This One Time When a Knight Had to Be Rescued By a Dragon...

"I have returned!" Aldra said brightly.

Her favorite two attendants looked at one another, and she noticed that they were not fully dressed or ready to receive her. There was no smell of food, no sound of servants scrambling to put together to get her tea, a bath, and clean clothes.

She breathed out slowly. "All right, what happened? Where is Tristan?"

Another glance shared between them, and Princess Aldra considered stamping her foot and demanding that they spill it. She managed to avoid this infraction of manners, but only because she held her breath.

"When you did not arrive at your uncle's home, it was thought you were stopped on the road by the monster lurking in that area. So, we could not stop her from going to get you."

She sighed. "I decided not to go and put up with that old windbag, am I not allowed to decide things without first attaining approval from everyone?"

The attendants traded uncomfortable looks, and Aldra waved them off. "Never mind, I shall return. Please be certain to have a hot bath for me and my silly bodyguard, hm?"

Her dear attendants exchanged glances yet again, and there was a little titter from one of them as Aldra flounced her way back out of the castle to go get her favorite knight.

It was known that a lamia had taken up residence near the road. There were some that said they had seen the burrow that it had dug for itself, but no one really believed that to be true. After all, you'd have to be pretty close to the monster itself to know that information, and then make it back alive?

But Tristan was a good tracker, and she could see the trail it was using because it's large, long body was heavy enough to make its path obvious.

There were signs of struggle on the road. Were they the Princess's? If they were? How long ago had she passed through here? Couldn't be more than a few hours. Her uncle's court wizard had sent an almost immediate angry message when she was more than a quarter-hour late, and he did not live but two hours from here.

She tried to tell herself that two hours was not that long, but in the clutches of some monster? She couldn't bare to think of it any further. There would be only one right course: slay the beast!

Tristan advanced some distance into the woods, these were certainly dense enough that it was easy to imagine a serpentine form lunging out at her from practically every side. However, things were quiet. I would surely hear a monster that size moving, right?

So, she advanced slowly, yer armor did make some noise, no matter how hard she tried to keep it quiet, and she was also not fully able to move through the brush without sometimes crushing it and having things break beneath her feet. She was a woman who made a living being stronger than everyone else, not sneaking up on them, after all.

It was quiet.

Her nervousness grew, she was quite deep into these woods now.

"You know what I love about this area?" a voice above her asked. It was soft-spoken and feminine. She panicked and tried to leap to one side and draw her blade.

She was not faster than gravity. Tan and golden coils wrapped around her with a crushing squeeze. She didn't even land after her leap, let alone draw her blade. She struggled, she felt buried in scales and bands of impossibly strong flesh. "Aaugh-!" was the only sound she got out before things tightened enough that even with armor protecting her, she found that plenty of her limbs could not move, and she could barely breathe.

"If I just wait, someone comes along looking for a fight, and I get a lovely meal. Shall I leave all your armor by the road?" The lamia smugly answered her own question and posed a new one. She was dipping her finger into something, on a belt about her hips, painting it on her forehead, even though she struggled.

"Let me go!"

"That's what they all say, every time I let them have a breath." She squeezed, smiling down at her with unfeeling amber eyes. She groaned as air left her lungs. She felt her scalp and fingers tingling as she struggled to get enough air. The lamia finished whatever mark it was that she was making, and the landscape slid by in a disorienting fashion.

They disappeared from one place, and reappeared on the grassy banks of a pond, with the full afternoon sun beating down. This must be how she gets around without getting caught. The monster can teleport.

Whatever other logical thoughts the brave knight might have had were lost as the monster squeezed, this time scales slid across bare skin - her armor and clothes had been left behind when the beast teleported. Tristan managed to get breath in only short pants. The beast was huge, longer than she could have expected, and just the size of her hands and torso, though human like, looked more like they belonged to someone ten feet tall, rather than somewhere under six.

She groaned as she exerted every muscle in her body against the creature, until there was popping sensations in them, but the tan and gold-dappled scales did not budge.

The lamia chuckled, "My, my, I do hope that you remain this lively throughout the time we spend together, however short it may be."

A big red and pink mouth with a long tongue opened over her face, and despite squirming, pressed down over the top of her head. Her face was compressed against a sloppy, wet tongue that was much too long and curled under her jaw. It was paralyzing, a little recvolting, fear jolted through her, and... mesmerizing. For what little light she had as the mouth closed over her head and began to press over her shoulders, she had only been able to shallowly pant and stare...

