Monthly story - male dragonborn x gn reader (nsfw) (Patreon)

It's still June, just... I'm so sorry this didn't appear sooner, but it's a whopping 14.5k words long, so hopefully that makes up for it!

Content: at the end of their first year at the Royal Academy for the Magical Arts, the young, entitled son of the wealthiest family on the continent is partnered for an assignment with a diligent reader from a very humble background, and makes a very poor choice. Years later, after finishing their masters, the reader finds themself having to work with him again, only to find he's not quite as they remember this time around. Also featuring a naga bestie, adoptive dads, a badass dwarven professor, and a chunky cameo from the orc mage, Orrakh from a short story on Tumblr.

(Light spoilers) content warning: reader is drugged to render them unconscious, but nothing untoward happens while they're out, and it's facilitated by their friend. Nsfw: reader gives a blowjob in a sort of semi-public place, and receives oral in return back in private.

Wordcount: 14,565

Ambient magicka crackled and coalesced around you, becoming little flashes of light in the air as you strode down the navy blue corridor of the astronomy wing where you’d met your friend. “I worked my ass off for that placement, Alana, and I am not going to let some gilded turd buy his way in beside me and turn it into a farce!”

The naga’s thick, serpentine tail carved a wide swathe through the other student mages as she struggled to keep up with you, until she finally grabbed at the sleeve of your dark robe and yanked you around to face her.

“Take a breath, honey,” she said, pushing her circular, gold-rimmed glasses back up her nose and blinking moss-green eyes at you from her pretty, round face with all its myriad freckles. “From what you’ve told me, Rune is a first class shit, but you’re going to have to work with him.”

“He’s not just a shit, Alana,” you fired back through gritted teeth, aware that you were drawing a bit of an audience beneath the painted vaults of the long corridor. “He’s a rich shit who thinks he can throw money at people and just walk out with whatever he wants! That isn’t going to cut it with Magister Delfan.” The dwarven professor was notoriously impatient when it came to time-wasters, but if you got on her good side, people said she was an absolute blast.

You glowered at your best friend and tried to force down a tide of emotions and memories.

“Delfan wants actual talent,” you went on in a slightly more measured voice, “And I know from experience that Rune is a lazy, good-for-nothing arsehole. I worked with him before in first year? And what the fuck is he doing on a summer placement with Delfan when he’s not even studying her subject?” you added as the realisation hit you.

Rune, rather ironically, had only studied basic runecraft with you in your first year, but had switched subjects in his second. You hadn’t kept track of what he’d been doing in the interim years, but you knew it wasn’t Delfan’s specialism of foci and auxiliary artefacts, and their use in magical rituals.

You let out a tight, wheezing huff of breath and blinked away memories of your humiliating two week project ‘with’ him. It had cost you your friendship with your then-best friend too, and that had hurt almost more than what Rune himself had done.

“If I want the Board to consider appointing me for a research fellowship, I need to finish this placement with Delfan’s endorsement. If Rune fucks this up for me because he’s bored and wants to play the academic for a while, I’m going to ring his scaly neck and turn him into a fucking golden handbag, do you understand me? I don’t care who his father is, I swear to all the gods I’ll do it.”

Alana’s expressive face suddenly struggled to keep back her rush of amusement at the image. You saw the sparkle in her eyes and rolled your own in response, but a little of your anger drained away.

“I’m sorry,” Alana snickered, “But at least you’d get a luxury handbag out of it?”

You caught her laughter and your frustration disintegrated around you like a shattered potion flask.

Still giggling, Alana put her hand on your shoulder and squeezed it as she met your gaze. “You’ll be fine. Delfan is a hard-ass and she’ll recognise your commitment, even if Milordy Goldypants puts in zero effort, alright?”

You snorted a laugh, hefted your leather satchel back onto your shoulder. You’d never told anyone else what Rune had done, apart from your parents and Alana, and the idea of having to work with him again made your stomach roil. The magic that had started to crystallise around you dissipated, but your memories of the dragonborn from your first year lingered all the same, and they were not pleasant ones.

When you’d been partnered with Rune before — when Magister Orrakh had called your name right after Rune’s — your heart had dropped to your boots and he’d flashed you a sharp-toothed grin across the small lecture hall. Sometimes Magister Orrakh taught in that larger hall, when he needed more space to show the full intricacy of a runic circuit and the way magicka flowed around the lines of chalk from rune to rune, but when he taught his theory classes, he preferred to use his small classroom. Unfortunately, that day’s class had been a practical session, and the tiered seating which gave the students at the back a better view of the experiment on the stone altar at the front of the room also gave you a good view of Rune lording it over you from the higher seating.

The dragonborn had been lounging near the back of the tiered seating on the end of the row, with his serrated tail dangling nonchalantly into the gangway that ran between the two halves of the auditorium. He was strikingly handsome, of course, with eyes the colour of back-lit amber flecked with pyrite, and his scales were a warm, honeyed yellow that gleamed almost opalescent in the sunlight streaming in through the clear, arched windows set high in the wall.

His tunic was a deep, pure black, but it had been embroidered with the most minute, fairy-wrought detailing that dizzied the eye if you looked too long at it, and he had whisper-thin, gold chains dripping from ornately engraved bands around his twin, ridged horns. The larger horn sat stacked atop the smaller, nestled close together at the root, and both followed the line of his skull back over his head to end in elegant, polished, gently-rounded points. He was so obnoxiously wealthy that even the delicate, gossamer chains were adorned with tiny flashing diamonds which sent minuscule rainbows dancing around the walls wherever he went.

You'd had nothing to do with him so far in your first year at the academy, having come from entirely different backgrounds.

There was no way the scion of the wealthiest family in the entire kingdom — richer even than the royal family, if rumours were to be believed — would look twice at the adopted child of a fisherman and a rat catcher from the dockland slums of the city. You’d fought for everything you’d ever got out of life, finally earning yourself a scholarship to the prestigious Royal Academy for the Study of Magical Arts. He’d probably got his father to buy his place, since he’d shown no real demonstrative abilities with magic.

Everything had been going so well for you until that fateful final presentation of the year when you’d been paired with Rune.

Your roommate, Millie — a human witch of middling power and ability whose family was in the cloth trade — had become your closest friend after only the first week, and the two of you soon did everything together. When you’d filed out of that seminar with your spirits so low they were practically dragging around your ankles, she’d gaped incredulously at you and called you an idiot.

“What do you mean?” you asked. “The guy’s an arse, Millie. He’s treated Magister Orrakh like a piece of shit since our first class. He’s obviously prejudiced against orcs, and he’s not exactly generous about humans either.”

Millie fixed you with a flat stare, as though you were being both unreasonable and incredibly dense. “People would quite literally kill for the opportunity to get in with Rune’s family,” she hissed. “You of all people shouldn’t be so high and mighty you know. This could set you up for life.”

You blinked at her. It was as if she’d become a completely different person right in front of your eyes. “You can’t be serious,” you replied, adjusting your folder of notes in your arms and making your way towards your astronomy class. “You’re not honestly suggesting I cosy up to Rune Brightflame just so I can advance my career, are you?”

She shrugged in response, clearly not wanting to push the topic but obviously thinking you were making a huge mistake.

You’d thought that was it.

Rune caught up with you in the dining hall that evening and you felt every eye on you as he leaned down over your plate and planted his large, claw-tipped hand onto the wooden surface, heedless of the little scuffs his dark ivory talons made in the time-scarred surface of the table. He smirked down at you, and you gazed up into his reflective, golden eyes, and swallowed. Oh, for all that he was awful and obnoxious, he was devastatingly good looking. And he knew it. He also stood about a head taller than you so you had to crick your neck to look up at him, even standing. Sitting down as you were put you at an even greater disadvantage, and he seemed to know that as well.  

“Hello, partner,” he drawled around a toothy smirk. All his teeth were pointed, and his tongue — just visible behind that glinting white row of teeth — was an unexpected, acidic blue. This close up you could see all the smaller horns and spines that projected from his sharp jawline and under the point of his chin. They looked like geodes or crystals jutting out from the smooth, polished scales of his face and neck, and they made you want to touch fingertip to point just to see if they were sharp.

“Hello, Rune,” you replied warily.

He gave another lopsided grin and remained leaning over you, his other hand resting roguishly on his hips, tail swinging casually back and forth behind him and obstructing the walkway between the long trestle tables of the refectory. If anyone wanted to pass, they’d have to go all the way along the length of the table and around it to reach the exit. Certainly no one was about to ask Rune Brightflame to step aside for them.

