a small animal

“Sir Mathis heard it straight from Lord Mortingale’s lips himself,” Ruairí said, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder to get his friend to follow him.

Aneirin fell into step beside him, and bit back a yawn as he followed him through a concealed passage, out of the prince’s chambers and towards the adjacent apartment which belonged to his parents. In the darkness though, the prince paused and put his hands on Aneirin’s breastplate, tapping the cold metal a couple of times in his excitement. “A dragon, Nye!” he practically giggled. “Can you believe it? The magisters say they all migrated in to the frozen north a thousand years ago! What do you think drove this one south?”

“Maybe it’s fed up with all the snow,” Aneirin deadpanned, and the prince snorted a laugh and turned away, moving with easy familiarity down the dark corridor until he popped the latch on the door at the other end and they stepped out into the king’s empty study.

“Mother and father are in their sitting room,” Ruairí said, adding with a heavy grimace, “Magister Ferrar is in there too.” The much-hated former tutor of the crown prince was a truly odious man; pompously pious, deeply disdainful of those who wielded a sword instead of a stylus, and rake thin because he thought that consuming food with actual flavour was a grievous sin. Unfortunately, he was one of the most learned scholars in the country, so it was hardly a surprise that he had been summoned upon a credible report of a dragon reaching the king’s ears.

So it was that Aneirin found himself with the command of a small group of riders the next morning, heading north-east towards the belt of mountains that sheltered the kingdom’s fertile plains from the worst of the wild winters, and charged with finishing off the downed beast. A larger party would follow behind to collect the corpse for study and preservation, apparently, but his focus was killing it.  

Aneirin also had a grinning crown prince on his magnificent bay stallion at his side, despite his protests that a fire breathing lizard the size of an average cattle barn was probably quite dangerous, and putting the heir to the kingdom within a twenty mile radius of the thing was a colossally stupid thing to do, but the prince had insisted, and his parents had never been able to tell him ‘no’. To be fair, he was irritatingly charming.

“What do you think it will be like?” Ruairí asked as they trotted at the head of the column.

Nye looked around constantly, and even though the prince was dressed in sensible clothes for once, rather than showy silks designed to accentuate his fashionably fit figure and draw the eye of everyone in the room, he couldn’t help but feel the immense responsibility of guarding the crown prince out in the open like that. “Big, probably,” he mumbled. “And pissed off.”

The prince barked a laugh. “You’re funny, Nye. People think you’re grumpy, but you’re not. You’re just quiet.”

“You talk enough for the both of us,” he scowled, squinting at a shadow by the road a few hundred paces off. It was just an old tree stump, but he still glared at it like it was an assassin crouched in ambush all the same.

Somehow, the prince was still in a blindingly good mood as they walked their horses up the twisting, mountain road four days later, the breath of man and beast billowing in the air as they climbed higher. Everything was an adventure to Ruairí, and Nye couldn’t help but twitch a little smile as he watched the way the soldiers leaned closer to their prince in the firelight at camp, drawn like moths to his radiant joy instead of the flames of the campfire. Nye made one more round of the perimeter guards, greeting each by name and earning an earnest salute as he left them to their duties, and went to lie down on his own bedroll while the prince kept talking late into the night.

On the following morning, they reached the mouth of the canyon where the dragon was supposed to have gone down. According to Lord Mortingale’s soldiers, it had swooped overhead from a lower peak of the mountains, then swept down the narrow gorge like a hurricane, which spooked the horses to a white-eyed panic and caused the archers on the ground to nock arrows. When they’d loosed at it, it had wheeled away suddenly, and only to catch a wing on the bridge, colliding with it and disappearing into the depths of the gully. The soldiers had been forced to keep going, given the fragile health of their lord, and hadn’t been able to report accurately on the status of the dragon when they’d left the pass.

At the head of the canyon, a huge waterfall roared over the edge of a ‘v’ in the ridgeline of the mountains and plunged down out of sight into the bottom of the gorge. In the spring this road was only just passable because of the sheer volume of meltwater, but now at the tail end of autumn, the road was only misted by a constant spray. On either side of the gorge, the rocks rose into steep pinnacles, and in front of the waterfall, bathed in a sheeting mist, the stone bridge spanned the canyon and connected the road from one side to the other.

