H - 95: Wife Material (Patreon)

“Comfortable?”

“Not…really,” Percy grumbled, shifting about in her perch between two of Pheneraxa’s back spines. “You are not really designed for passengers. I suppose it would be a horrible indignity if we got a saddle for you?”

Pheneraxa raised her head and half-turned to grin sidelong at her rider. “An extreme affront to draconic pride, yes. For you, Percy, I might agree to some manner of more comfortable seat, but with the chance of any of my family seeing it? Out of the question. Hells, if my mother saw you’d put me in a saddle she might fling you through a wall.”

“That is to be avoided if possible,” Percy said solemnly. “I don’t believe I have much penetrating power, and walls are quite durable.”

“We agree. Well, I’m sorry I’m not a very comfy throne, Percy, but please settle yourself as best you can. I’m going to be applying some protective magic—layers of it, in fact. One of which will be securing you in place.”

“Yes, I remember that from when we flew to Shadrach’s tower,” Percy agreed, shifting her hips. “Actually, though, thrones are not comfy—or shouldn’t be, at any rate. My mother says a throne that can be lounged in stands over a doomed kingdom.”

“Wise woman.”

“Yes,” Percy said wistfully. “It would be interesting if you could meet her someday…”

Pheneraxa did not trouble to think of a suitable response to that, already fully occupied deploying magic. She flexed her wings, concentrating, and after the initial charm to affix Percy securely to her back, began applying additional wards. Layers of them, as she had said.

Percy blinked owlishly and peered about as, one after another, they took shape. Some were moments of silence marked by the lack of apparent effects, while others created tingling sensations upon her skin, a faint feeling of pressure, and a few times, a glow or distortion that covered their combined bodies for a moment before fading from view.

“Are we going to war?” she asked.

“On the contrary.” Pheneraxa’s voice was distant with concentration and she did not turn her neck around again, continuing to focus on casting. “We’re going to the last place untouched by war.”

Percy narrowed her eyes suspiciously and opened her mouth to say something, but was suddenly distracted by the most recent application of magic.

“Ow! My ears just popped!”

“Sorry about that. It’ll prevent that from happening way worse later, but it’s hard to apply it without a bit of an effect up front.”

“Hm…did you just put a ward on us that makes the air smell fresher?”

“Nope, that’s just a side effect.”

“Pheneraxa…should I put on my glasses for this?”

Pheneraxa finally turned her head again, giving her passenger another grin. “You’ll be safe without them—that’s the point of all this. You shouldn’t need protection, but the glasses are up to you. If you start to feel overwhelmed, don’t hesitate. You ready?”

“I’m just along for the ride, here. I think the relevant concern is whether you’re ready.”

“I am confident in my preparations, yes.” Her grin widened. “And have you guessed yet?”

“I’m starting to have suspicions,” Percy admitted, her lips twitching into a growing smirk. “But surely you can’t…”

“Now, now, no spoiling the surprise. Also if you guess wrong, you can still claim otherwise later.”

“What kind of thin-skinned egotistical fool do you think I am?”

“Fair enough, my apologies. I’m used to talking to dragons. And Shadrach. All right, hold on tight!”

“I thought you fixed that with magic!” Percy protested, grabbing onto the spinal spike in front of her.

“Yeah, but having something to do with your hands will feel better. Off we go!”

She surged into motion, galloping a few short steps to the edge of the plaza, and launched them out into the air above the descending city. Her wings snapped outward, turning their descent into a smooth glide, and then began pumping fiercely to propel them higher.

Percy let out a whoop in spite of herself as they crested the surrounding mountain ridge and the whole world spread out around them—the green (and partially black, at the moment) basin of Dragonvale to their left, mountains descending into the distant ocean to their right, the rising wall of the Highlands dead ahead and the great plateau of the Hiiri Reaches behind. Pheneraxa flew north, continually beating her wings to carry them ever higher.

“Oh, it’s not nearly as cold as it should be!” Percy yelled above the wind. “You added a spell for that?”

“You’ll be even more glad of that one soon,” Pheneraxa called back. “And all the others! Here we go!”

“I thought we were already goiiieeeeeeeeeee!”