Arsehole.

“So,” he sneered in his smooth baritone before going on with a lyrical chuckle. It was an unkind laugh and it set your teeth on edge. “You seem to have Magister Orrakh wrapped around your little finger…”

You didn’t grace that remark with a response and continued to stare flatly up at him, but you could feel your eyelid twitch and his grin broadened to show all his predatory teeth.

“I’m sure he’ll give us an A for whatever you turn in.”

“Whatever ‘I’ turn in?” you blurted. “You can’t be serious. You don’t expect me to do all the research on my own, do you? It’s supposed to be a joint project.” The end result was joint, after all, and if he failed the assignment, you failed it. You knew you had enough high marks in your other classes to pass your end of year evaluations, but you didn’t need this to stain an otherwise perfect record.

He gave another low, throaty chuckle. “Look, just because my name is Rune, doesn’t mean I have the slightest inclination to study my namesake.”

“You don’t have the slightest inclination to study anything,” you snapped back, standing up so abruptly that he had to stagger backwards or risk taking the top of your head to his chin, and potentially biting the tip of that brilliant blue tongue of his clean off. You stacked your cutlery into your bowl of half-finished supper and glared at him. “I’ll be in the library during study hour tonight and tomorrow evening, and I expect my partner to be there. I’m not doing this by myself, Rune.”

You marched away, leaving him looking a little foolish, and you caught a rumbling, low-frequency growl escaping his chest as you departed, like an alligator’s rumble.

“Great,” you muttered to yourself as you stomped off through the rambling corridors of the castle towards your room. “I’ve already pissed off my partner and we haven’t even started the damned project.”

Things had only got worse from there.

Rune didn’t show that night in the library, and the next night, he showed up an hour into your studies, reeking of the strongest firebrandy money could buy. He plonked himself down into a chair opposite you, stared at you with unfocused eyes, smirked, and then slurred, “How’s it going, partner?”

You leaned forward over your notes, careful not to smudge the still-drying ink on a diagram of the interactions of two different kinds of rune in a circle, and hissed, “Are you drunk?”

He worked his jaw as if trying to see if he could still feel his stupidly alluring blue tongue, and then nodded. “I do believe I am.”

“Fucking hell,” you snarled. “Why are you even here? Just go away and sleep it off.”

“So mean,” he gasped as if wounded, then reached across and helped himself to your notes. He snagged the corner of one of the sheafs of cheap paper with a claw-tip and spun it around, squinting. “Fuck me,” he breathed.

“I’d rather not.”

Either he didn’t hear you or he ignored the inconceivable rejection, and mumbled. “You really do know your shit.” He looked up then and said, “Listen, I have a proposition for you.”

“I’m surprised you can even pronounce the word ‘proposition’ with all those teeth and all that drink,” you muttered and he grinned, apparently taking it as a compliment.

“I’m a man of many talents, and you’d be amazed at what my mouth can do, partner.” He bowed his head in a theatrical little bow, and then made his offer before you could react to his salacious comment. “I’ll give you a full purse of gold to recompense you for your time — not that you need any excuse to spend time in the archives, I’m told — and we can meet up the night before the presentation to Orrakh and go through it all. How’s that sound?”

“Repulsive,” you fired back immediately, earning a harsh shushing from another student a few tables over. Lowering your voice to a pointed whisper, you practically spat, “Do you seriously think you can pay me to do your half of this project?”

“Two purses of gold then,” he shrugged, as if that was chump change for him. On reflection, it probably was.

“No,” you said as you sat back in your seat. “I’m not taking your filthy gold, Rune. Do the fucking work or tell Orrakh you’re not interested in his class.”

Despite being drunker than a satyr on Beltane, his gaze sharpened and focused, becoming as hard as the metallic scales around his eyes and over his solid brow ridge. The diamonds on the chains between his horns winked distractingly at you, and you thought rather unsettlingly of the flash of a knife-strike in the dark.

The dragonborn let his eyes rake over the worn collar of your shirt and the slightly frayed edges of your mage robes, then down to your cheap feather quill that had been trimmed repeatedly, right down to the last inch, and to the thin ink that sloshed in the glazed earthenware bottle on table every time he jogged it with his unsteady movements. 

He let the potent silence stretch before he spoke again, but his words cut you deep.

“Look, you could clearly use the cash, partner. I can’t possibly be seen hanging around with you, but if you take my offer, you’ll have enough gold to cover your tuition here for the rest of your degree and you’ll even have enough left over for an entirely new wardrobe.”

Incandescent rage boiled up from your gut — an anger born of years of scrimping and saving and working yourself to exhaustion just to scrape enough together to buy your first set of mage robes and equipment — and you channelled as much of it as you could into the acerbic snarl that issued from behind your teeth. 

“My tuition is already covered, Rune, for the rest of my degree. I earned it with a scholarship. I don’t expect some rich prick like you to know what it’s like to have to work for anything, let alone for the thing you want more than anything in the whole world, so you listen to me very carefully. I’ll be here every night working on this project, and you can join me or not, and I’ll present it to Magister Orrakh in two weeks’ time, with or without your input.”

You glared at him across the table and his eyes widened a fraction as you went on. He’d probably never been spoken to like that a day in his life.

“But I will not pretend for a single instant that you put any effort into this project and I will not cover for you. If you fail this assignment, I will not let you drag me down, do you understand? You might be able to buy your way through this course, but I will earn it. Now fuck off and take your insulting ‘offer’ with you.”

To his credit, he didn’t say another word.

He stood with the careful wariness of the very drunk, swayed just a tiny bit, his thick, serrated tail stabilising him before he found his balance, and he walked away with astonishing and almost enviable grace. You didn't see him at all outside of Orrakh’s class for the next two weeks, and even then he sat as far away from you as possible and never met your eye.

Millie asked you carefully how it was going, and you just rolled your eyes and told her about his disgusting offer. She, to your surprise, was astonished that you hadn’t taken him up on it, and, looking back on it, you should have realised that that was when your friendship had truly begun to erode from the inside out. She was jealous, and envious that you’d had the opportunity to cosy up to one of the wealthiest families in the kingdom and had spurned it.

She’d called you proud and foolish, and had walked away, leaving you with a nasty taste in your mouth. When you’d had relatively little for so long, the temptation to accept Rune’s weighty purses full of gold had certainly been there, but perhaps you were proud. Perhaps your pride was all you had that was truly yours. Pride, and your trust in your own abilities. You thought of your parents, of how hard they worked and how much they valued what they had, and you knew they’d be as disappointed in you as you’d be in yourself for accepting that gold, and that decided it.

Things ticked along, the deadline and the end of the year approaching steadily in lock step.

 Magister Orrakh caught you as you were leaving his seminar three days before the presentation and asked in his softly spoken voice if everything was alright.

You looked up at the handsome orc mage and sighed. “Fine,” you said, plastering on a fake smile.

You’d always felt a kind of kinship with the firm-but-fair professor. Orcs weren’t a common sight in the world of magical academia, and you’d heard plenty of people — Rune included — muttering disparaging comments about him in the corridors and classrooms of the castle. He was an outsider like you in many ways. Plus, he valued hard work and integrity over the underhanded purchases of diplomas, which, unfortunately, still happened from time to time. You were certain that that was how Rune was planning to finish his illustrious time at the academy, not that you had any other classes with him.

Magister Orrakh fixed you with his bright, green eyes and pursed his lips around his modest set of twin tusks. “You know you can talk to me if you’re having any kind of… issues. I’m aware that your partner is a… difficult case, shall we say. I’m sorry you ended up with him, but I thought you of all people wouldn’t tolerate his… ways.”

You felt your face give away everything that you were feeling about Rune for just the briefest moment before you shut it all away. Part of you wanted to show Rune up on the day for shirking all his studies, and part of you wanted to confess everything now.

“You’ll get your presentation, Professor,” you said neutrally. “I promise.”

He nodded slowly and left it at that. “Alright.”

As you exited his classroom, you caught a flash of gold out of the corner of your eye and glanced left down the corridor to see Rune with his back to you, leaning with one hand against the castle wall, his tail wrapped alluringly around the fine leather of his right boot while he spoke to a shorter figure in front of him. Shifting just a little to see who he was talking to, your breath caught when you saw Millie’s familiar face, blushing and giggling up at him like a silly maid from a fairytale.