The walls that made up the protective sides of the sandstone bridge had been punched out in places by a the collision of something enormous, presumably the dragon as it fell, and all up the far side of the steep slope the trees and scrub had been singed to charcoal.

Aneirin held up a gauntleted hand and the riders halted. Taking a deep breath of damp, freezing air that burned his lungs, he listened. Behind the constant roar and rumble of the waterfall, a deeper sound filtered up through the scorched trees and scattered rocks. Low frequency, like two blocks of castle masonry grinding together, the rumble of a dragon reached his ears.

“Sir, that bridge looks like it’s about to go,” the captain of the unit muttered from Aneirin’s left and he nodded.

“We need to get a better look at what’s down there, but the scree slope on either side of the bridge is too dangerous to go near. I’ll dismount and go on foot.”

“Nye, you can’t go onto the bridge!” Ruairí exclaimed, wheeling his horse around to face his friend. “What if it gives out?”

“One man isn’t going to tip the balance,” he said. “But you stay here. You hear me? Stay…”

“I’m not a dog, Nye,” the prince pouted, but he did stay put.

Aneirin nodded, swung down from his horse and petted the placid gelding’s neck. The black horse twitched his head and stretched happily when the knight let go of the reins, but otherwise remained steady.

After only a couple of steps, he heard another rider dismounting from behind him, and turned to find one of the soldiers hurrying after him. “Captain said you shouldn’t go alone,” she said. “I volunteered.”

Aneirin shot the captain a level look, but didn't protest. He wasn’t sure what difference one extra person would make, but he wasn’t one for causing social friction when there were bigger problems to face; namely the dragon lurking in the steam at the bottom of the four hundred foot drop.

Stones and grit skittered away audibly under the arch of the bridge as the two of them stepped cautiously out onto it, avoiding the missing chunks and making their way to the middle where the wall was still intact and they could peer safely over the edge into the abyss. A flash of movement out of the corner of his right eye caught his attention, and Nye turned sharply to find the soldiers they’d left behind had dismounted and were loading bolts into crossbows. The grinding of the windlasses had dissolved into the noise of the waterfall and they were nearly all ready to loose.

Frustration flickered through him. If he shouted a warning from right above the dragon though, it could alert the beast to their presence, but if those fools shot down at it now, it could take out the entire bridge while they were still standing on it. Heck, if the dragon wanted to, it could probably start a landslide and suck the whole damned road into the gorge as well. Grinding his teeth, Nye waved and exhaled in relief when the captain responded in kind, and when Nye gave the signal to hold, the captain nodded and barked something to his soldiers that was lost to Nye behind the pounding waterfall.

Satisfied that they wouldn't endanger the crown prince or the volunteer soldier who’d come with him, Nye leaned over the edge and his breath caught. There at the bottom of the gorge was indeed the dragon.

A myriad of golden scales glittered in the water like a treasure hoard itself as the creature basked in the flow of water, seeming to enjoy the feel of it caressing the spiny ridges of its back. He frowned though when he realised it was slowly swinging its head back and forth through the water just downstream of the waterfall’s plunge-pool, jaws slightly open, and it appeared to be… catching fish? Somehow the image didn’t align at all with what he’d expected for a beast that big. Had it just been sitting in the river for a week catching salmon and trout like a fat lordling on a vacation from court life?

Before his bafflement could truly sink in, the sharp clunk of a crossbow loosing somewhere to his right jerked his attention away from the dragon, and before he could react, a thick, oak bolt sank deep into the creature’s shoulder just above its wing membrane and it gave a screeching roar loud enough to make Nye’s eardrums hurt and his mind go a little bit blank from the sheer, unfamiliar dread of it.

With a wild thrash, the dragon erupted out of the spray from the base of the waterfall and sent its tail and powerful hind quarters arcing around like a battering ram while remaining on the ground. The whole structure of the bridge swayed and shuddered as the beast collided with its footing piles, and both the knight and the soldier froze in place with their hands clutching the stone wall.

“Run!” Nye yelled at her, shoving her in the direction of her comrades gathered nervously on the road to their right. If he survived this, he was going to see to it personally that the one who’d loosed without a direct order was on latrine duty for at least six months.

