Male Lizardfolk/Argonian x f. human - Part 1 (3rd person, sfw) (Patreon)

Hello friends! I mentioned a little while ago that I was working on a big, muscly, lizardy boi for you, and here he is! Before you panic, it is set in Skyrim, but you don't need to know anything about the game to enjoy this story/setting. I'm just using it as a sandbox to play in. Argonians are the lizardfolk of the Skyrim universe, and a few live on the docks at the Nord city of Windhelm, where they're not treated well because Skyrim Nords are pretty racist to all the non-Nords... yay. Anyway, the focus of the story isn't anything Skyrim-y. The only thing I'll add is that Argonian naming conventions are either in their native language, or when translated it's quite literal, like 'Scouts-Many-Marshes' or 'Stands-in-Deep-Water'.

Content: A young courier requires passage to another town, and it falls to our big, gruff, unusually tall and intimidatingly patterned lizard boi to take her... Featuring a deaf Argonian friend, some reference to a nebulous 'Argonian Sign Language', some unwelcome comments of a sexual nature (not from our romantic leads), reference to inter-species racism, and passing mention of an off-screen animal death.

Wordcount: 3750

(This will be a three-parter, with this POV from the male lead, the last two from the female. Due to Patreon's rules on sexual content, the final (nsfw) chapter will not be released to everyone after a week, but the first two (sfw) will be. There's nothing I can do about that, though I am sorry).

 A dolorous watch-bell rang out around the Windhelm dock as the guard rotation changed at the East Empire Trading Company’s offices, but no one looked up from their tasks. The stench of herring hung heavy in the air despite the brisk wind whipping in off the mouth of the White River; it made the netting that Crimson-Throat was working his deft, clawed fingers through with the bone needle thrum and sing like a ship’s rigging.

Beyond the regular rhythms of the dock — the pulsing pull of the work-song as his people unloaded the latest cargo ship’s contents onto the slippery wharf, the clanging and knocking of ship repairs, the slap of the icy sea against the hulls and stones of ship and shelter alike — Crimson-Throat heard a new refrain.

A mellifluous whistling, idle but not directionless, rose above the cacophony, and he turned his great, spined head, pausing in his work, to see a new figure approaching from the stone staircase that led to the shuttered city beyond. The massive dock gates stood open during daylight hours, but they might as well have been locked and barred for all that his people were allowed into the city beyond.

This new arrival was not Argonian though. She was human, wearing a fur-lined, leather coat that looked cosier than any fireside warmth offered to his people in the dank, stone accommodation of the Argonian Assemblage, which sat barely above the tide line and frequently required its walls scraping free of black, creeping mould. She had a leather pack on her back, but it didn’t look big enough to house the camping supplies a traveller would need for the road. She looked like a runner for the Messenger Guild, and sure enough, he spotted the compass embossed on the pack when she passed by, heading for the East Empire offices.

Her hair was long and a light, mousy brown, tied back in a plait that hung down and around the pack like a ship’s rope, and behind the ruddy glow of the pinching wind on her cheekbones, her skin had the pale, freckled complexion of many of the Nords native to this part of the world.

Something about the fullness of her hips and thighs, and the way her coat only just toggled up across her chest made Crimson-Throat’s sheath constrict a little in the loose fabric of his too-thin, dark, linen trousers, and he looked away. Yes, his own kind held plenty of attraction for him, but he’d only once had the pleasure of enjoying the taste and heat of a human’s body, and it was an ecstasy he’d never forgotten.

Too bad that most humans wouldn’t look twice at an Argonian in Windhelm, unless it was to hurl another insult at them, let alone one with his unusual colouring and massive size. Where most of his species were the colour of the marshes they came from, in varying shades of greens and browns, he had been born with snow-white scales. The base of the white thicket of spines at the back of his head and down to his collar, however, was a deep, blood red, the colour fading as each spine extended up a few inches, ending in a bone-white tip. His eyes too were the colour of polished rubies, but the most startling thing about him was the colouring that had given him his name, even as a hatchling. There was no way a human would look at him with attraction when he looked like he’d just been mauled half to death, with blood-red markings slashing across his throat and down to his chest in an arresting, even alarming, pattern.

The woman wasn’t tall by human standards, and if he hadn’t been perched on an upturned crate to tend to his work, he was certain she would only have come halfway up his chest. Again, his sheath constricted and he bit back a rumbling moan behind his row of pointed teeth.

As if she’d heard it, though he hadn’t been loud, and she was a good few yards away as she headed towards the guard at the office door, she twitched her head around and caught him eyeing her up. Where a human would have blushed at being caught, he felt the quills at the back of his skull pull up and then flatten themselves in shame, and he looked quickly away again, though not before he thought he saw the corner of her mouth twitch upwards.