Rune then brought the knuckle of his index finger up to chuck her flirtatiously under the chin before stalking off down the corridor away from you. You watched his back for just a moment, the tailored slit in his tunic allowing his long, heavy tail to hang elegantly down almost to the ground before it flicked upwards and ended in a dagger point of golden cartilage.

Millie was watching him go, and you saw her shoulders twitch as if she had just let out a squeak of excitement. When she turned around and saw you watching though, her expression shattered into one of shock and, oddly, guilt, before she flashed a fake smile and marched off in the same direction as Rune, leaving you standing there with your stomach churning in the doorway of Magister Orrakh’s classroom.

The night before the presentation, you went to the library as always, but without much hope that Rune would show up.

To your immense surprise, the dragonborn was already there, waiting for you at your usual table. Your brows pinched together in instant suspicion, but Rune just grinned at you and stood gracefully despite his height and muscle. He had a satchel dangling artfully off one broad shoulder, the leather tooled to look like scales and with the gilded, embossed sigil of House Brightflame prominently displayed in the centre of the top flap of the bag. It was full, so evidently he did know what books were and how they worked.

“I reserved one of the study rooms,” he said in a low, warm voice that carried just far enough to reach your ears and send something unwanted flickering through your gut. “That way we won’t be disturbed.”

You shook your head. “I can’t believe you actually showed up.”

“My partner’s done all this hard work,” he crooned, eyeing you up and down with a look that was openly flirtatious. You tried to let it wash off you like water off a mermaid’s tail, but it wasn’t easy. Despite how much you despised everything he seemed to stand for, he was so bloody good-looking. Then again, a reaction based on purely chemical inputs wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. You didn’t actually have to like him to find him physically beautiful.

Rune let you unpack your bag once you were in the secluded study room on one side of the rambling archives, and you began spreading all the notes out and explaining all the hours of work you’d put in to come up with the complex array of runes inscribed in ink on the large roll of paper between you. It was cheap, thin paper, and the ink had wandered a little along the fibres in places, but it was clear enough as a diagram and blueprint for the chalk lines which could then, theoretically, be drawn out on the floor, should the ritual ever be used.

“The goal was to create a circuit that was completely stable, and which, once activated, could run indefinitely on ambient magicka until the system was safely disarmed,” you said, indicating the three runes that balanced each other out in a perfect, equilateral triangle composed of twin parallel lines for extra stability. “Branching off from these, and placed in perfect mirror symmetry, are the three activation runes…”

You went through the whole array in detail, and the dragonborn listened with a focus and attention you didn’t know he possessed. He asked the occasional question for clarification, but by the time you’d gone through it, you were surprised and a little unsettled to discover that he wasn’t just a pretty face with very deep pockets. He actually was intelligent.

You sat back in the unconformable, wooden chair and regarded him after all of your work had sunk in.

“What, partner?” he asked with an uncharacteristically nervous chuckle.

“I don’t get it,” you murmured.

He tilted his head. “Don’t get what?”

“Why you just piss around all the time? You’re way smarter than you let on. You don't have to buy your way through this place at all — you could actually just study like the rest of us.”

Something unreadable flickered through his amber eyes, and he looked down with a sigh before his golden mask of cocky arrogance was back and he grinned at you.

“I’m a reptile, sweetheart,” he drawled, lounging back in the chair and even hooking one arm over the back. “I don’t expend an ounce more energy than I have to, and it’s so much easier to lift a purse once than it is to lift a quill a thousand times.”

“Aren’t you the poet,” you quipped, all your temporary sympathy for him evaporating. “Any more questions?”

“No, but I do have a gift for you. A gift,” he stressed when you opened your mouth to protest, “Not another crass attempt to offer payment for your obvious hard work,” he added, waving a taloned hand at the work spread out across the table.

You narrowed your eyes but watched him lean down and reach into his bag. It wasn’t full of books after all. When he straightened up again, Rune had a bottle of fire brandy in his softly-glinting golden fingers, and he slid it across the table to you. “A thank you,” he said again.

Against your better judgement, you took the bottle and, after only a slight pause, you nestled it carefully into the scant remaining space in your own satchel.  

“A wise choice,” he chuckled when he saw you’d stashed it away. “Better wait til you get back to your room before you sample it — it’s powerful stuff.”

“So I learned when you came into the library reeking of it two weeks ago,” you said as you stacked up the papers and prepared to leave.

His expression dropped and you got the impression he was masking something, but you let it lie, and turned to go.

Rune called your name as you put your hand on the door handle, and you paused, looking back over your shoulder at where he was still seated at the table, his scales looking oddly dull in the low magelight of the study room.

“Yes?”

Rune inhaled, his chest rising and making the thread-of-gold embroidery on his black tunic glitter all the more in contrast to his lacklustre scales. He looked tired, and you noted the way his tail dragged on the floor behind his chair instead of hanging in its usual poised curve. “You truly are a brilliant mage,” he said in a softly-articulated voice. “I might not be as… obtuse as I pretend to be, but never in a hundred years of study could I have come up with a rune circuit like that.”

“It wouldn’t have taken me two weeks to come up with in the first place, and putting off everything else, if you’d actually shown up and helped me,” you barked back, suddenly irritated again.

Rune just shrugged and shifted in his seat. “Go and enjoy a nightcap before tomorrow. I’ll see you in class, partner.”

Your anger had cooled into disappointment by the time you returned to your room, and you found that Millie was actually in your room for once. She’d taken to avoiding your company and even hanging out with Rune’s bunch of friends in the past week or so, and you drew up short when she turned to face you with her old smile back on her face.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hi,” you frowned, crossing to the small desk on your side of the room and drawing out the bottle of brandy. It looked so out of place next to your second-hand textbooks and simple belongings with its ornate label and stunning, cut glass profile.

“That from Rune?” she asked with a slightly strained harmonic to her voice, as if wary of bringing up your dreaded partner’s name.  

“Yeah,” you sighed. “He claims it’s a thank you, but I’m sure it’s some kind of bribe. Honestly, I’m just glad the assessment is tomorrow so we can forget about everything and go back to ignoring each other.”

“You’re not even going to try it?” she asked, stepping closer and eyeing the brandy.

You shrugged. “Probably not the best idea the night before a big presentation…”

She laughed, the sound brash and a little high pitched. She was obviously forcing herself to be friendly after spurning you since your disagreement, but you turned to regard her. She grinned cheekily, and you saw the old Millie from your first week at the Academy, when she’d got you drunk on fairy-brewed elderberry wine and the two of you had shared a little of your life leading up to your arrival at the Academy. It had been one of the moments you’d bonded.

“Let’s just have a sip,” she said, “To toast the end of your short-lived partnership with Rune Brightflame. It can’t have been that bad,” she added as she skipped across to her side of the room and pulled down two stunning, blown-glass goblets that seemed impossibly thin and delicate. Returning, she went on, “I mean, you’ve hardly seen him.”

“True,” you replied, un-stoppering the bottle and inhaling as the honey-rich aroma of brandy wafted up towards you in the still room. “But on the two occasions I have seen him, at least he was easy on the eyes. If not the soul.”

She laughed, raised her glass, and waited for you to pick yours up so you could chink them carefully together.

You did, and licked your lower lip, oddly nervous. You’d never tried anything so fine, but what could be the harm in sampling it just this once?

Millie watched you closely as you sipped. The smooth yet fiery liquid rolled across your tongue and filled your mouth with the sweet, rich vapours of brandy before sliding like syrup down your throat.

She watched you too closely.

The room spun as if the floor had dropped out from underneath you, and you staggered and set the glass down with a heavy clunk on the table.

“You spiked my drink?” you slurred, your tongue thick and slow in your mouth. “Why?”

“I didn’t,” she said, taking the glass carefully away from your clumsy reach before you knocked it off the table and broke it, and she stepped back while you fought down a wild wave of panic. “Rune did.”

You never got the chance to call her the name that boiled up onto your tongue though. Unconsciousness washed over you and you woke three days later, alone in the infirmary.

At first, you didn’t remember what had happened to you, but you knew that the story the medic told you couldn’t be true.

Apparently, you’d collapse from exhaustion when you’d returned to your room after stressing out about the presentation, and after overworking yourself all year. Millie had dashed into the corridor when you passed out, and had just happened to come across Rune, departing after gallantly walking you back to your rooms. The burly dragonborn had then carried you through the castle to the infirmary, fussing over his partner and refusing to leave until he’d been assured you were stable and alright, just unconscious.

