Chapter 6: Leaving the Ruins
Kashira smiled even with her mouth full. Leave it to a cute jayune to try to threaten me with being mean, she thought as she gathered his things. She took off, still holding him in her mouth. He wasn’t wiggling or kicking, and he wasn’t as stiff as he had been the day before, so she felt that was promising. He might not like the process of becoming more desensitized… How did he put it? Conditioned? .... to act how I would like him to act, but this is cute. She repressed a chuckle at the whole train of thought since her mouth was full of little jayune with big ears.
As she flew them toward home, she couldn’t quite help but feel that he was a sweet little thing. Yes, he was pushing back against her behavior and complaining, but he wasn’t really being aggressive about it. He was only blunt. She could easily imagine herself being a lot moodier if she had been through the same traumatic things he had experienced.
Kashira felt him shift a little in her mouth, and she couldn’t help but grin. She was certain that he had fully expected her to swallow him right away, which was precisely why she wasn’t doing that. She waited to see if he would say anything, but he was silent. I suppose if you ask, you open yourself up to teases about why you would be impatient to be swallowed, so you are trying to just endure it. I could counter this by wiggling you about on my tongue, but I think for now I will let you contemplate the situation. It’s a short flight anyway.
Why hadn’t she swallowed him? He was just sitting in her mouth with the saliva building up around her tongue, soaking into his fur. He had gotten a little cold, so all this heat was intense; drool dripping along his ear was itchy, but nothing happened. The tongue wasn’t still; it shifted and flexed beneath him, and its squishy texture pressed between his fingers.
The dragon wasn’t doing anything, and somehow that was causing his heart to race all over again. Goren absolutely would not give her the satisfaction of asking her why. He could clearly imagine her asking him why he was in a hurry to revisit the insides of her body again. He huffed at the imaginary dialogue.
A small eternity passed; she didn’t talk while she carried him around. He was pinned with his side on her tongue and his other side to the roof of her mouth. He felt her jolt as she perhaps landed. Then, she tilted her head up, her teeth gapping a little bit. Light pierced the darkness, highlighting the wet, thick muscles framing a dark, small, roughly round-shaped entry to her throat. His heart pounded as the tongue beneath him flexed. He wanted to close his eyes, not watch it come closer to his face, but he couldn’t look away as saliva ran back and pooled. There was a loud gulping sound that made the wet pool vanish, but the front of the tongue kept him squeezed where he was, and he didn’t move at all.
Then, she tilted her head forward, his feet slid up against her front teeth, and she drooled him back into a hot bath. He huffed.
“I release you from time-out,” she said as she set his stuff down near the makeshift tent he had not used. She took the tapestry down again and rolled it, revealing the crystal slabs beneath and behind it.
“Why… are you disassembling the tent?” he said anxiously as he sat in the warm water.
She grinned. “You didn’t use it, so I have decided you do not need it.”
“But… you just brought me back here, and I have to have somewhere warm to sleep. You were just picking on me about crossing the mountain pass,” he protested, feeling a tight feeling in his chest for what he realized she was probably going to say next.
“Yes, I do need to make certain you stay warm, and you are not going over the mountain pass by yourself,” she agreed.
He blinked.
“Wash up and get dry, or you will be riding in me and not on me,” she said. She picked up what looked like a large drawstring bag and secured it like a bracelet around her right wrist.
“Riding…? To where?” he asked uncertainly as he started to scrub saliva out of his fur. “What do you mean?”
“We are going to Arieton; I think we can get there by tomorrow morning.”
He stared at her. “That’s several days’ journey.”
She moved around, picking out a big green gem from her hoard. “I was able to fly to the lake and back and find you in what… two hours? Three?”
Goren huffed. He watched as her hoard seemed to vanish into the green gem. He’d heard magical creatures with enough Earthen attunement could do that.
“Gem storage,” she explained as he watched. “You aren’t getting dry, and I’m almost done packing.”
He huffed again and scrubbed himself and then climbed out of the water and used the same velvety fabric that was plainly too valuable for being just a towel to dry out his fluff.
“Lie on the flat stone inside the box; it’s warm, and it will help,” she said, as the last of her hoard disappeared.
When he put his paw on it tentatively, he found that it was. Despite his desire to not cooperate with anything she wanted, he lay down. He was cold, and the ruined castle was full of drafts and barely warmer than outside.
“Why are we going to Arieton?”
“Why not?”
He sighed. “Don’t start with this; you have some reason for wanting to go there all of a sudden. It’s one thing to pluck me out of a snowstorm when I wandered into your ruins, but you didn’t just decide to up and move out for no reason.”
“We will probably come back eventually. I like my castle.”
She lay down on the stone near him once everything was packed, her gem going into the drawstring bag bracelet. He stared up at her as she looked down at him. He became self-conscious and crossed his legs.
“Well, I am thinking since you complain about what I am allowed to do, I should make things more official. There is an Exotic Exchange in Arieton.”
He groaned. “I didn’t mean for you to get me a collar. I meant for you to let me go.”