Pheneraxa had been aggressively gaining altitude until they had risen above even the peaks of the Highlands, but now suddenly plunged into a dive. A relatively shallow one, but one which turned swiftly into horizontal motion as she used the momentum to bank. The dragon swept into a wide arc, her scales suddenly sparking alight as if wreathed by lightning. Glowing motes streamed from her body, trailing behind as she soared out in a wide loop. Only when they had crested the halfway point did Percy look ahead and realize Pheneraxa was creating a glowing mark in the air.

“A circle?”

“It’s a big spell, but a basic one! Basic spells usually start from a circle!”

“It’s a spell cir—oh! Oh, I see it!”

It wasn’t easy to see from this angle, but more traceries of light across the air were growing from the inner curve of the great circle as Pheneraxa formed it. In fact, by the time the dragon had swooped around to the starting point to join the loop, they had begun to spread to that side, actually branching back to connect to the newly-laid outer arc. Only once Pheneraxa had completed the design and flipped over backward into a dive could Percy look back and see the real intricacy of the diagram forming.

That looked like it would’ve been challenging to draw accurately, were it room-sized as was more typical of spell circles. As it was, even the most minute details of the elaborate diagram would have been too large to step across. It probably helped that they appeared to be drawing themselves, too.

“You could fit a town inside that! People are going to notice this, Pheneraxa, even out here!”

“Let ‘em!” the dragon crowed, once more folding her wings and diving. She quickly snapped them back outward, swooping upward again, and began pumping them relentlessly to gain speed as she regained altitude. They were now heading for the center of the huge, floating spell circle from below.

The full diagram had finished forming, and now there was a change in its glowing lines, as brighter luminescence flowed along them in a tightening inward pattern. The spell circle was obviously igniting, gigantic sigils flaring alight as the wave swept over them, the overall movement toward its center.

Pheneraxa was now pumping her wings fiercely with her nose skyward, shooting straight up at the center point toward which the energy of her spell was coalescing.

“Are you going to—what happens when that finishes?” Percy shouted. “It looks like we’ll hit right when it completes.”

“That’s the idea!”

“What does that do?” she demanded. “Pheneraxa? What’s going to— Raxa!”

The glow put out by the activated lines was tangible for the split second they were in its midst, a thick haze swirling around them and disturbed by the passage of the dragon through it. Percy didn’t have the luxury of even that second to examine it, though, because the shrinking focus of the great spell circle snapped shut on them right in the instant they pierced its center.

The entire vast diagram shattered and began tumbling from the sky in disintegrating fragments of light, which neither Percy nor Pheneraxa saw, because suddenly they were roaring straight up into the sky at multiples of the speed of sound atop a column of blue fire.

Percy may have tried to scream; she wasn’t entirely sure.

All those protections did their job, at least. The sensation of motion was there, but nowhere near as extreme as it should be; moving at this speed should have rendered her unconscious at least, but it felt nothing like that. She remained both comfortably warm and able to easily breathe even as they ascended through altitudes at which neither should have been possible.

And higher still! Pheneraxa had not beat her wings since they were launched skyward by her spell; keeping them braced at her sides with her neck and tail fully extended, she made her shape as sleek and aerodynamic as it could be with a person on her back—a person grateful for the spells preventing her from being sandpapered to nothing by the air resistance this would normally cause.

When she finally spread them again, Percy didn’t even notice. Her attention was fixed dead ahead—which was to say, straight up. Where the blue of the sky had been thinning progressively as their speed began to die down. Until, a shockingly brief span of minutes since they’d been launched, it faded entirely.

Pheneraxa extended her wings once more, concentrating upon a new layer of magic. Ripples of light scintillated across her wing membranes, as well as along her dorsal spines, a working enabling her to move her body and propel herself as she was accustomed even where there was no air to manipulate.

Percy did not even see it.

As the dragon leveled out, reorienting herself to once more fly parallel to the ground, it was at a height which made ground a completely different concept—not the omnipresent totality of everything anymore, but one feature of incomprehensible vastness which still seemed large from their perspective only because they had gained enough distance to begin to appreciate how tiny everything truly was. The entire curve of the world stretched away, finite and lonely in the vault of infinity, the whole haze of atmosphere distant beneath Pheneraxa’s wings.

Her passenger was not looking at the world.