The desperate beating of wings as the creature floundered and screamed again filled the air and the bridge gave way beneath them with a thunderous clamour.

Nye found himself sucked downwards amid a cloud of masonry and dust and the woman beside him screamed and floundered for the remaining edge of the bridge but it was too late.

Amid the clouds of choking dust, gold flashed and flickered, and something incalculably enormous barrelled out of the carnage at them with the force of an avalanche. Talons snatched for him and Nye found himself borne upwards while the scaly foot of a dragon closed around him. The brief thought that he would be punctured and crushed like an egg in his steel armour flitted across his mind as the dragon lurched upwards with a knight in one hand and, to Nye’s relief, a soldier in its other.

It struggled to escape the blocks of sandstone as they rained around them, but despite the bolt in its shoulder, it cleared the wreckage and swooped over the road, but as it banked, the soldier slipped from its grasp and plummeted away. Nye had the vague impression of her bouncing once and sitting upright while crossbow bolts buzzed through the air like summer flies until someone obviously yelled at the soldiers to stop in case they hit Nye.

The last thing he saw before they wheeled away into an open sky was Ruairí’s horrified expression peeking out from the visor of his golden helmet and the sword falling from limp, shocked fingers as his friend was snatched away by the dragon they had been sent to kill.

He wasn’t sure how long they flew northwards along the spine of the Icetide Mountains, but the dragon eventually began to tire, swaying and weaving, sometimes dropping a horrifying ten or twelve feet between wing beats, until a shivering Nye looked up and realised that a wide, snowy field was rapidly coming into focus through the oncoming snow that had started to fill the air perhaps an hour earlier. At the end of the long meadow covered in a perfect layer of deep snow, Nye could just about see a gaping hole in the cliff-face, and realised it must be a cave. Dimly, his mind supplied that this was probably the dragon’s home, and he was probably either about to be eaten or stored for later like a woodlouse in a spiderweb.

As the ground rushed up to meet them, he tried to thrash free of the enormous, curling talons, but he was held firm, and there was no freeing himself. When the dragon didn’t slow down nearly enough though, another thought crossed his mind. They were going to crash land, and he realised this might be it. Death by high-velocity impact with a mountainside wasn’t on the list of ways the Crownsguard knight had ever thought he would perish, but he didn’t have any more time to ponder it as the dragon twisted at the last minute and collided with the ground in a spray of snow, and Nye was tossed from its talons to land in a heap thirty feet from the point of impact.

He struck his head, helmet clanging once, and his consciousness winked out instantly.

Warmth was the next thing he felt, and he blinked his eyes open to find that he was lying on his back in the snow, and above him, a dragon was squinting against the onslaught of a full storm, its ochre eyes fixed on him as it tilted its head this way and that to get a better look at him, and it exhaled again. Its warm breath washed over him and he realised his clothes were soaking wet where the heat of its breath had melted the snow.

Aneirin’s first thought was that he was about to be eaten, but instead of floundering away or reaching for a weapon, he just froze.

“You’re awake,” came a rich, rumbling voice and he blinked. Nothing in the tales he’d ever heard had suggested that dragons were capable of human speech. They were wild, savage beasts that burned the land below them in great swathes and snatched people into the air like owls hunting vermin in a cornfield. “Thank goodness,” the dragon went on, and then sat back on its haunches like a dog to regard him at a bit of a distance. A huge, golden dog, partly covered in snow and bleeding from a barb in its shoulder, but still, the resemblance to a dog was remarkable.

“How… How long was I out?” Aneirin rasped, sitting up. When he didn’t feel sick and his vision didn’t warp, he felt a degree of relief. The concussion he’d suffered wouldn’t be bad.

“Only a minute or so,” the dragon said, lowering its muzzle a little and puffing out again. “But you should get inside before you freeze. The temperature out here is too low for human survival.”

“How would you know that?” he groused as he struggled to stand and then gave a yelp as his ankle gave way beneath him in a hot flash of pain. In all the shock of coming round and finding a dragon in his face, he’d not noticed the pain in his leg.

The dragon caught him in its claws and tightened its hold just enough to hold him steady and he clutched at the tiny, snake skin scales that covered its hand more out of reflex than anything else.