She kissed his cheek, leaving a saliva track on his damp fur that he had just cleaned. “Yes, well, for my plan to work, you need it.”
He pushed at her face. “No.”
“You say this a lot, but it does not change what is going to happen.”
He stared up at her, but her eyes were soft, and her tone had been gentle. “And what exactly is your plan?”
She put her head over his body, resting her chin against his torso and thighs, squishing him a little. “I was considering opening a shop or something in Arieton; I also want to learn more about the gnolls, but that will be safer if you have a collar.”
He pushed on her nose. “Safer? You mean to just put a collar on me and let me walk up to gnolls?”
“Yes.”
“Since you pointed out there was no one to stop you from bullying me, what’s going to stop them from harming me?”
“Your collar.”
He groaned. “I doubt that will work.”
“Stop fussing and trust me a little,” she said, kissing his shoulder and chest.
He sighed. I guess I do not really… have… much else to do, he thought as he remembered her saying the same thing. A breeze whispered through the gaps in the castle walls, chilling him as he thought about how lonely the place generally felt.
All the same, he had never become a proper painter; his family was unlikely to be found again… Truly, what else did he have to do?
For the first time since he’d been faced with the smoke curling above the houses in his hometown, he felt his eyes starting to burn. Then, the first bitter tear escaped the corner of his eye, followed by another and another.
The dragon made a soft, empathetic noise and scooped him up in her paw, pressing him to her chest, where he could feel her heart beating beneath him. He realized, given the size difference between them, it was about as close to an embrace as she could give him. “I am sorry; you do not have to go to your home if you do not want to. It was only a thought that if there is anyone… left, we need to talk to them. They won’t talk to me. They will only flee or fight me.”
“You could just go burn them all,” he grumbled, scrubbing at his eyes.
There was a pause. “Is that what you want to do?”
“Yes!” And then he felt a tightness in his chest. “No… a little.”
She nuzzled the space between his cheek and shoulder. “Well, we can at least terrorize them. But only after you have a collar signifying that you belong to me, and it has adequate enhancements.”
“Enhancements?”
“You will see. Why don't you get dressed now? You can’t go flying with me without clothes, I think.” There was a little upbeat tease in her tone as she tried to cheer him up some.
He sighed. “I haven’t the least idea how to ride on you. You don’t have a harness or a saddle. What will I do? Hang on for dear life to your mane?”
She hummed, “I guess? I have not thought about it.”
He pushed on her chest, “You will catch me if I fall? Is there rope?”
She let him down, making sure he had his feet on the ground before she let go. “No rope, but I will make sure that if you fall, you are not harmed. I have more than enough magic to ensure that.”
He huffed as he got dressed. “What shop were you thinking of opening?”
“No idea, but we need something to do to make money. You trained to be something?”
“A painter, but my training was never completed, and I doubt Arieton will give us farmland for me to work.”
She grinned. “I like art. I think a painter’s studio sounds lovely.”
He stared. “I am not a painter. I am a journeyman artist at best.”
“So?”
He sighed. “You are going to make no money and have to close up shop in no time because you don’t have a real painter!”
“Don’t be a grouchy bunbun. One stop at a time; we start with going to Arieton and visiting the Exotic Exchange. Then, we deal with Buetarn; then we talk about your lack of self-esteem in painting.”
“You’re infuriating,” he said as he pulled his hooded coat on and put his boots on. “Could you have found no better way of putting it than lack of self-esteem?”
She grinned at him. “Is it not true?”
“Shut up,” he said as he laced up his boots.
She chuckled. “Just for that, if you fall off me, I’m going to eat you. You’ll do the rest of the journey from that point in my gullet.”
He resisted saying that he was surprised she was even giving him an option… mostly because he didn’t want to just have her decide to skip to that part. “Can I put my bag in your bag?”
She held out her wrist, and he put his bag in with the two big gems. She tightened the drawstring bag again, and then she offered her claw once more, this time palm up.
“Climb up. Why are you still a journeyman, or whatever you said, painter?”
“My master died before I could be properly admitted into the guild. All the apprentices had to go home with nothing because no one would take us.” He crawled between the claws.
“Maybe it will make more sense to me later.” She said softly as she lifted him to her shoulders.
He couldn’t sit astride her very securely, so he decided to try lying against her, holding onto the fluff. “Walk?”
She stood up and began moving, her shoulders shifting beneath him, the ground just far enough away to be anxiety-inducing. “You really ready if I fall?”
“Yes, I am paying close attention.” She walked to the outside, where there was a clear area for her to take off. “Hold on, this will be rough.”
Her wings beating blew him around a bit, but he was able to loop big sections of her mane around his forearms and hands and hang on anyway. Once they were actually airborne, it was better, not as bumpy or tumultuous.
But it wasn’t great. The wind blew fiercely at him. It cut through his clothes; it whipped her mane against his face. The ground beneath was a long way off and went by much faster than he was prepared for.
He felt dizzy watching it…
It was so dizzying that at first his brain didn’t comprehend that he had slipped over the side of her shoulder and the wind rushing around his body was ripping through his clothes and fur because he was falling.