The stars…they were so many. Nothing stood between her eyes and their light. Space was not even black, only empty in the distant reaches visible in the several directions in which there were relatively fewer lights. The flattened shape of the galaxy predominated the sky in a smear of brilliance, a region so thickly glittering with stars that it seemed to be a solid mass with no dark spots in between. Even outside of that slice of the eternal sky, there were more and brighter stars than Percy had ever seen. Without the world’s sky between her and their space, they gleamed in a multitude of colors, in such tremendous number that the most sparsely decorated reaches of space glittered and flashed like the treasures in a dragon’s hoard.

Old familiar friends stood out, glowing with a new intensity, with more vivid color than she had ever known from them. Now she could see lesser cousins glittering around those brighter stars whose names she knew, luminous comrades which had been hidden from her before by the air she breathed.

She hadn’t any thought to spare for what she was breathing now—maybe pure magic, for all she knew. Percy didn’t even dare blink, couldn’t bear to miss an instant of this.

Beneath her, Pheneraxa shifted, angling her wings and then beating them against nothingness; it made no sound up here, but thanks to her spells served to reorient them. The dragon raised her head to grin back to Percy sidelong, her smile widening at the princess’s expression when she realized Pheneraxa had just aimed them straight at the Manticore, a constellation visible throughout the northern hemisphere; the bright tip of its stinger, the brilliant blue of Gallimarde, shone with a new intensity. Well, new to her, despite being more ancient than the very world.

They drifted this way and that above the skies. Pheneraxa was a good tour guide, shifting her whole body to direct Percy to one astronomical sight after another, a living encyclopedia of the constellations, and giving her just the right amount of time to appreciate each before moving on.

At one point, Percy excitedly patted the blue scales in front of her and pointed at the looming disc of the larger moon, hovering in the distance with its cratered face visible in more detail than she had ever seen without the aid of her best telescope. Pheneraxa grimaced and shook her head, however. Though disappointed, Percy patted her again reassuringly, not one to demand the unreasonable when she was already basking in the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. She knew what a distance that was; it made their ascent above the atmosphere look like nothing. There was a reason not even the greatest wizards tried to go there.

Well, several reasons, among them that there wasn’t much to see on its surface. Except for someone like Percy herself, to whom the unfiltered sky itself was everything.

She had no idea how long it was before Pheneraxa turned beneath her and angled downward. Percy again patted her sapphire scales in understanding, still craning her neck for the last desperate minutes to gaze at the stars as long as she could, the whole time they gradually faded from view and the blue of the daylit sky reasserted itself.

Then shifted, as they vanished from that spot and reappeared in another part of the sky, leagues distant.

“Have to cheat a bit going down,” Pheneraxa called, her voice hoarse with strain and noticeably out of breath. “Otherwise we weren’t even going to land on the right continent. Hold tight.”

It took several more jumps, each taking them across a long distance overland and visibly lower in the sky; only once the final teleportation brought them out above the Highlands did Pheneraxa cease those spells, angling downward in a gentle glide.

After a last long sweep over the mountaintops, she lowered in a wide loop, pumping her wings with a soft grunt of effort in the final descent above the ancient Timekeeper city behind Dragonvale. Her blue talons came to rest upon the plaza right outside Emeralaphine’s library; it was a less graceful arrival than their departure, accompanied by another distinct grunt from the drake.

“Sorry I couldn’t give you more time,” Pheneraxa said breathlessly. She was noticeably drooping, her head hanging low and wings and tail trailing along the Timestone floor. “Had to conserve some energy for the trip home. It takes actively maintaining a fair few spells to do that, and… Well, I’m sure it would be nothing for my mother, but I’m barely an archmage even by human standards. Now you know why I didn’t take us all to Shamissar myself.”

There was no response; after a moment she wearily lifted her head, peering back. “Percy?”

Percy was sitting between her back spines, practically vibrating in place. Her eyes were wide, mouth slightly open and hands quivering in front of her as if she’d forgotten where to put them. The expression on her features was the opposite of distressed, however.

“You okay?” Pheneraxa asked hesitantly.

Percy nodded, making an abortive grasping gesture with both hands.

Gently, Pheneraxa bent her tail up, looping the end around Percy’s waist and lifting her bodily off her back. She set the girl down with as much care as she could manage, but Percy still stumbled—not from any rough handling, but as if it took her a moment to remember how to stand.

Pheneraxa shifted forms, coming forward to stand right in front of Percy—which, finally seemed to jolt her back to life.