“Come on,” the dragon muttered, and he could hear the bellows of its breathing clearly this close up. The sheer presence of the creature was astonishing, overwhelming, and he swallowed, trying to process everything that had happened that day.

Using three out of its four legs, the dragon ploughed through the deep snow, keeping him aloft with its right front foot, and then it ducked its head and slipped into the cave like a snake disappearing into its den.

Aneirin blinked slowly, looking around. It wasn’t a cold, empty cave littered with carcasses and bones, but instead the walls were smooth, ashlar masonry, and adorned with tapestries. In the far corner was what appeared to be a great nest on a stone platform made of silks and furs.

“This… This isn’t what I’d expected,” he whispered, wondering if he was hallucinating all this.

The dragon chuckled, low and warm and oddly friendly before he sat the knight down on the bed of fabric and stepped back. “I’ll find you something to wrap your ankle. I don’t think it’s broken, but it might like some support…”

“How would you even know that?” he asked again, ignoring the pain and staring up at the creature.

Its sunset orange eyes seemed to laugh and the pupils dilated just a little as the dragon stared at him. Then it cocked its head a little to one side and laughed quietly again. “I have an interest in human scholarship, though I admit, my sources may be a little out of date now…”

“You… what?”

If dragons could look embarrassed, this one managed it, so much so that Nye felt a prickle of shame creep in behind the slightly hysterical exhaustion that was making his body heavy, his mind a bit slow, and his dark eyes incredibly gritty.

Clearly seeing as much, the dragon sighed, a sound like wind moving through woodland, and then said, “Why don’t you rest and we’ll talk more tomorrow?”

“I thought perhaps… uh…” Nye faltered, the shame intensifying.

“That I was going to eat you?” the dragon said, one brow-ridge rising with disconcerting familiarity into a dryly sarcastic expression. “Please, all that pretty, etched steel of yours would give me terrible indigestion.”

“Says the dragon that was gorging on fish in the river like a grizzly bear.”

“Well we don’t exactly have an overabundance of trout up here on the mountaintop,” the dragon retorted, puffing smoke out of its nostrils. “Excuse me for wanting to broaden my diet and make the most of an unfortunate situation. Until you lot came back and shot at me, I was actually enjoying myself. They weren’t the mountain goats I’d been looking for, but the fish were fun to catch and tasty to eat.”

At his words, Nye’s brown eyes slid to the bolt that was sticking out of the dragon’s shoulder still, like a bee’s sting, and his gut twisted. “You want me to take that out for you?” he asked, jutting his chin upwards to indicate the bolt.

“If you would be so kind,” the dragon admitted. “Though I’m surprised you’re offering, since you seem to have been sent to finish me off. It does hurt rather…”

“Here,” he said, and gestured for the dragon to lower its body down, which it did with surprising grace given the close confines and evident discomfort. “My name’s Aneirin,” he added.

“The one with the gold on his helm shouted something different at you as we flew off,” the dragon said as it got settled on the stone floor in front of its nest. “He seemed particularly distressed.”

“‘Nye’, probably,” he said as he reached for the oak bolt and braced his other hand on the scales of the dragon’s shoulder. The body beneath him was solid and warm, and the scales had the most beautiful iridescence to them over the gold lustre beneath. “The prince is the only one who calls me that, except my sister. What should I call you, by the way?”

“My name is —” the dragon began, but grunted and bared its teeth when Nye drew the bolt out. A little blood trickled down, but it wasn’t much, and Nye pressed a wad of clean linen from the pile beneath him to the wound, and the dragon went on. “My name is Vulfuri’ik.”

Nye scowled. “Vul… fury… ick?” he repeated, butchering the syllables and the glottal stop even while they were still fresh in his ears. “Never been much good with languages,” he added with a wry look at the dragon, who was regarding him sidelong with a flat, unimpressed sort of look at his poor efforts. “How about I call you ‘Fury’ instead?”

Indignant, the dragon’s head lurched up and the movement pulled the makeshift dressing away from the clotting wound as it fixed the knight with a scowl of outrage. “Fury? Fury?!” it repeated. “My name means ‘peaceful wanderer’, you know? It’s a name that’s been carried by many of the noblest males of my line!”

