{{Amber-fields? Are you okay?}} Dizzy-tail whispers into your thoughts, coming up to nudge himself under your wing. You pull him close with the wing, marveling at how you have eventually adjusted to having the wing always there, working as a second set of hands. Just like you don't always notice the pectoral muscles for your forelimbs contracting as you move them about, you don't really feel your lower pectorals working as you move the wing, except this time, as you pull him in tightly close to you in a hug, you feel a pleasant sting in your chest as the muscle tenses.
After a moment, you finally look over to examine the annoyed elder-dragon, the amethyst Blunt-snout. The old drake doesn't really look like the monster he used to. He just looks old and careworn. As you have begun to see this, though, you start realizing that this makes him look more handsome, not less. You trace your eyes over every scar that he has picked up in his long and storied life and over the creases and folds in his hide, and you think of the roots of an old tree. You start seeing that, for every fault that makes him less than new-hatched, there must be a story, and you start longing to hear them. Yes, you could picture yourself learning how to love the ancient drake, even though it might take you a while to get there.
Reaching out with the other part of your attention, you feel for the reassuring warmth of your lover next to you. Dizzy-tail, although young, has a body a lot like that of Blunt-snout, his snout even being slightly shorter than your own. Trained to be a member of the educated knightly elite among an ancient warrior culture, Dizzy-tail's body is pure bone and muscle to the tough, even though he looks like finely crafted porcelain on the surface...well, except where your claws rent tears in his hide, which you are glad are not deep enough to have permanently marred his perfect, rock-solid body. It's partly his initial hardness that makes it so heartwarming how he melts into butter next to you, as if he were soft like this only for you. It makes you feel special, as if his tenderness were a secret that only you knew.
Dizzy-tail is also very much unlike Blunt-snout, and you know that this is for reasons besides their respective ages. You can see it right away. Blunt-snout is an idealist and a dreamer, and as you have gotten to know him, you have come to see the true tenderheartedness of the ancient drake. Dizzy-tail, as sweet as he has been to you, has a sharper and more skeptical intellect, which zooms in on its subject with laser focus. Everything is a puzzle for the gifted, young drake, even you. You just like being his puzzle. You know that Blunt-snout, being a softhearted, old stooge that has fallen in love with an army of alien creatures as if they were his children, would be a more empathetic and sensitive sort of lover. If you ever loved them both, they would be different loves, maybe even altogether different emotions.
And both are more beautiful than the gross, green frog that squats shamefully...no, you remind yourself, shaking your head. You hold in your mind what Dizzy-tail told you, that your body is beautiful in the way that a hen's is. You never thought of yourself as feminine before, though, and you realize that the thought actually scares you. You're not sure why your heart contracts in your chest every time you think about embracing it, but it does. You know it's a different thing from how you feel toward Dizzy-tail. It's just something that you have always felt an urge to try to hide from the world. In this new world, though, could you think of yourself as...pretty? Maybe still a drake but...just okay. You decide you'll start with feeling okay, and you'll go from there.
And yes, you would feel perfectly comfortable being bred like a hen by the old drake, Blunt-snout. Far from fearing that Blunt-snout would cruelly split you open, you know that he would be asking about your welfare every step of the way and fussing fretfully, like a nursemaid, over every moan that came out of you. You know that he would really be a compassionate and sensitive lover. You know that you would enjoy it, perhaps more than anything you have ever experienced, and you know that you could get lost in the experience in ways that you never could with a less caring lover.
Still, you keep coming back to that thought, love. You twist your soft and flexible lips and wrinkle your scaly tourmaline-sheathed forehead as you try to sort that thought out. You can't get lust to come apart from it. They seem to be stuck together, almost as if you couldn't have one without the other. You start recognizing that the two thoughts are different, now that you have seen that Dizzy-tail can separate them, but for you, they are tangled together so densely that they look like the same thought. They just won't pull apart, and it's frustrating. Damn it!
A little bit ashamed, you focus again on Blunt-snout, and you realize that, while you are starting to understand his capacity for loving and being loved, you are not in love with him...maybe someday but not yet. You smile softly as you accept that someday you might accept him as a second lover and accept being bred by him, but for you to submit to him willingly, you would have to feel something more intense than just a hope and the beginnings of understanding. You carefully tag the thought of being submissive toward the drake as being something you would feel okay with, but you just don't feel it yet. For now, you satisfy yourself with being kinder toward him if you can.
