself halfway. He had finally decided to stop after pushing too hard and hearing you gag, fractured the silent air with a startled cry, one which was accompanied by real tears. The only ones you could ever remember spilling, and swiped away as quickly as they had come.

Lysander turned his head to your leg on him, molded a kiss to your shin, and took his time thrusting into you. Eventually, he let you rest on your back with both legs strewn over his arms. His hands cradled the globes of your ass, lifted your lower body up for his cock to reach.

His immense girth with the rough segments and grappling ridges started to feel good. Nothing went missed, nowhere went without being stroked or prodded. Your breaths were as shattered as you felt by him, eyes gazing up vacantly at the starless sky, hands creasing fabric and tearing up black fingers of grass.

At your every moan, his thrusts grew a little more honed and his armor grinded hollowly with a beat, putting some irrational fear in you that he was unscrewing and would fall apart in pieces. His vocalizations were a combination of wild thrumming and bestial panting and bellowing.

The silvery-gold stallions were probably pacing timidly, snorting defensive fog into the air, alerting the disgruntled coachmen to the sounds. He would've heard your frailer noises intertwined with Lysander's and would ask no questions tomorrow, nor be able to bring himself to look at you again.

Lysander’s strokes inside your body reached deep, left you queasy in the head as he effortlessly jostled you on his cock. The segments along his shaft pushed and pulled the fine tissue around your entrance. It throbbed sorely. You detected blood and thought of the faint tang of copper slick on your skin; imagined a pink, creamy ring around his cock.

The ridges were what finished you, built up that orgasmic well in your stomach and loins. It overflowed when you touched yourself and choked from sensitivity, but kept going. The back of your head dug into your soggy robes, joining the grass and the earth and natural indulgences you had abandoned in isolation.

You withdrew behind clenched eyelids, a world made of wrinkled skin and twitching eyelashes. It forced you to focus on Lysander; his ripe, inhuman pleasure as close to climax as you were. It forced you to truly experience his cock, the sheer size of it impaling you again and again, foul and sloppy and never fitting right. The ridges tried to find purchase along your inner walls, adhere unrelentingly like briars to your clothes.

They were evolutionary for dragons, meant to massage to numbness, house a cock cozily until it was flaccid. What you possessed was smaller and far less robust, so with every pass Lysander made, the ridges teased your velvety insides with hard tugs until you were over the edge.

Tiny threads of fire ignited under your skin, carrying you through the white static in your head, torrents of electric writhing through each limb, finger, and toe. It crashed over you so powerfully that you were soundless as if submerged underwater, or trapped in some airless place. Just as fast as it had all come on, the pleasure lifted off of you like a spirit ascending to the gods, leaving you pleasantly spent in cool, static relief.

Lysander had seen your warped grimace, your subsequent facial softening and sighing. He had felt your walls clench him, trying to wring whatever they could from his cock but he hadn't been ready until he saw you calm, intoxicated by emptiness, sprawled open and unmoving below him.

He rutted into you savagely at the end, stirring you back into discomfort, but he was done and cum surged inside of you so strongly that it caused another reaction. You gasped nasally, shivered as he fucked you through his orgasm with feral moans, hips lashing your naked ass with the chainmail he hadn't removed.

His release overflowed; globs of it pushed out, around his cock as he withdrew. It leaked from you sluggish and plentiful, and you pretended for it to be pooling hot white beneath you, under your ass and legs once Lysander let them down gently.

Even in your sedated afterglow, your body stinging, sore and chafed from overuse, you could still think of nothing but catastrophe, soul fruit, and whether Lysander was capable of producing life, or if everything about him was truly damned.

You heard his armor scrape, his helmet returned to complete him: the atrocity known as the Knight of Noss. He had once again become loathsome and impenetrable, but he stayed with you there on the ground, watching your limbs shift around as though the relaxation you felt was everywhere, all around you. An aura radiating, vibrating like a pleased animal.

“Such a sight. I will never tire of it.” He said from within his castle of magnificent thorns. “My days from before feel far away, long gone. They're memories of someone else, someone destined to walk in darkness, through rivers of blood and decay. You see me as more. I am more.”

Your night sky descended, swallowing everything around it into its peaks and mass. He was careful not to come down so far as to crush you beneath his armor, but he covered you, concealed you perfectly from the spiral of ancient trees overhead, from always prying, hidden eyes.

He kissed you. You accepted his lips and his veneration, his chest of ice.

After a moment, “This is our end set in stone, Lysander. From here on out, we will be marching to our doom.”

“Aye,” he soothed grim reality with fearlessness, devotion pressed against your mouth. “We are doomed. But, we face it together.”

Maybe, it wasn't so foolish to hope.

Maybe.

Maybe…

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author's note: so, first and foremost, thank you so much for reading. the concept for the knight of noss has existed in my head for almost fifteen years. until the past three or four years, however, I have never had the skill to be able to execute any of the ideas. to see an idea like this come to fruition after so long is, honestly... overwhelming. to know that there people who wanted to see my explore this idea means even more to me.

if you're interested in the actual story, you're more than free to shoot me questions about it. I did have a massive amount of lore written out, but decided against including it here so as to not drag things on and on.

I hope you enjoyed reading this story, and I hope to hear your thoughts on it! I'll see y'all in the next piece ❤️🙂‍↕️.

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