Percy literally bounced on her heels a few times, grinning madly. She gesticulated wildly about, almost flailing, until she seized Pheneraxa’s claws in both hands and pressed them against her mouth, still beaming like a madwoman.

Pheneraxa couldn’t help grinning in response. “Aheh…hem. So! Good surprise?”

Percy nodded fiercely, pulling back to hop in place twice, still holding Pheneraxa’s claws as if dancing. She finally let them go and gesticulated again, flapping her hands in agitation next to her own face. Finally her fugue of pure joy faltered, frustration breaking through it.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Pheneraxa said quickly, stepping forward and gently taking Percy’s cheeks in both claws. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to say anything. I’m just glad… I mean, I’m so glad you had fun. I hoped you would.”

Percy grinned hugely, reaching up to wrap her fingers around Pheneraxa’s scaled wrists and squeeze. Then, impulsively, she hurled herself forward, arms flying around the dragon’s neck in a hug that sent them both spinning in a full circle as Pheneraxa had to redirect the momentum or be bowled over.

“All right, I get it!” she laughed. “Good surprise! Percy, I don’t think I have the strength in me to do that often, but it definitely won’t be the last time. Okay? That’s a promise.”

Percy, still beaming, pulled back, grabbed her claws again, and once more spun them around, this time deliberately in a wild caper.

They trailed to a halt, still holding hands and grinning into one another’s faces. Now, though, Pheneraxa’s smile faltered as, for a long few moments, she just gazed down at Percy. At her face so alight with joy it seemed to reframe all of creation around her. At her big brown eyes, more full of stars than the universe.

“Listen… Percy, I…” Percy gaze up at her, expectant, receptive. As happy as any person had ever been. There would surely never be a better moment. “I want you to know…um. I mean, I…”

Percy nodded once, encouragingly.

“I just feel…it’s important that…”

Subtly, the princess tilted her head to one side, her smile fading into a more inquisitive expression.

“What I mean is…” Pheneraxa stared down at her, already missing the intensity of that smile. And, finally, found herself putting on a smirk. “You’re welcome.”

Percy’s smile returned, with a beaming force that was blinding at this distance, and threw her arms around Pheneraxa’s neck in another impulsive hug.

The dragon held onto her, tightly but carefully, squeezing her eyes shut and just feeling the moment for as long as she could.

***

Kaln was having the best day in a while.

His morning had been…in a word, spectacular. And also informative. Revelatory, even. He’d had some hints for a while now as to how things would go with Tiavathyris, but when the time actually came, it was a whole new world. Obviously he’d been prepared to play along with her, but it had taken him by surprise, just how personally satisfying it had been to him, stepping into the role she wanted. That…was something about himself which he had not known.

It also turned out that Tiavathyris liked to cuddle after. That was three for three; though he wouldn’t dare suggest it to them outright, Kaln had arrived at a private theory that all three of his consorts were touch-starved after their long lives in relative isolation.

Also like the others, Tiavathyris preferred time and space to herself after cuddling, and so he had enjoyed one of Zhiiji’s excellent lunches—alone, as Percy hadn’t come back from wherever Pheneraxa had spirited her off to that morning—washed up, and returned to his own new hobby.

Thus he was still in the library, seated on the floor against the shelves for a change of pace with his study materials around himself, still struggling through his book of children’s fables in classical Darashi, when Percy herself came skipping through.

Literally skipping; he had never seen her so visibly excited. She didn’t respond to his greeting or even seem to register his presence, simply bounding through on her way into the main vault, and Kaln decided that probably didn’t require any intervention from him. As long as she was happy, and Emeralaphine was not present to observe this lack of decorum in her library, everything was most likely fine.

It was a couple more minutes before Pheneraxa came inside, currently in her larger form. Kaln was already once more immersed in his study and didn’t react to her presence, even when she approached him directly. This did not truly penetrate his awareness until he felt a dragon calling on magic close at hand, then the book lifted out of his grasp, as did all the others he had laid out around himself. They floated to one side into a neat stack and he looked up in quizzical annoyance right as Pheneraxa pushed her long face directly into his personal space.

His annoyance died as, eyes squeezed shut, she laid her head upon his lap, flopping the rest of her body to the floor. She was really much too large for this; he couldn’t even see over the top of her head. But a momentary attunement to her mental state made him stifle any protests he was considering.