Reaching your decision, you bow your green tourmaline head to Dizzy-tail's head of kyanite-blue, and you think softly at him, {{I am sorry, my love, but while I can accept that you can do what you did with Blunt-snout without ceasing to love me, it would mean more to me if I did it. I couldn't submit willingly without having unfaithful thoughts about our affection for each other, so I think that I will need more time to figure out if it's even possible to love you both at once. Please, don't judge me, my darling.}}
Dizzy-tail nods his head thoughtfully as he takes this in. {{I just worry so much about you, Amber-fields. You seem so ashamed of yourself all of the time. You seem so much like those kobolds at the dinner that hid themselves away at the periphery, as if you were resentful of both yourself and everything you saw and just...damn it to Hecate's bitch-heat! I can't accept that you were the same person there that you are when we're alone. That's not the way you are,}} He paws at the ground wistfully as he continues, {{and I want Blunt-snout to see you the way I see you, as beautiful and kind and good.}}
Blunt-snout seems to have overheard at least some of that thought, and he inserts, {{I can already see that, you dumb whelp}}. He lumbers over, and he reaches within your wing where he's cloaked to nuzzle him gently. {{Dizzy-tail, I recognize your text-tablet knowledge of history, and I can appreciate the fact that your gifts in the magical arts might be on par with those of the dragons that created the rock-golems that turned the tide toward the end. Your people skills, though, are nonexistent, and that is the reason that, in a way, you deserve to be clawed-up.}}
You nuzzle Dizzy-tail, and you find yourself agreeing with Blunt-snout, with an important caveat, so you mention, {{Dizzy-tail, you are really right that I have been really uptight around everyone except you. I've been clinging to some dumb ideas about things. There is a lot that I need to reassess. That might take me a while. If you can accept that I will still be self-conscious most of the time for a while, then I will prove to you that I can let myself love the sky like any dragon can.}} You continue, {{but Blunt-snout is right. I'm a little bit delicate, still. Even for the kobolds that Blunt-snout has won the trust of, can't you see how self-conscious even they are? They try to hold their wings up like dragons, and some of them are starting to look more like two-legged dragons, rather than like goony monsters that hide among rocks. It's still a new and scary thing for them, though.}}
Blunt-snout nods sagely at that. {{When I met my first kobold that I didn't regard as a potential lunch but probable pest, he came to be my lover, and...}}
Dizzy-tail bristles. {{I can't accept that!}} he snaps. {{How could you ever? I mean they're animals! Are you like one of those mad-drakes that rape hatchlings???}}
You grab your lover's forepaw tightly in yours. {{I insist you calm down right now,}} you admonish him. {{Remember that I also misunderstood something recently and made a fool of myself, so let him finish.}}
Dizzy-tail shakes with rage, but he goes numbly silent, for now.
Blunt-snout looks tired and annoyed, but he continues, {{well, he would crawl every night up to my ledge to curl up next to me. At first, I had thought that he was an orphan, since he behaved a little bit like a lost hatchling willing to latch onto anything that might look like its mother and too stupid to clearly distinguish a predator from a potential source of succor. I could not understand why a creature that must know that dragons hunt kobolds, being old enough to fend for itself, would willingly throw its life away, and this very strange behavior is really what stayed my jaws from quickly snapping his neck and being done with it.
{{Not having the heart to kill him first, I even tried picking him up in my jaws and holding him there until I had the urge to swallow, but I ended up holding him there for so long that ultimately we both fell asleep, and I woke up to him getting off on my tongue, apparently lost in a dream. He shot quite a load, too. It just kept coming and coming, and I still can't figure out how such a small creature can produce so much fluid. That, whelps, is how I recognized that he was a full-grown adult...one of his own species}}.
Dizzy-tail makes a disgusted sound, but he doesn't interrupt this time.
Blunt-snout continues, {{Anyhow, with purely cynical motives at the time, I decided to pretend to myself that I was playing with him in the same way that meaner whelps like to play with their prey. I never used to approve of that, but I needed to somehow keep my head believing that my relationship with this creature was one between predator and prey. Every morning, before I would go off to hunt, and every evening, before we rested, we would play the same games, with me playing the role of predator and him the prey. I figured out that, if I provoked him just right, I could get him to start running in spite of his suicidal desire to stay with me, and I would hunt him down like a great elk and return him to my nest, where I would make further feints at him and then curl up to sleep, holding him helplessly in my grasp. I would leave him in the mornings for my hunts, but he would always be there, waiting. I would bring home bones from my kills with the intent of gnawing them in case I needed them as consolation after a poor hunt, but he would get his fill off of them.
{{Eventually, I started to notice that he was tidying the nest every day while I was gone, weaving the grasses that I had piled into it like a bird would. He eventually had built a sort of thatched hut out of some of it that was sort of a cave within the structure of the nest, although I only ever saw him sleeping in it when it rained. Mostly, I saw him burning his food in it. At first, I was only bringing home different parts of my kills and watching to see what he did with them. He took horns and bone and made implements out of them in the same way that some birds do. A few times, he would have such a surplus that he would insistently bring it up to my snout and implore me to eat some of it. It was an acquired taste at first, but believe me: I was skeptical of this idea of burning the outside of meat at first, but it's a pretty nifty idea.}}
{{Tastes like crop-milk,}} Dizzy-tail grumbles bitterly.
Blunt-snout glares at him, but he goes on, {{Well, after that, I noticed the flavors changing each time he did his meat-burning ritual. Some days, it would taste like air, only more so. Other days, it would taste like meat, only more so. I had some that tasted like great elk that had grazed heavily upon fresh green grass, and I had some that tasted like great elk that had grazed heavily upon oats. I tasted things that I had never tasted before.