From the medic’s account, Rune had been quite the hero, and they even implied that Rune had magnanimously risked dirtying his lovely tunic in personally carrying such a lowborn creature as you up to the infirmary.

You tasted bile in your mouth, and with it you started to remember the evening a little differently from the medic’s tale.

It was only when you returned to your room though, and found Millie stashing a heavy purse of gold back into her lock box — which she’d evidently been brooding over like a crow over a trinket — that you realised completely what had happened.

“He paid you to make sure I drank that,” you said when she jumped like a guilty thief. Your throat was sore and parched, your voice rough, and your temper frayed.

“So what if he did?” she shot back, closing the lid of the coffer with a snap and standing up, shoulders squared. “And what does it matter anyway? Orrakh gave you an A when Rune told him you’d worked on it equally hard, and he also told him how you’d be gutted that the exhaustion of the term had finally caught up with you just before your last assessment.”

A fury you didn't know how to contain welled up inside you and you closed your fists at your side. Ambient magicka swirled into you like water down a drain and you let it fill you until wisps of Millie’s hair rose as if she was about to be struck by lightning. Realising just how much magic you were holding, you carefully let it go with a series of measured breaths, and Millie exhaled.

“You can’t prove anything,” she chirped defensively. “And if you raise a complaint, Rune’s father will have it hushed up and you know it.”

You did.

That was almost the worst thing about all of it; feeling so powerless. The worst thing, aside from the fact that Rune had drugged you so he could put you out of action and take all the credit for your hard work, was that your friend had facilitated it. It was like you’d never truly known her.

You passed through the day in a daze, but by the end of it, you decided to go to Magister Orrakh and explain what had happened.

Reaching his cosy little classroom as the afternoon light cast strong shadows down the corridors, you slowed at the sound of voices and came to a halt outside the lecture room.

You kept out of sight, resting your back against the wall to wait for him to finish, but the door was open a crack and you couldn’t help but hear what was going on inside with a certain amount of curiosity and satisfaction.

“I don’t want to see you in my class next year,” Orrakh’s granite-block voice rumbled dangerously from inside, low and steady and full of disdain. “I will not teach you, do you understand me?”

“Perfectly, Professor,” came Rune’s smooth reply. It even sounded like he was fighting off a smile. “And don’t worry, you couldn’t pay me enough to sit through another one of your boring lectures.”

“Get out then,” Orrakh barked. After a brief pause, during which the ungracious scraping of a chair on the hardwood floor of his classroom was the only sound, Magister Orrakh added in an arrestingly gentle voice, “You can make your own choices, you know? You don’t have to do what he tells you to do.”

“And where did that get you, orc?” Rune sneered back, full of venom. “Disowned by your barbarian tribe for studying magic?”

“Yes,” came the honest reply, surrounded by a heartbeat of silence. “And I’ve never been happier to put my so-called family behind me and make a life of my own choosing. You’d do well to remember that, Rune.”

Rune apparently had no reply for that, and a moment later he flung the door open and strode out into the corridor. When he caught sight of you standing with your back against the cool castle wall, his footsteps faltered and his tail tensed. He fixed you with an indecipherable look, then turned his back and walked away without a word.

A long sigh emanated from inside the classroom, and a moment later, Magister Orrakh spoke your name. “You might as well come in.”

How he’d known you were there, you had no idea, but the orc was craftier than he looked, so you didn’t question it and simply entered, closing the door quietly behind you.

He was standing with his hips resting on the edge of his desk and his long legs stretched out to brace him up, arms folded casually across his chest, head bowed so that his blue-black hair had slid forwards over his right shoulder in its thick ponytail.

A chair was sitting out of place in the front space of his classroom, and you assumed that Rune had just vacated it.

The orc wasn’t wearing his magister’s robes, and was clad in an undyed linen shirt and simple, dark trousers tucked into leather boots. He looked so ordinary, it was hard to believe he was one of the strongest mages in the whole Academy.

You didn’t sit, and Orrakh regarded you sidelong, and then sighed again. “I know that none of the work I saw on that assignment yesterday was done by Rune,” he said.

Something uncomfortable squirmed in your gut; mingled relief and a decent dose of guilt at having let Rune manipulate you into doing it alone, most likely.

“He put you in a difficult position, and you handled it with grace,” Orrakh said. “I gave you an A, by the way.”

“So I heard,” you said tightly, still furious with Millie for betraying you like that. “Thank you.”

He nodded. “You’ll finish the year with honours across the board,” he said. “You should be proud.”

“I am,” you replied. “I worked hard.”

“Will you continue with your current subjects next year?”

“Yeah. If you’re still teaching runecraft?”

“Oh indeed,” he smiled, green eyes twinkling. “I look forward to seeing how quickly you master the more advanced circuits and arrays.”

You smiled despite yourself, and Magister Orrakh’s big shoulders dropped.

“Listen,” he said. “I get it. I get how shitty this place can be; how stuck in the past it is in so many ways, despite being at the cutting edge of academia. I get that rich tossers like Lord Brightflame think they can pay for their kids to get whatever outcome they dictate to the Board, but not all the staff is like that, alright? I’m on your side.”

“I know,” you said, tears unexpectedly rimming your eyelashes. “It just… It sucks.”

“Well, when you’re a faculty member one day, and there are others like you, we can make more of a change to the way things are run. We just have to wait for the useless chaff like Lord Brightflame to blow away.”

“You say ‘Lord’ Brightflame, but Rune isn’t a lord… that would be —”

“— his father,” Orrakh finished. “Sitting on the biggest hoard of gold in the kingdom, banker to kings across the continent, and the truest ‘draconian’ creature outside of the great winged dragons of the South.”

“You say that like you’ve actually met him,” you said.

“I have. He barged in here and gave me a talking to before the academic year started. Tried to push a chest of gold twice as heavy as I am across this very desk to get me to give Rune an A at the end of the year.”

“What did you do with it?” you asked without thinking.

Orrakh barked a laugh. “I transformed it into a gilded shit and set it on fire.”

You blinked at him. “You didn’t…”

He pushed himself off the table with a slight buck of his hips and gestured to a dark blotch in the centre of the empty desk behind him.

You met his gaze, then simply burst out laughing.

It was such a relief that you actually doubled over as tears of mirth and mild hysteria washed down your face, and behind your own laughter, you heard the orc’s deep chuckle too.

“Here,” he said after a little while, offering you a clean, linen handkerchief to sort yourself out.

When you were back to normal again, he waved his fingers and it transformed in your hand into a piece of paper with what appeared to be a list written in his neat handwriting. You blinked at it, and realised belatedly it was a rather comprehensive list of books.

“I thought you might want some light reading for the summer.”

“Light?” you asked, eyeing the dry looking titles on advanced runecraft.

Orrakh just winked at you, and you thanked him and left his classroom feeling infinitely better, despite the events of the past two weeks.

Your second year passed without crossing paths with Rune at all.

Of course, you saw him around the castle, but he kept himself distant from you and almost always walked the other way if he saw you approaching. He appeared here and there as nothing more than the briefest flash of gold in the refectory, or, to your surprise, in the archives. You never bothered to find out what he was studying, but whatever it was, it had nothing to do with your schedule.

His odd conversation with Magister Orrakh that afternoon had stuck with you though, and you thought more than once about what Orrakh had said to him about wealthy fathers prescribing their children’s courses and results. Had Lord Brightflame wanted Rune to attend the academy and come out with qualifications that Rune clearly had no interest in acquiring?

Alana transferred in from a different university for the start of your second year, and the naga proved as adept at runecraft as you. Almost by way of apology for pairing you with Rune, Orrakh had had you partner with Alana in your first week, and the two of you formed a tight friendship over the course of the first term that lasted right up until graduation, and into your respective Masters qualifications.

So now, as you fumed and tried not to foam at the mouth with indignation at being paired with Rune yet again during a summer placement at the Royal Academy, Alana took you out for drinks and distracted you as best she could.

Starting the first day of your placement with Magister Delfan felt oddly like starting university for the first day.

Delfan’s area of expertise lay in the precise fabrication of magical foci and objects which augmented the power of a ritual, or channelled the magicka in a specific manner. Having focused your studies with Magister Orrakh purely on runic arrays, this was a natural progression for you, but you couldn’t help wondering as you made your way across the castle’s huge inner bailey and over to her workshop what Rune was doing there.