And then the lamia began to swallow as soon as the jaws closed over her and sealed her into darkness. Soft breasts pressed down against the scales, compacting and compressing as the lower jaw worked down over them and the binding coil blocked them from slipping down her chest. The way that her soft breasts squished and slid over the tongue brought heat to her face that was unexpected.

She writhed, but there was hardly any room to do so.

The pressure from the throat squeezing over her was immense, and it expanded over shoulders, down over her chest, her waist. Her legs spasmed and kicked as coils fed her forward, and the slick tongue dragged at her groin as the lamia worked to take in her round rear.

Wet heat engulfed her legs, and then the tongue dragged over her toes... and there was nothing but pressure, pulling her down... down...

The princess had a small secret. Actually, it was a very big secret. It was a fifteen feet at the shoulder and almost twenty feet when you accounted for her neck and head sort of secret. It came with a keen sense of smell, she could smell both where her silly knight had gone off the road and also that a lamia was not far. There was a spot where her knight's scent just stopped, but the lamia-smell was stronger.

The now four-legged formed princess moved through, big wings tucking to her back, smelling where the lamia smells were strongest until she found the beast curled up by the pond, wrapped around a bulge with a definite curvy shape to it.

Rage flushed through her as she saw it, and she held still, until she saw a small squirm.

The princess controlled her temper, and she stepped forward, deliberately noisy now.

The lamia woke, feeling the stomping steps on the nearby earth through her tail. She said something that did not sound very nice, and recoiled.

"You have something of mine," Aldra said flatly. "I am prepared to be quite rough getting her back."

"If you leave food lying around, dragon, you can't be mad when someone else eats it."

Aldra did something she rarely allowed herself to do in either form: she growled. When the lamia was not sufficiently worried (though she did recoil more), the dragon roared.

The lamia tried to flee; Aldra heard muffled little noises of the disgruntled knight being squished, squeezed, and slung back and forth.

Naturally, the dragon chased the ridiculous snake. She didn't really want to have to beat her up (or worse), but she knew that she would for Tristan's sake.

The lamia was moving in a way that somehow made Aldra suspicious, so the dragon took a deep breath and roared again. However, this time, it was with her breath weapon engaged, and a haze of ice spread everywhere, chilling the cold-blooded creature... and interrupting a spell she was trying to carry out that would have teleported her somewhere else.

"Wait, wait!"

For Tristan, things had been tight, slick, smothering, and it burned a bit on her skin. It wasn't too bad, but the gloopy insides of the snake were sticking to her skin and squeezing from every side. She felt thoroughly disoriented when her whole world waved back and forth, and then more so when suddenly there was squeezing around her legs.

She was slipping somewhere, rapidly. se panicked. She tried to yell for it to let her go, but things were too smothery and tight.

Then she was on her back in the grass, some other horrible beast was standing over her, snarling at the lamia.

The lamia was retreating

Tristan pawed for a sword she wasn't wearing. She wasn't wearing anything, actually.

She tried to scrabble away, but a big foot smooshed her down.

Clawed, covered in scales, her heart began to pound just as hard as it had been when the lamia had first ensnared her, and she drug her squinty in the daylight eyes up. A dragon!

She panicked and flailed, punchign down on the scales and biting as if it could make a difference.

"Ugh, absolutely not," the dragon said, and a big mouth came down over her.

Oh, gods, no, not twice in one day!

Aldra didn't approve of the taste of lamia on Tristan. The knight tried to bite her on the tongue, punched her tooth, fortunately on the side, and kicked with way too much energy.

Logically, she knew the knight could not know that the dragon that caught her was her employer. But at the same time, did she have to be such a little wild heathen about it? She probably just bruised her own knuckles, and she had been trying to chip her own teeth on Aldra's hard green scales.

Of course, Tristan's being a wild little gremlin that was so head strong was part of what Aldra liked about her, but she definitely took some time to restrain the kicking legs and then take big, steadying, restraining gulps over the writhing, muscular body she'd caught.

It took a little more patience than she planned for, but soon, she had her nose up in the air, a very tight and satisfying feeing in her throat, as her knight squirmed and complained with muffled little noise. She closed her eyes, pressing the knight into her hoard belly, where her precious treasures belonged, especially if they dared to wander off. "Tristan, I order you to settle down and quit that flailing about. You are going to hurt yourself."

"Princess Aldra, where are you?" the voice was startled, there was pawing all around the soft belly where her knight was.

"All around you, silly. I cannot believe you went off all by yourself. You are in time out. Maybe for weeks."