{{And in time, I noticed the landscape around my nest transforming. Every nook and crevice had something growing from it, and the place was dripping with vines. Vetch was replaced with fragrant and delicate plants that I had never noticed before. Whelps, I didn't believe it until I saw it, but it was as if the bones of the earth answered to the little fellow. He wasn't just engaging in the random, meaningless behavior of an animal, but he was practicing magic. Earth-magic!}} The old drake was sounding more and more excited.
Dizzy-tail sighs defeatedly, and he decides to drop the subject of the older drake's peculiar relationship with the speechless beast. {{So some animals can practice magic, then, apparently,}} he says.
{{They're not...}} Blunt-snout starts abruptly, but he drops it, knowing that this will be an uphill battle. {{Anyhow, at first, he always kept his wings folded around himself like most kobalds do, but I found that the more often I molested him, the more often he would hike his wings up like a playful hen. As I would lick him, he would stand like a hen ready to be mounted, on all-fours, and he would flare out his wings. Eventually, he submitted to me completely, and he left his wings open to whatever I wished to do to him, only flushing a little bit as I nuzzled over his body. He would grow erect, and I would take a load off of him.
{{I kept telling myself that it was about power, but this kept going on for years. It genuinely was about power for the first four years. I owned him. He was my toy. I abused him. I had my way with him. I played with him like a cruel whelp tormenting and stalking partially crippled prey when no adults were around to scold him for it. In this manner, I kept myself from realizing what was happening to me. I was coming to love him.}}
Dizzy-tail snorts. {{So this was all just some elk-brained attempt to defend you doing things with your prey that any responsible elder would claw me bloody for,}} he says, as if his explanation were quite satisfactory for any rational being and would only be objected to by a misguided fool.
Blunt-snout just looks too tired to argue, so he ignores the remark. {{He would keep barking at me in the way that kobolds do at each other, and the more I came to feel what he felt, the more I would see that he was moving around in the same ways that dragons do when they are having conversations by thought-speech. I ultimately tried imitating his barks, which initially made him laugh quite a lot. In time, I found out that some types of barks caused different reactions than others did, and I slowly started to decode them. I have even created a bank of tablets where I have been creating an organized system for them, which some of the kobolds have been getting excited over.}}
You realize that Blunt-snout is searching for a pithier thought, so you supply him with one: {{Lexicon.}} As the thought leaves your head, you realize that Blunt-snout is most likely not hearing the English word "lexicon," but he is just getting the idea that this system of his could be a specific sort of concept that has a specific purpose or set of purposes.
{{Yes,}} he says after a moment. {{A lexicon is what I have created. Anyhow, my lover also proved to me something important during our time together. He taught me that kobolds, if they take time to strengthen their wings sufficiently, can learn how to glide by jumping from heights, and while they may never be as efficient at flight as a dragon, I am holding out hope for them that they can learn.
{{The obstacle, though, is their strange propensity for furling their wings around themselves as if they were beetles. It doesn't flatter them, and I have no idea why they do it. When I first started trying to get to know other kobolds, I noticed elders beating their offspring anytime they revealed themselves, and it seemed like there was some kind of systematic suppression of kobolds ever embracing their ability to use their wings at all. They have this intense hatred of the bodies underneath their wings, as if they had been given their bodies as some terrible punishment that they must now unwillingly bear for all of their days. Well, at least that is what I gather from what I can glean from their barks.
{{They seem to talk of a historic time when things were different, and they didn't have scales at all. They say that, by an ancient act of disobedience to their creator, relatively beautiful bodies they once had were taken away, and those they have were given to them, rendering them hideous and monstrous as an eternal punishment to help remind them always to be ashamed. It's heartbreaking.}}
Dizzy-tail snorts again. {{I won't believe this,}} he snaps. {{You gave into the impulses of some stupid whelp, and instead of being sorry and quitting the behavior, you have constructed this complex self-justifying fantasy in your head. I had just started to like you, Blunt-snout, but now I see what I saw before, which is that you are a delusional, old drake living in a fantasy-world.}} He pulls himself out from under your wing, and he starts on his way back to the stables. {{Amber-fields, my love for you is eternal, but I ask that you don't encourage this mad hermit. Maybe you can reason with him. I don't have the patience. I don't have your gentle heart. I don't care what you have to do, though: fix him.}}
You sigh, and you look face-to-face with Blunt-snout. {{I am sorry,}} you say to him painfully.
Blunt-snout shrugs. {{I figured most dragons would say the same things if they wouldn't put me to death,}} he says lightly. {{Anyhow, let's put together a lesson-plan for tomorrow. Where do you and your lover want to start? If you would like, I could spend some time trying to train you on the language of the kobolds: if you took this route, you might be the first dragon to ever learn the magic of the kobolds, since the way it's done really eludes me. You could also start working with more of the young kobolds to help them learn to open up their wings, and this would make you the captain among my small troupe of gliding students. If you would prefer, though, I could start teaching you some draconic magic, and this would help immerse you further into the life of being a dragon and thinking as a dragon.}}
You choose to...