“I’d been wondering if you were male or female,” Nye mumbled. “Well, I can certainly try to pronounce your name — what was it again?”

“Vulfuri’ik,” he said with exaggerated pronunciation, huge teeth clicking when he snapped his jaws shut at the end of the word and glared down at the knight.

“Vool… fur…eek…”

“Oh for the love of the sky, no. No. Just stick with Fury. That’s fine. You’ll only be here for one night anyway. Once you’ve healed up and I’ve convinced you to tell your kind to stop shooting your nasty little bolts at me if I ever need to venture down into the valley, I’ll take you back to the road and I’ll never have to hear you spoil my sacred name with that tiny little tongue of yours.”

“My tongue’s had quite a few compliments, you know?” Nye shot, not entirely sure where the bout of playful innuendo had come from. Perhaps it was exhaustion and the fact that he was trading gentle insults back and forth with a creature that was only supposed to exist in legends now anyway.

“I’m sure,” Fury said dryly. “But until you decide that I can test that claim for myself, why don’t you take your little metal shell off and I’ll find you a goat or something you can eat, and then you can rest.”

Nye had to smile. The creature was supposed to be intimidating, and in a way he supposed he was, but the sense of humour was not something he’d been expecting. As he stripped off the various pieces of his plate armour, he felt the dragon’s curious eyes on him and turned to meet his gaze. In the stillness that swung between them, Nye sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, gaze snagging on the scab that had formed over the hole where the crossbow quarrel had sunk into his shoulder. “When we’d heard that a monster from the mists of time had crashed down on the border of our kingdom, we only thought to protect ourselves from you. Clearly, you were just… raiding our larder…”

The dragon laughed, deep and rumbling like a rock slide, and something shot through Nye that he wasn’t expecting to feel. He didn’t often seek out the company and touch of others, despite his momentary brag earlier. It just wasn’t something he felt the need for, but in that moment, the way the dragon’s voice rippled through him and his supple lips pulled back to reveal a maw full of sharp, white teeth, and his talons flexed on the stonework floor and his wings drew a little closer to his muscular, lithe body… Nye felt his cock twitch and decided he might actually have a concussion after all.

The dragon left not long after that, and returned with a neatly butchered and roasted goat, which surprised the knight, who had been poking around the large, chilly cave and hopping awkwardly to avoid putting weight on his sprained ankle.

“You shouldn’t be up,” the dragon purred as he landed and held out the goat on one talon. “Here.”

“You want me to eat out of your hand? Bold. We’ve only just met.”

The dragon’s laugh sounded again, only longer and louder this time, and he looked at the steel hanging on Nye’s hip. “I thought you could use that. It’s not the most elegant of solutions, but I don’t exactly have a full dinner service here. I don’t collect crockery like an old lady.”

It was Nye’s turn to bark a laugh at that, and he shook his head. “Alright, I’ll use my castle-forged steel sword as a carving knife, but just this once.”

“I hope it’s clean,” the dragon grimaced.

“I take good care of my weapon,” he said, and then hoped the dragon wouldn’t notice the flush in his face at the horrible and actually unintended innuendo. Definitely a concussion. He was never this bold or unguarded with people ordinarily.

“Glad to hear it,” Fury muttered dryly.

Fury let Nye sleep on the pile of fabric that night while he curled up on the floor like an overgrown, gold-adorned house-cat, and Nye found that he had no trouble drifting off whatsoever, and woke to find the snowstorm raging outside the cave entrance when he woke the following morning.

Over the next three days, while his ankle healed and the snow piled up, he and Fury talked. The cave he was living in was the remnants of a human outpost from the time when dragons and humans had apparently once lived in peace. “This cavern was actually where the dragon would have lived, while their rider would stay in a small room below — through that tunnel,” Fury said, astonishing Nye with the information.

“Their… ‘rider’?”

“Mmm,” the dragon rumbled, puffing a small flame over his tongue to ignite a torch on the wall beside an opening large enough for a human to walk down. “Every room in this little termite mound of an outpost is accessible to my kind as well, though I have to go outside and back in again. Something to do with the structure of the rock not being sound enough to tunnel down from here. There are other rooms below.”

“Yes, sure, but… rider?”

“Oh. Has your kind forgotten that?”