Instead he draped an arm over her muzzle, letting his fingers stroke the smooth scales along the other side, and waited.

“I am utterly pathetic,” Pheneraxa finally mumbled.

“Now who the hells told you that?” Kaln asked lightly. “Do I need to beat somebody up?”

Both sets of eyelids parted and her blue eye focused on him; he didn’t even need to be feeling her emotions to know the joke didn’t land.

“I took Percy out for a surprise,” she said instead of upbraiding him.

“How’d that go?”

“Perfectly. Could not have been better.” Once more, she squeezed her eyes shut. “She was so happy. So happy I…it made my chest hurt, to look at her face.”

“Good job,” he said, quietly and sincerely, stroking her nose again.

“I had the perfect opportunity,” she whispered. “There will never be a better one. Even next time… I can take her again, but it won’t be like the first again, you know? It was the moment. The moment.”

She fell silent, and Kaln nodded after a short pause. With his other hand, he reached up to scratch behind her jaw, then up behind one of her horns. He could sense that she barely felt it, physically, but was aware of the touch and that it seemed to provide some tiny comfort.

“Why couldn’t I say it?” Pheneraxa finally asked, a hint of a whine cracking her voice.

Kaln just nodded. “It’s hard, isn’t it?”

“Pathetic,” she groaned. “I’m a dragon. I stand in majesty astride the glory of all creation, the apex of living things, and somehow I can’t even tell the girl I love how I feel. Pathetic.”

Kaln scratched her again. “Raxa, you already have all the answers. You have read every book.”

“Not even close to every book,” she growled.

“But close enough,” he said gently. “Enough that the books have told you about this.”

“Yes…yes, I know.” Her sigh disturbed the cover of the topmost book on the nearby stack; he reached over and closed it again. “All of it. The books even told me that no amount of books would be able to tell me enough. It’s different when you’re…there.”

“Books are wonderful,” Kaln murmured. “I don’t have to tell you how much. Experience is just…categorically different, is all.”

“I bet this never happened to you,” she whined. “Mister Bigshot Silver Tongue with all the social skills.”

“I had different struggles than you do,” Kaln agreed, scratching behind her horn again. “Comes with having different skills and aptitudes and life events. Yeah, it went…relatively smoothly for me, the first time I really tried to put the moves on someone. Of course, later on, when I met somebody who I couldn’t handle so easily… Well, you already know the high points of that story. Nothing like that will ever happen with Percy; she’s simply not like that. I’ve got a feeling it’ll go much better for you when you get there.”

“I’m not going to get there,” she whined. “I’ve borked it right out of the gate.”

“That’s just silly,” he said lightly. “You’ll do fine, Raxa.”

“That is a platitude,” she accused, her tail thumping irritably against the floor. “You can’t possibly know that. You don’t even have a reason to think it.”

“Don’t I? You just made her so happy that looking at her face hurt your chest. And that was with your first date idea. Raxa, the term for that is ‘wife material.’”

Her lips drew back, and he could see them trembling as she struggled to repress a smile.

“The end of one date isn’t the end of anything else,” Kaln continued, once more patting her snout. “You haven’t failed—you’ve just found out exactly how hard this is going to be, which you couldn’t have known before. Now you can start. And considering Percy went sailing through here looking like nothing in her life had ever made her this happy before, I’d say you’re off to a better start than you could ask for. Just keep moving forward. And remember that you’re allowed to mess up. Expected to, even. The two of you will find a way through together—that’s how it works. You’ll do fine, Raxa.”

She heaved another sigh; he closed the book again.

“You’re a good dad, Kaln,” Pheneraxa finally grumbled. “Obviously, if you tell either of my siblings I ever said that I will devour you.”

He stroked a hand along her horn, leaning his forehead against the cool scales of her eye ridge. “Just because you know I’ll never make you prove it doesn’t mean you should issue threats you can’t back up.”

She huffed again, much more softly, and this time he didn’t have to close the book cover.

She also didn’t move, and Kaln decided not to prod her. Being a godling with dominion over dragons, she wasn’t even making his legs go numb. And if this was a little uncomfortable… Well, it was probably best not to get too complacent around here.

So he sat with her, for as long as she felt like that was what she needed.