But then she was gone, with a word in the stooping ear of the guard at the door, and he returned to mending the rip in the fishing net with scarred but deft fingers. Where once he’d wielded a blade with the same dexterity, unpicking the skein of life with lethal care, he now wove the bone needle in and out of the web of knots and cord. In a way, he supposed, he was still taking life with his work, only this time the souls he was harvesting were a myriad, glittering fish to sell at market, instead of those of the great races of Tamriel.

He shivered as a gust of icy wind rattled across the dockside, bringing with it stinging needles of sleet that melted in the scant heat rising from his cold-blooded body and pinged off the silver-white scales on his exposed head and forearms. Quite why he endured the combination of icy climate and frigid Nords when he owned his own skiff and could literally sail away to anywhere in the world, he wasn’t sure, but what was there for him now anyway? He might as well stay here where he could be useful to the handful of his people who had washed up here on this gods-forsaken dock in northern Skyrim. His size made him enough of a deterrent for drunken guards looking for someone to wail on at the end of their miserable day, and his markings were off-putting enough to bolster his sheer bulk if that alone didn’t work. Since he’d arrived at the Windhelm Docks, the harassment had all but stopped.

The door opened again about half an hour later, and the young woman emerged again, sliding on supple, leather gloves before donning thicker, outer gloves that had been treated with lanolin for waterproofing. He could smell it — taste it — on the wind as it lifted the wayward strands of her hair from her face and whisked across the snow-strewn wharf towards him. He could taste her story too, and it confirmed why she was there. Behind the leather and lanolin, he could taste parchment, the light tang of sweat, and the distinctive aroma of horse. There was blood too, dried and not her own. She was a messenger then, and one who had seen some action to bring her to the remote city of Windhelm.

She smiled at him as she passed, heading not for the city gates again, but towards the First Mate of the Northern Maiden, the large cargo ship which had recently docked. She was thoughtful as she danced around the working Argonians unloading the crates and sacks, pausing to let them pass or going out of her way so that they didn’t have to deviate from their course with their heavy loads. The First Mate watched her approach with a leering look in his lonely eyes, and as she waited on the wharf and looked over to him, he jutted his chin at her and puffed out his chest.

Crimson-Throat felt bile rise up inside him like the venom some of his kind carried inside their fangs or saliva, but she just straightened her spine and asked curtly about passage to Dawnstar.

“Sorry sweetheart,” the First Mate crooned, staring openly at the curve of her breasts before meeting her gaze. “The Maiden’s only just docked and my crew needs a rest. We’re not going out again for another week, though I can think of a few ways we could spend the time together.”

“I’ll pass,” she said immediately. “Is there another ship going out? I have to get to Dawnstar urgently. I have a message for the Jarl and it can’t wait.”

“Take a horse then,” he shrugged dismissively.

“I can’t. Bandits cut her down from under me,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “And the nags in the stables here are only fit to pull a plough or a carriage. I need a light-boned runner, not a horse that’s half-bear. And I’m not walking from here to Dawnstar in the dead of winter.”

“Talk to one of this lot then,” the First Mate sneered, waving a hand in the general direction of the Argonians on the bustling dock. “A few of them got boats, though what those egg-laying fucks know about sailing ain’t worth a single ration of rum in my opinion, girl.”

He watched her jaw grind for a moment before she said, “You know what, I don’t think you could pay me to take passage on your ship anyway. Thank you for your time.”

Crimson-Throat watched her turn from the sallow-faced First Mate, and stalk back down the quayside with a face like a thunderhead. She paused beside Stalks-In-The-Rushes, an appropriately reedy-limbed Argonian with scales the colour of bulrush stalks and green, creeping moss, and she murmured something Crimson-Throat couldn't hear at that distance.

Rushes was deaf, but he could lip-read humans, elves, and orcs alright for the most part. He spoke aloud only rarely, preferring to use Argonian Sign, and when he did, it was heavily accented and hard for most folks to interpret. “Talk to Crimson,” he said, and pointed across the dockside with a dark green talon.

To his evident surprise, she added the sign for ‘thank you’ along with the voiced words, and left him with a polite nod, heading straight for Crimson-Throat.

He continued his work with the bone needle, completing a knot in the netting just as she came to a halt at a little distance from him. He felt her gaze skim across his thick tail with its razor spine of vertical scales marching the length of it like a snow-capped mountain range. They got smaller the closer to his hips they got, morphing into the regiment of gnarled, horned nubs that rippled up his spine and broad, muscular back until they became a crest of spikes that nestled at the back of his skull. She took in the sheer size of him too, but she didn’t balk.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your work,” she said. “Your colleague over there said to talk to you about the possibility of taking passage to Dawnstar with you.”