After a bit of digging the previous night at the bar with Alana, you’d managed to learn that Rune had left the discipline of his namesake entirely, and had done rather well as a potion crafter and alchemist. Given that it relied more on the innate properties of the ingredients themselves and in their precise combination, the art of brewing was generally less well regarded in academia than the lofty abstracts of runecraft and so-called ‘pure’ spellwork. Of course, you thought that was a load of rubbish, but perceptions were what they were, and it puzzled you that he’d chosen such a humble course of study, especially when his family were also renowned spellcasters and mages.

The minotaur who’d given you the information about Rune had also added in an undertone that Rune’s father had not spoken to his son for six months after he’d announced the change in career path, and had also apparently threatened to disinherit him for ‘shaming’ his ‘magical bloodline’ or some such nonsense.

That new information didn’t alter your opinion of him after what he’d decided to do to you, but it did play on your mind as you pushed the heavy wooden door open and entered Magister Delfan’s workshop. Things were never black and white, and there was always a story beneath the facade that people chose to present to the world.

The building was a long, single-storey shed, with a flagstone floor and three rows of workbenches on either side of a central walkway between them, and an intricate pattern of iron gratings in the floor for drainage in case of spills and accidents. 

One long side of each bench had a step or platform that ran the length of it to allow those of shorter stature, namely gnomes, dwarves, and goblins, to access the benches, with a ramp at one end for access for those using wheelchairs. The other side had stools which could be moved out of the way for the few centaurs and cervitaurs who studied at the Academy, or for those like nagas with their long tails, and anyone who just might not feel like using a stool while they worked.

Standing behind a workbench placed in the centre of the far wall at the other end of the workshop from the doors, and talking with a very familiar looking dragonborn, was Magister Delfan. The dwarf had her long, ginger and white bead plaited into a single tail that showed the sections of different colour in an attractive pattern, and her long red hair, streaked with white, was also braided back off her face. She wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a practical, leather apron over snug-fitting clothes. There was no danger of a floaty sleeve catching fire on her watch, and you were suddenly very glad you’d opted for your humble, practical outfit over something a little more formal.

Rune was standing below the dais where Delfan’s workbench sat, wearing a plain black, woollen tunic and tight, buckskin leggings, and sturdy, black leather boots. His clothes still looked well made, but there were no gold chains dangling from his horns, and no embroidery on his clothes. His serrated tail hung behind him in the familiar, elegant curve you remembered, and his crest and horns glinted in the bright magelights burning steadily in high sconces on all the walls. At the sound of the door opening, he half turned over his shoulder and you watched him swallow thickly and step back and to one side, tail dropping.

“Ah, there you are,” Delfan beamed at you in a hearty alto, her voice echoing off the stone walls.

“I hope I’m not late,” you said as you tried not to scuttle up the centre of the workbenches towards her.

“No, no, not at all,” she replied with a smile. “You’re still early. I called Master Rune in here for a quick chat beforehand.”

At that, you had to look at him, and he met your gaze.

Your stomach dropped a little. Close up, he was as handsome as he had always been, but there was a steadiness to him that seemed to have eclipsed the swagger of a few years ago, and he looked almost meek as he bowed his head to you. He still didn’t speak though.

Well, if he wasn’t inclined to talk to you, you weren’t going to make the effort. You’d done well enough without his company for three years.

Magister Delfan noted the frost in the atmosphere between you but didn’t react beyond a minute twitch of her white eyebrows.

“Well, as you know from applying for the internship,” she said, clapping her scarred hands together and rubbing her palms a little to make a rasping sound that spoke of rough calluses and a life of practical work and research, “We will be examining the use of foci in rites and rituals. This particular project has received funding from the Prince’s Trust for the Development of Civic Magic, and we will be examining the use of both rune and alchemy in cleaning the city’s water systems, with a view to creating a prototype for use in the lower districts.”

She paused, and you swallowed. Having grown up in the dockside area, one of the least developed parts of the city, this project suddenly struck you far deeper than you’d realised. In a shaky voice, you asked, “Drinking supply or sewer water?”

“Both, ideally, but to start with we’re focusing on the drinking water — wells and aquifer purification.”

You stood there, still misty-eyed, while she began giving a more detailed overview and outline for the project, and when she turned to Rune and asked for his input from an alchemist’s point of view, it became obvious that he had truly found his calling.

What struck you most though, after getting over the delightful shock of the project’s true goals, was how different this older version of Rune seemed.

The golden-scaled dragonborn still had that aristocratic lilt to his voice and the crisp articulation to his words, exacerbated by his rows of shiny, sharp teeth and that alluring blue tongue, but the prickly arrogance had mellowed into quiet self-assurance. He never talked over either you or Magister Delfan; he deferred to you when she asked how the solvents he proposed might interact with the energies of certain runes; and he listened attentively when you ventured a few ideas about where to place the runes in the water systems to make them most effective.

“Wonderful,” Delfan said after an hour of bouncing ideas around between the three of you. “Now, what say the three of us go to the pub and talk about something other than work for a bit?”

At that, Rune twitched a small but wary look in your direction, his amber eyes widening, and he opened his mouth as if to begin to utter an excuse but you cut him off before he could bring up the past in front of Delfan. “Great. Let’s go.”

As it happened, as soon as the three of you stepped inside the Wonky Chairleg pub, you spotted Magister Orrakh just picking up a pint from the bar, and he hailed his fellow lecturer by raising the foaming tankard. Delfan darted away with an excuse about having wanted to catch Orrakh for a while, leaving you and Rune standing alone near the door.

After a long and extremely awkward silence, Rune cleared his throat and turned to look down at you. “If you want to go home, I understand.”

You took in the wide-eyed, earnest look on his face, and decided, after a deep, slow inhale, to give him a chance to explain himself. After all, you had to work with the guy for the next couple of months. No point in shunting the elephant around the room when you could just face it now. “No,” you said. “Let’s get a drink.”

He nodded and you followed Delfan to the bar, but she was already deep in conversation with the orcish professor, so you ordered your own drinks and went to a quieter, more secluded corner.

After he’d slid into his seat and waited for you to do the same, Rune spoke up again. “Listen, I feel I need to clear the air. I’m not going to ask you to forgive me for how I behaved and what I did, but I want you to know I’ve changed. What I did to you, and realising just how deeply wrong it was, changed me. Fundamentally.”

You regarded him across the table and nodded slowly. “I can see that, I think,” you said.

He licked his lips and swallowed. “I thought at the time… that if I did something so egregious, they would finally kick me out of here and my father would finally realise that following in his footsteps was not something I was cut out for.”

It was as you’d half suspected, not that it excused his choices. “But they didn’t kick you out.”

“Because you didn’t say anything, and neither did Magister Orrakh,” he said, with a low rumble to his voice like distant thunder. “I couldn’t believe it.”

You snorted and shrugged. “Millie said it best when she told me that if I spoke up, your father would pay off anyone and everyone to keep it quiet, and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference.”

Rune blinked slowly, the silky, nictitating membrane on his eye veiling the bright amber behind for a long second. Then he dropped his gaze and shook his head slowly, biting his lower lip softly with his upper row of teeth. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry that people like my father have that kind of power. It’s wrong. I should have been held accountable for what I did. I drugged you, for fuck’s sake. I spiked that brandy and let you spend three days in the infirmary. I had no idea if you had any kind of medical condition, though I asked Millie about it and she said you didn’t, but I could have killed you.”

“Let’s not get caught up in what might have happened,” you muttered into your drink. “What did happen was bad enough.”

“I’m honestly surprised you agreed to work with me when you found out about the summer placement,” he said, drinking deeply from his own tankard.

You shrugged. “Magister Orrakh wants me to join the faculty, but he said I needed some more experience under my belt before the Board will consider me, even for a junior fellowship.”

“My father tried to buy me a place in the alchemy faculty,” Rune admitted.

Your eyebrows rose. “Rumour has it he’s not exactly pleased you’re mixing potions and dissecting frogs…”

Rune barked a laugh, his eyes lighting up as the sound continued to bubble out of his chest, crinkling his eyes shut. “That’s an understatement,” he chortled, bringing the back of his wrist to his reptilian lips in an attempt at stopping the laughter. It continued to roll around in his chest for a long time though, and finally it made you laugh as well.

“What?” you asked. “I didn’t think you’d find it that funny.”

“He was so angry with me, but after…” he cut off and the mirth died right down again to nothing. His broad shoulders dropped and he sighed. “After the end of that first year, it made me realise that I was not the kind of person that I wanted to be. Not when I was going to inherit my father’s estates and connections and power. I can use all that to make a difference, or I can use it the way he does: trampling people and using them and exploiting them.” He murmured your name and added, “I don’t want to be that.”

He looked genuinely spooked by the idea, his clawed hands tightening around his tankard until you thought the pewter might crumple inwards like cardboard.

“So don’t be,” you said evenly.

Rune nodded. “I’m trying. I hope… I hope over the course of the summer you’ll see that.”

And to his credit, you did.

On trips into the lower districts, he didn’t act the spoiled nobleman you recalled from your undergrad. He didn’t wear his fairy-embroidered tunics and sneer at the ‘common folk’. He listened when they talked about the issues they were facing with their water supply, and when you returned to the lab, he was there tinkering with the formulae until the compounds did what he wanted.

You used your runic arrays to amplify the effects of the solvents, and Delfan used her knowledge of foci to help you craft district-wide arrays that finally took the foul water and made it truly potable.

On the day it first worked, six weeks into the project which Delfan had been working on alone for two years already, you emerged from an access tunnel that the dwarven masons had built beside a well in the cramped square two streets over from where you’d grown up and tears flowed down your cheeks as you hauled yourself out of the hatch.

When Rune levered his long legs out over the lip of the hatch after you and straightened, and he spotted you turning away to hide your emotion, he crossed to you in three long strides and put his hand on your shoulder.

It was the first time he’d touched you, but you didn’t flinch.

You turned to regard him through the blur of tears and found such open concern in his regal, golden features where only a few minutes ago he’d been alight with glee at the success of the project. He uttered your name and ducked his head a little, trying to discern the source of your distress. “What? What’s wrong?”

You shook your head, speechless for a few heaving breaths. Finally you regained enough composure to rasp, “I never thought… growing up here… that… that there would be clean drinking water coming out of those pumps…” You gasped and gulped around the words, and gestured towards the nearby communal pump where a too-thin faun was working the lever and staring amazed at the bright, sparkling, clear water that was flowing out into a pail at her hoofed feet.

Rune looked around at the muck-grimed buildings crowding in on all sides of the tiny, overshadowed square and then back at you. “You grew up here?”

You nodded. “My parents live two streets in that direction,” you said, gesturing towards the familiar alleyway that led to your parents’ tiny, two-roomed apartment near the quayside.

“You should tell them what you’ve done here today,” he said quietly, his eyes almost catching fire in the fading afternoon light. “Right now.”

“I…” you faltered.

There was no real reason not to go and see them. You went back all the time, and you’d told them just how close you were to achieving the seemingly impossible only a week earlier.

The only problem was that you’d told your tiefling father that your feelings towards Rune had changed lately too, and you didn’t want to risk Rune meeting your parents. Your papa might have been able to keep a poker face when it came to not giving things away, but his husband, your father, was an open book, and you just knew he’d wink at you and make some remark that would spoil the tentative peace you’d woven between you and Rune.

“No?” Rune asked, looking uncertain. “Wouldn’t they want to share in celebrating your success?”

It was your own fault. You talked about them all the time; Rune clearly knew how close the three of you were, unlike with his own father. Rune’s mother, you learned, had passed away when he’d been only a hatchling, so he’d never known any kind of familial bond.

“Pa’s probably out on the water,” you said evasively, knowing full well he was having two days’ rest between excursions right at this moment, and your father would be taking time in between his jobs as a rat catcher to be with him. They would both probably be at home right now. Papa would be baking, and Father would be darning his socks and stealing cookies when he could. Or raw dough if Papa wasn’t far enough through the process for the theft of finished biscuits.

Before either Rune or you could continue the discussion though, Fate, it seemed, stepped in.

A deep and very familiar, husky voice called out across the tiny square from behind you, and you closed your eyes and hung your head before turning around. The werebear, with a pale grey, woollen, fisherman’s sweater stretched across his large paunch despite the summer weather, chuckled your name again and opened his arms wide.

“Papa, I’m filthy,” you said, looking down at the algae slimes on your trousers from the narrow spaces of the access tunnel below.

“Don’t care,” he growled. “You did it, didn’t you? You only bloody did it! Gods, I’m so proud of you!” and he swept you up into his trademark bear hug that lifted you right off the ground and knocked all the wind from your lungs to leave you a wheezing, empty bag. Finally, you managed to smack him on the back of the head and he released you, staggering, to the cobblestones.

You reeled backwards, unsteady and a little dizzy, and found a hand at the small of your back to stop you teetering down the still-open hatchway behind you. “Steady,” Rune murmured, then let go.

You swayed again in the wake of his hand’s absence, and it returned. “Thanks,” you muttered, then looked up at your adoptive father.

“Papa, this is —”

“—Rune,” the grizzled werebear finished for you, giving him the once over. “I know who he is.”

Rune very swiftly removed his hand a second time and straightened his spine ever so slightly. Your papa was taller than Rune, and about twice his weight, and though he was usually a gentle soul, when angered he could be a force to be reckoned with. Something protective flickered in his grey-blue eyes as he regarded the dragonborn you’d told him about — both the bad and, latterly, the good — and he nodded once and held out his rough hand.

Rune swallowed, blinked, and then slid his hand into your father’s to shake.

“Good job, both of you,” was all your papa had to say. “Now, why don’t you make a quick stop and tell your father the news.”

“Pa,” you groaned through gritted teeth. He knew exactly what he was doing, the bastard, but he was keeping his usual stoic face on.

“Just five minutes, sweetling,” he said mildly. “Then you and Rune can head back to the castle and celebrate there. We can borrow you again at the weekend, no doubt.”

“Go on,” Rune said quietly, nodding. “You should go.”

“You should come too,” Papa interjected in Rune’s direction before you could shoo your partner away. “I’ve been baking all day, and it’ll only make my darling husband sick if he eats it all before supper.”

Rune looked to you, and you rolled your eyes, caving. Trying to argue with a werebear was like trying to shift a boulder without magic: unless you were a bigger werebear, it wasn’t likely to work.

“Fine. Just five minutes.”

‘Just five minutes’ turned into afternoon tea, turned into dinner, turned into a very late night with a fair amount of very cheap fruit liqueur.

To begin with, your father had been on his best behaviour as well, though by the time he was neck deep in his husband’s cookies again, and the fruit liqueur had soaked into the starch in his stomach, you knew there would be no stopping him.

The slender tiefling coiled his blue-grey tail around his glass and rather impressively knocked back a final shot before leaning languidly back in his wooden seat at the tiny dining table. You’d all crammed in around it, and to his credit, Rune actually looked more comfortable in that humble room than he had in any of the finely-gilded and painted function rooms up at the castle.

He laughed loudly when your father cracked a joke about coldblooded creatures taking their alcohol way better than you warmbloods because of their innate resistance to poisons, and how it took an entire ship’s cargo to get your papa even the slightest bit tipsy. “Trust me, we actually tried it once in our youth,” your father said dramatically, leaning forward onto the table and resting his elegant, delicate wrists on the scrubbed surface where you’d learned to read and write as a tiny child.

Your papa chuckled and patted his husband gently on the back of his hand. “They don’t need to hear that story tonight, sweetheart,” he rumbled. “In fact, we’ve kept them long enough, don’t you think?”

With a put-upon sigh, your father leaned to his left where you were sitting and pressed a kiss to the top of your head. “Of course. Listen, apple muffin, I’m so proud of you.”

“Can you not call me that?” you groaned into your own nearly-empty glass. “Gods, you’re so embarrassing.”

He snickered, all his earrings flashing and the bangles at his wrists clinking as he reached up to ruffle your hair. “You’ll always be my little apple muffin, no matter how brilliant you are.” He looked across at Rune and added, “You keep this little creature of mine humble, alright? Don’t let all this success go to that excellent head…” he added, rapping his knuckles sharply on the crown of your head for emphasis.

“It’s the other way around, I’m afraid,” Rune said quietly, and the mood shifted a little for the first time that night. “And on that note,” he said smoothly, “I think you’re right; I should return to the castle.” He regarded you and asked, “Are you staying here?”

You looked between your parents, and while Rune stood carefully and slid his chair politely back under the table, you caught your father’s scarlet eyes and he jutted his chin in Rune’s direction and winked once.

You rolled your eyes, and then said, “No, I’ll come back with you.”

“Safe journey,” your papa said as you opened the door onto a surprisingly cool, midsummer evening.

The stink of the quayside and the runoff from the streets filled your lungs though and you wrinkled your nose as you always had.