Crimson-Throat examined the knot one last time, then gently released the needle, letting it dangle on the end of the cord from the repaired netting. It swayed like a bone talisman in the winter wind. He wondered what auguries it might have told, if he’d had the skill to read them.

“You’d take passage with an Argonian, but not with a human?” he asked her, half shifting on the crate to look at her, and resting his left hand on his thigh. He knew the pose made him look like a thug, but he wanted to see what this woman was made of.

She didn’t flinch, and in fact, she smirked. “With that human? No thank you.”

“And with this Argonian?”

She shrugged and met his eye. “Depends on your asking price and your terms.”

“You don’t even know if I have a vessel.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

Her brown eyes twinkled in the cold light, seeming all the warmer for it. “Well, that’s a solid start. What would you charge, if you were to take me to Dawnstar?”

He thought about it. He knew the Maiden’s Captain charged two hundred and fifty gold for passage to the nearby island of Solstheim, and the weaselly little ferryman in his tiny rowing boat charged fifty for passage to most of the coastal ports and docks within reach. Crimson-Throat’s skiff was a larger vessel than that rowing dinghy, with a sail to take a lot of the work out of it, and she was in good nick too, with no barnacles on the hull and proper caulking on her clinker-built body to keep the sea out. She even had a covered area at the stern around the tiller to keep the worst of the wind out.

“Forty,” he said.

“And your terms?”

“Terms?” he scowled, the spines on his head and neck tugging briefly down towards his skin the way a human’s eyebrows would pinch in the middle.

She shrugged. “Am I expected to do anything along the journey, or am I simply a piece of cargo? I don't know anything about sailing, so I can’t be much help unless you tell me what you need. I’m not selling what that slimy piece of skeever-shit was clearly thinking about either, so if that’s part of the bargain, you can forget it as quickly as he did.”

He fixed her with his ruby-red eyes and blinked slowly, the clear membrane passing horizontally across their polished surfaces and rendering her little more than a blurry smudge for just an instant before she reappeared in perfect clarity. She was gorgeous. It was no wonder the First Mate had thought about exacting a price no person should be expected to pay unwillingly, but while Crimson-Throat was many things, a ‘slimy piece of skeever-shit’ he was not.

“For forty gold, and forty gold alone, I will rent out my skiff and my services as a sailor to you. You may shelter for the journey in the cabin, though it is cramped and I will occupy it too, since it’s built around the tiller. You will not be expected to partake in any of the actual sailing but I might ask you for a hand with something simple if the need arises. You will need to provide your own food and drink. You will follow my orders when it comes to your safety and the safety of myself and my vessel.”

She blinked, looking wary, until she sighed and nodded. “Deal. How soon can we leave?”

He eyed the mended netting, cast an eye to the skies, and inhaled deeply of the fresh wind. “Let me put this away and fetch my belongings, and we can be off.” Crimson-Throat looked at the water sloshing up the White River and nodded. “The tide is on the turn. If we wait too long, we will miss our chance.”

With their deal struck, he stood straight up off the crate and would have turned to head towards the stone building where his kind were corralled like cattle into their damp bunkhouse, but he caught the way she looked up — and up — at him, and swallowed thickly.

“Second thoughts?” he rumbled, his heavy tail swinging slowly from side to side behind him.

She shook her head. “Your name…?” she croaked. “Your colleague said it was Crimson?”

“Crimson-Throat, in your language,” he said with a grin that showed all his teeth. He made a cutting gesture with his thumb right across his throat. “For my markings.”

“Makes sense. I’m Sofie.”

He had nothing to add to that, so he just nodded and stalked away.

No one was in their bunkhouse when he shoved the door open with his shoulder. It had a tendency to warp and stick when the wind blew the moisture directly in off the river, but when you’re built like a battering ram, a sticking door isn’t much of an obstacle.

When he returned a few minutes later, with his waxed, waterproofed bag slung over one shoulder and a scruffy, oiled coat to keep out the cold and the rain, he drew up short at the sight of Rushes talking animatedly with the human. Sofie, her name was, he reminded himself.

Her hands flew through the signs with the same eloquence and nuance as anyone born and raised in Argonian culture, and the usually shy and retiring Rushes even threw back his head and gave a loud, breathy laugh, his tail rising in delight as she made a jibe — and an Argonian one at that — at the First Mate’s expense, calling him a paper-shelled weakling, still slimy with the remnants of his hatching.

Crimson-Throat just stared at them until Rushes noticed him and quirked a grin, beckoning him over. Using his hands, he said, “Your new friend knows our ways better than any human in Windhelm…”

“She’s not my friend,” he signed back, clumsily and one-handed because he was holding onto the strap of his supplies bag with his other. “She’s a paying customer who wants to get to Dawnstar as soon as possible. Unless she’d rather stay here and trade insults about the humans with you until the tide turns again.”