“One thing at a time, kiddo,” papa said when he saw your reaction. “You’ve just given an entire district clean drinking water with that project.”

You nodded, and shivered a little.

After promising to visit again soon, you turned your steps towards the upper districts of the city, and Rune walked in silence beside you.

A quarter of an hour passed without a single word from him, and as you walked along the leafy paths of one of the city fancier parks, you finally cracked and looked up at him. “Rune? You alright?” you asked. “You didn’t have to stay all that time, you know?”

He worked his jaw and obviously chewed the inside of his cheek, and you saw just how shiny his eyes had become.

Your feet faltered and you tilted your head. “What is it?”

“They know what I did to you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes. I tell my parents most things that happen to me.”

Rune’s throat worked as he struggled to swallow, blinking rapidly. “And they still welcomed me into their home? Let me sit with their child at their table?”

You shrugged. “You’ve changed. You’re not who you were three years ago, Rune. I wouldn’t have worked with you a minute longer if I thought otherwise.”

“But —”

“Stop. You have to let it go.” Perhaps it was the alcohol that made you honest, but whatever it was, it was time. “I don’t forgive you for what you chose to do, but I am willing to move past it because of who it made you. You’re a good person, Rune. You weren’t then, but you are now, and you have to accept that I’m not going to hold it against you forever. People make shitty choices and do shitty things, but that doesn’t have to define everything they are, alright?”

“You mean it?” he asked, turning fully to face you.

You nodded.

His whole body softened and he began to weep.

“Rune…”

“I’m sorry. It shouldn’t be all about me,” he said, trying to rein it all in. “I’ve just… I’ve never spent an evening like that… With… With a proper family.”

Something cracked inside you at the revelation.

You put your hand gently at the centre of his chest, feeling the large sections of hard scale that adorned his torso like armour beneath his thin, well-made, linen shirt. Rune drew in a shaky breath and his eyes rolled closed.

Slowly, you spread your fingers out until your palm was flat against his chest and your fingers were splayed wide.

Rune stood perfectly still, the only movement the rapid rise and fall of his ribs beneath your hand, and gradually, his breathing slowed and a low, indistinct rumbling resounded from him. Like some great feline, you realised he was essentially purring.

Stepping close to him, you slid both hands up his chest, over the slope of his shoulders, and up the side of his neck. His smooth scales were cool in the summer air, and you finally got to feel those geode spikes around his jawline and up around the base of his twin horns as you cupped his face in your hands.

He opened his eyes and blinked, his slit pupils soaring from narrow, elegant ellipses to wide voids in his amber eyes.

Rune breathed your name but you silenced him with a fingertip over his reptilian mouth.

“Come on,” you whispered. “Let’s keep going.”

Rune nodded and followed after you through the streets of the city.

When you reached your modest rooms in the castle, he bowed formally and bid you goodnight, and you watched his retreating back as he walked away down the corridor towards his rooms in a different part of the academy.

“Rune!” you called after him, your voice echoing briefly off the stones.

He halted and turned, his tail hanging in perfect counterbalance. “Mmn?”

You bit your lower lip and then smiled. Very quietly, you told him, “I like the person you’ve become.”

Rune brought hand to heart and bowed his head, then left you to your thoughts for the night.

Two weeks later, your project had brought clean drinking water to the worst affected districts in the ancient city, and it had earned you recognition from the Prince himself.

Magister Delfan shunted two heavy parchment envelopes across her immaculately clean worktop towards each of you with a smug look on her face, and sat back to watch you both open them.

When you read the words:

‘You are invited by His Royal Highness The Crown Prince to attend a ball to be held in your honour at the Royal Palace one month hence, on the Hay Moon.’

The rest of the invitation turned into a blur the longer you stared at it, and when you finally looked up, you saw a similar expression on Rune’s face, despite the differences in your species’ appearances.

“Holy shit,” you breathed.

Magister Delfan chuckled. “Holy shit indeed, my friends. We did it! And you’ll both have places in any university you wish to attend after what we’ve achieved.”

It was like a dream come true. The Crown even paid for your expenses in attending the ball, which included a new outfit for you since you couldn’t very well go in your crusty mage robes, despite what you tried to tell Alana. She went with you to the Prince’s own tailor, and when you put on the outfit for the evening, she squealed and clapped her hands and hugged you.

“Rune won’t know what to do with himself when he sees you, I guarantee it,” she giggled, and you rolled your eyes.

She’d been right though.

If reptiles could blush, Rune would have turned to a flaming pile of ash when he clapped eyes on you at the event that night.

Standing by a marble fountain in the courtyard of the Royal Palace, he watched you descend from your carriage after the short ride out of the city, having clearly arrived a little ahead of you, and his jaw slackened just a touch.

Self-conscious, you approached him but he met you halfway. “You look incredible,” he breathed.

“So do you,” you shot back, a little breathless. “You’ve got all your lovely gold chains back too,” you added, eyeing the glinting diamonds that dangled from the gossamer threads of gold lacing between his horns. “Haven’t seen those in years.”

“I haven’t worn them in years,” he admitted. “You don’t think it’s too much?”

You shook your head. “No. Of all the things you left behind in the past, I’m glad you brought those back.”

He did look wonderful in his rich, black tunic. The Brightflame sigil was worked into the fairy-embroidered gold detailing, and tiny diamonds had also been sewn like dewdrops into the details around the deep ‘v’ of the neckline and at the dizzyingly intricate cuffs.

He tipped his elbow out and looked a little uncertainly at you, as if you might refuse him.

So you slid your fingers into the crook of his arm and let him lead you inside, all the while subtly enjoying the play of soft fabric over hard scale and muscle beneath.

When you danced later that night, it was only with him, and he was wonderful. You didn’t know many courtly dances, but he led you perfectly through every step, and when he knew a dance was coming up that was too complicated to learn on the spot, he stepped out to the edge of the room with you and you watched the more advanced dancers swirl and spin their way through the steps until you felt as breathless as though you were dancing anyway.

“You should dance one of these with someone who knows what they’re doing,” you told him. “You’re a wonderful dancer.”

He took the compliment with a shy smile, but shook his head. “Thank you, but there’s no one else I want to dance with tonight.”

You felt your cheeks go hot at that and eyed a very elegant elf on the far side of the room who had hardly taken his eyes off Rune all night. “You sure? You’ve got people queueing up in the wings just waiting for you to ask.”

Rune shook his head. “No. Only you.”

“Intense, much?” you snorted.

He shrugged and deflected by watching the dancers again.

When the evening began to get rowdier than you were truly comfortable with, Rune took your hand and led you out into the palace gardens. Overhead, stars blinked out from a canvas of midnight blue, and the little torches and floating candles flickered in and around the ornamental ponds, trying their best to answer the graceful, timeless stars above.

Feeling Rune’s whisky-warm gaze on you yet again, you paused your gentle stroll around the large lily pond and looked up at him.

Firelight and starlight danced together along his opalescent, gold horns and glinted in his eyes and in his scales. He looked like a sculpture of an ancient dragon lord come to life, and with the dewy diamonds dancing seemingly in mid air around his head in a halo, he seemed almost impossibly beautiful.

You had acknowledged, both to him and to yourself, that he’d made a very poor choice three years ago, but you understood now what had driven him to it. It didn’t excuse it, but it made it easier to understand. And he’d more than made up for it with his behaviour in the intervening years. That he’d never done any of his good deeds hoping to impress you also went a long way. He’d done what he’d done and changed who he was of his own accord, because he knew he’d had to change. You got the sense that he’d frightened himself with the depths he’d sunk to, and that was enough.

Rune spoke your name in the stillness of the garden and you answered him with a kiss.

Rising up on tiptoes, you pressed your lips to his and felt his whole body stiffen with surprise, then melt with a low-frequency rumble. It shivered through you, resonating in your chest and in your lungs and in your bones, and you clung to his horns just to keep your balance, mindful not to tangle your fingers in the chains and break them.

His hands found your waist and his tongue flicked along your lips and you opened to him.

For a long time, you both lost yourself in the closeness of each other, but after a while, he drew back, winded and wide-eyed.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“You.”

“How?”

“It doesn’t matter. I want to get out of here, and I want you.”

He nodded and guided you around the palace grounds towards the entrance, and called for a carriage.

“You know your way around the palace?” you asked, only just realising it.