He regretted the harshness of his comments the moment his hand had finished shaping the signs, his glassy spines and thick tail signalling all the sharp discomfort and wariness he would have put into his tone if he’d vocalised the words instead. The guilt doubled as Rushes’ spines deflated and his shoulders dropped.

“Right,” Rushes said, his whole body broadcasting dejection and hurt.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Crimson-Throat signed. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.”

“It’s fine,” Rushes said, but he slouched away and Crimson-Throat rumbled something low-frequency and heartfelt in his chest. The sound carried on the air, and Rushes felt it, even if he didn’t hear it, and he looked up again, his large, green eyes wide and surprised.

“I’m sorry,” Crimson-Throat signed again, formally this time. He even let his prideful tail drag through the briny slush at his boots.

Rushes quirked another lopsided, toothy smile and forgave him fully. “Don’t stay way too long, Big Guy,” he said, using his private name-sign for him. “We need all that burly anger here to keep the guards off us.”

“I won’t tarry,” he promised, and looked over at Sofie.

She had watched their exchange with those deep, brown eyes, and as he met her gaze, she raised one eyebrow. He had come to learn that that could mean a few things to a human, and he didn’t like to guess at what she was feeling. Most likely it wasn’t anything flattering.

“You need anything before we leave?” he asked.

She shook her head and jostled the pack on her back. It clinked and rustled slightly. “Got supplies in here, and the East Empire officer let me use their facilities to clean up when I delivered their message. I’m good to go.”

“Come on then,” he growled, and he stalked away to the outermost pontoon of the Windhelm Docks, where the mooring fees were lower but the boats were more exposed. His little Gull bobbed merrily in the beating currents though, her sail furled protectively.

If Sofie had any doubts about getting into the small vessel with a massive lizard-man with markings like a murder scene and muscles to rival an orc’s, she didn’t seem — or smell — afraid. Wary, yes, but there was a touch of excitement in the way she waited on the wooden pontoon, rising onto the balls of her feet a few times and regarding the Gull while he prepared her for sailing.

“You know you actually have to get on board in order for me to take you to Dawnstar?” he growled once he was finished.

Unfazed by his gruff words, Sofie just rolled her eyes, but she stepped gingerly over the side and tensed and froze as the boat shifted with her additional weight.

Crimson-Throat raised his clawed, white hand and offered it to her, palm up. She snatched for it and gripped him hard with strong, slightly callused fingers until she’d found her balance and the boat had stopped rocking so much. The Gull still bobbed and swayed on the eddying water though, and Sofie nodded towards the tiny cabin. “Alright to sit down in there?”

“Aye,” he nodded, and guided her past him and into the relative shelter of the cabin. Her hand looked so tiny in his, and so… soft. He swallowed.

The tiller occupied most of the central space, but he’d built a wooden bench that ran all the way around the three walls of the tiny shelter. There were no cushions or comforts in there, but Sofie just hooked her pack on the peg beside his own, plonked herself down on the starboard side, and took a deep breath. Crimson-Throat took only the smallest amount of pleasure in knowing that the atmosphere of his cabin was infinitely nicer than that of the Northern Maiden’s accommodation. There was no beer, or worse, mixed in with the inevitable bilge-water, and the boards and seats were scrubbed with salt and sand and oiled regularly. There might not have been any concessions made towards softness, but at least the place was clean.

“Ready?” he asked and she nodded.

He would have to row them out of the docks, weaving around the Northern Maiden and the other cargo ships until he was in the tug of the centre of the river as it flowed out to the sea, but his cold muscles welcomed the action, and he set his body to the task with relish.

He felt her eyes on him as his shoulders and back flexed, but he didn’t look up at her. He knew the maze of buoys and pontoons like the pattern of scales on the back of his hand by now, but he still looked over his shoulder to guide the Gull out, and once they were moving freely in the centre of the river, he stowed away the oars and locked them down in the centre of the open deck, and returned to the mast to hoist the single sail.

As the heavy canvas filled and flexed, the Gull gave an almost joyful groan, a shudder running right through every timber, and he felt his spines ripple and rise like the hairs on the back of a human’s neck, and his tail curved slightly upwards with anticipation. He hoped his people would be alright without him to ward off the attentions of the guards, but this unexpected excursion had lifted his dour spirits.

His tail tapped against something warm and soft as he stood at the tiller once again and guided The Gull a little more into the wind, and he realised with a jolt that it was Sofie’s thigh…

-

Part Two

If you recognise the name Sofie from the game, yes, it's that Sofie uwu. Give her all the nice things.

Hope you enjoyed it! Catch up on my masterlist of Patreon stories here.