He smiled shyly. “My father used to bring me here as a child. I got lost in the gardens once. The daughter of the Duchess of Ironridge and I played hide and seek for hours out there in the box hedges before anyone found us…”

“That’s a story I want to hear,” you laughed as the carriage drew up and a footman opened the door for you.

Rune helped you in with a steadying hand and followed you up. “Another time,” he said.

As the carriage lurched away from the Royal Palace and your own party, Rune looked at you with his pupils still huge and his nostrils flared.

“What?” you asked coyly.

“I…” he swallowed and let his head thunk back against the silk panelling of the carriage wall behind him. “I can smell you,” he murmured. “Even taste you when I breathe in.”

“Fuck…” you laughed. He could smell your arousal, he meant, and it only made it flare hotter inside you. “Really?”

“Mn.”

You ran your hand up the muscle of his thigh and felt it quiver as his legs parted and his serrated tail twitched against your calf.

“Careful,” he rumbled.

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll make a mess of myself in a royal carriage.”

You moved your fingers up to his waistband and he gasped as you slowly began to unlace his black, buckskin leggings. You glanced up, giving him every opportunity to stop you, but he just stared as you moved off the seat and knelt between his knees.

“Oh Mother of the Gods,” he cursed and lifted his hips a little, parting his thighs even further.

The carriage ride back from the Royal Palace outside the city was a good twenty minutes by fast horse, so you weren’t worried. You had time enough for this.

Rune lifted his hips again and allowed you to draw his leggings and silk underwear down to reveal the reptilian slit between his legs. It was puffy and swollen and covered with slick already, and the tip of his cock was just visible. To your delight, it was the same acidic blue as his tongue.

As you laved the flat of your tongue over his slit, he hissed in a breath and bucked his hips upwards with another muffled curse. His slit clenched for a moment and then an inch or so more of his cock unfurled against the heat of your mouth.

Slowly, you let your tongue work along the silken edges of his sheath, tasting the sweet and slightly salty slick that covered him while he began to shake, gripping the seat with his clawed hands as though barely able to restrain himself from grabbing hold of you. That rich, low-frequency rumbling filled the air, far deeper than the rumble of the carriage wheels, and he couldn’t seem to stop it. Even when he spoke, it was there, broadcasting his arousal to you.

He whimpered your name and the heels of his boots scraped on the carriage floor. His heavy tail thrashed once against the wall of the carriage and then thudded against your side before he apologised and gasped, panting. His cock, bright blue at the tip and a stunning dark blue at the base, unfurled fully from its sheath and curved up against his belly, leaking and twitching with each lick of your tongue around his slit.

“Please, I can’t…” he moaned. “Please, I’m making such a mess… please…”

You reached one hand out and drew his cock carefully into your mouth.

Rune bared all his teeth and snarled, eyes rammed shut, chest heaving wildly. All the while, he kept rumbling too.

“Please… I can’t keep quiet… Please…” he begged. “Please make me come, please…”

The diamonds strung between his horns quivered and sent flashes of refracted light around the carriage as it rocked and swayed, the sounds of his drawn-out pleasure only just masked by the clatter of four horses’ hooves on the hard-packed surface of the road and the creak and rock of the fine carriage.

You worked your fist up the slick shaft of his cock and swirled your tongue around his tip, tasting the pre-come that beaded and gathered there before it rolled down his length and over your fingers. He was such a mess that you wondered briefly if you’d be able to get him clean enough to leave the carriage in a semi-decent state.

The longer you worked him though, the messier he got. His slit clenched and dripped slick down his scaled thighs and onto the seat, and his cock drooled over your knuckles and down your wrist with every writhing twitch it made.

Rune was teetering on the ragged edge of losing all control as he begged and gasped your name, pleading with you to let him come, until you finally relented and took him as deep down your throat as you dared. As you closed your lips firmly around his cock and hollowed your cheeks, letting your tongue glide up the smooth underside of his shaft, his slit clenched again, the muscles contracting against your fingertips as you teased him there in time with your mouth, and his eyes went suddenly wide.

“I’m —” he gasped, but you were prepared, and you let him spill down your throat.

His back hunched forwards and his rumbling became a low, wild roar.

Rune’s whole body convulsed and heaved as his release ripped through him.

Then he slumped back against the cushioned bench behind him and every muscle in his body seemed to go slack. Listless, he let his horned head clunk against the boards behind him, rocking in time to the movements of the carriage, and you caressed his spent cock gently in your hands while you let your aching jaw recover.

His dark blue cock twitched helplessly, the last dregs of his spend rolling over the back of your hand and he watched with a half-open eye as you licked it off your skin.

“Fuck,” he hissed.

You smirked at him and stood carefully. He took a silk handkerchief from his tunic pocket with uncharacteristically clumsy fingers and wafted it in your direction.

“You need it more than me, I think,” you said, eyeing the sheen on his scaled thighs from all the slick his slit had produced.

“Thank fuck there’s a spell to clean surfaces up,” he snorted, struggling to straighten himself from the slump into which he’d artfully draped himself in the aftermath of his orgasm.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to try and do magic after coming that hard,” you scoffed. “And anyway, I thought spellwork wasn’t your forte?”

“I can do spellwork as well as the next mage,” he said, the slur retreating from his voice as he recovered and cleaned himself up with the handkerchief. “I just chose to do alchemy over the other arts. The Brightflame line has been made up of mages going all the way back to the time of the Dragon King.”

“Go on then, but if you set this royal carriage on fire, O Descendant of the Great Dragon King, I will not be accepting any responsibility whatsoever.”

He laughed, stood carefully while the carriage was still moving, and tugged his buckskin leggings back up his legs and tied them, looping his tail skillfully through the tailored hole in the back. As he turned, you felt him drawing on the ambient magicka around you, and gasped in surprise when he made the tiniest motion with his clawed fingertips, and the mess on the seat disappeared entirely. The silk handkerchief he held out of the open carriage window and it turned to cinders that blew away in the rushing breeze.

“Oh don’t look so surprised,” he snickered as he sat down heavily and shot you a sidelong look. One of the rings that held his gold chains in place had slid off his horns and was dangling down behind him.

“Don’t look so smug,” you retorted, reaching up and fixing the chain for him.

Rune went very still while you sorted it, and when you looked up into his face again, his eyes had gone the colour of molten gold. “Thank you,” he murmured as you trailed your fingertips down the ridges and edges of his spines and scales before lowering your hand to your lap.

“Is that why you’re called Rune then?” you asked after a few minutes of easy silence.

“Mm?”

“Because of the magic in your bloodline?”

He shook his head. “No.” Then, to your surprise, he smirked, showing all the sharp teeth along one side of his jaw. “If you like, when we get back, I’ll take my tunic off and you can tell me why I’m called Rune.”

You frowned, but he refused to elaborate.

You ended up in his chambers — a surprisingly humble set of rooms near the foundry on the western side of the enormous castle — and sure enough, once the door was locked and the mage lamps had been kindled to a gentle glow, he let you tug the hem of his tunic up over his sharp hips to reveal the muscled expanse of his back. His scales looked like pockets of cooling bronze and gold, collecting and hardening to thicker armour around the blunt spikes that protruded down his spine like the gemstone studs around his jawline, and across his shoulder blades you saw a pattern of slightly darker scales in the shape of the rune for lightning.

With your fingertip, you traced it, and you felt his tail stiffen and flex, rising up to caress the inside of your thigh. You trailed your fingertips around the seam where it joined the curve of his backside below and he sucked in a breath through his teeth.

“You can study me like a lab specimen later,” he rumbled, glancing back over his shoulder at you. “It’s my turn, and I intend to use my mouth on you.”

A little while later, with both of your outfits in a tangled heap on the floor, he let you lie back on his bed and he slowly parted your legs with his cool, taloned hands. The contrast between your two bodies was enough to set you shivering and gasping, but when he parted his dangerous jaws and let that blue tongue work its clever way across your skin, you forgot everything else.

Rune gave himself completely to your pleasure that night and you lost track of how many times he made you come.

When you came for the final time and lay back against his pillows a gasping, weak wreck, he crawled up to lie beside you and drew you against his cool, hard chest.

“Thank you,” he whispered as you drifted off to sleep in his arms some time later. “Thank you for giving me a second chance.”

“Thank you,” you replied.

He tensed just a little, obviously thinking you’d tipped over the edge into sleep. “For what?”

“For giving me a reason to.”

_

Really hope you enjoyed this month's offering!! I thought May's story was a long one, but this was even longer!!

Check out the masterlist of previous stories here too!