“Forgotten what? All we know about dragons is that you’re deadly, fire breathing lizards who —”

“Reptiles, yes,” he growled. “But not lizards. Lizards do not spit volatile compounds which ignite when combined.”

“That’s how your fire is made?”

“Yes, it’s a simple bio-chemical reaction. Don’t they teach you anything these days?”

“I… You know what, no. Dragon biology wasn’t covered in my training to become a knight.”

“No, but they do cover how hard you need to hit a fellow man and where to cut him open to make him die… Very refined.”

“You’re one sarcastic lizard, you know that?”

Instead of taking offence, the dragon grinned at him. “Gosh, it’s wonderful to have company,” he sighed. “I know I shouldn’t enjoy it too much, since you’re only still here because you’re hurting and there’s a snowstorm and all, but I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve actually… you know… exchanged words with someone. I talk to myself all the time, but it’s not the same.”

“When was the last time? Are you the only dragon in these parts?”

“I’m the only dragon for at least five hundred miles,” he sighed. “And she’s a big, grumpy elder dragon who thinks I’m still a hatchling for goodness sake! A hatchling! I’m very much an adult, and I’m sorry my gizzard isn’t saggy enough for her tastes, but there you have it.”

Nye laughed and then rolled his ankle around experimentally. “I think it’s basically healed,” he said. “But it’s been an unexpectedly nice change from castle duties. Keeping the prince from falling down a staircase because he’s too busy flirting with some lording’s son has it’s own challenges, sure, but this is a nice change of pace.”

“You and the prince are… close?” Fury asked carefully. “But you are not… mated?”

“Mated? Gods no. They wouldn’t let him ‘mate’ his Crownsguard. He’s expected to continue the line, and I know you know enough about human biology to know that wouldn’t happen with the two of us, even if we wanted it.”

“Oh. Yes,” he said. “Is it… acceptable for two of your kind to mate though?”

“Yeah, when the future of a kingdom doesn’t hang in the balance,” he shrugged. “You?”

He nodded. “Dragons do not dictate with whom another may mate, though I admit, I’ve only ever met one of my kind. There are so few of us left in these parts after all.”

That rather dampened the mood, and they spent the rest of the evening discussing lighter topics. Nye told him about his twin sister and the work she did in the Temple of Healing, and how he had always felt like she was the smart one out of the two of them. He told Fury of her passion for healing and helping, and how he felt that his role as a knight in the castle, training younger soldiers and protecting the crown prince, was barely halfway as useful as Seren’s work, and was surprised when Fury reassured him that helping to ensure the longevity of a ruler he valued was just as important.

“I realise I don’t know you all that well,” Fury said, “But I don’t think you would stand behind a ruler who did not care for their people.”

Nye looked down at his rough, scar-flecked hands where he had cradled them idly in his lap. “Ruairí is a good man,” he said with quiet certainty, thinking of that fire-lit camp and their warm smiles and boyish laughter. “The soldiers love him, and the people adore him too. You should see the way they cheer for him at the tourneys…”

“Tell me about them?” Fury asked, his eyes lighting up at the idea of more knowledge.

“The tourneys or the people?”

“All of it…”

So he did.

While the snowstorm continued to whisk the world into a white haze outside, Nye told the dragon everything he wanted to know about how humans in his kingdom lived these days, and in turn, Fury curled around him to keep him warm with the heat of his enormous, golden body.

Nye talked late into the night, and he only realised that the dragon had fallen asleep when he noted the regular rhythm of his breathing had slowed even more than usual. Turning, he stared at the dragon and marvelled at what he was seeing. The light of the nearby fire in a niche in the wall caught the iridescence of his golden scales, each one unique and perfect, and Nye reached out and ran his fingertips over the dragon’s brow-ridge and around the base of the horn that curved elegantly backwards over his head. The dragon let out a long, low, sleepy rumble of pleasure and Nye gave a sigh.

Conflicted about his feelings for a creature that was about as far from a human as it was possible to get, he curled up against the dragon’s side that night, and woke in the morning with the dragon’s arm snugging him close to his warm body.

Sliding free, Nye stretched and walked easily across the cave floor towards the entrance; his ankle was healed and he would have to return home soon, lest he be pronounced dead and the modest estate he owned outside the city be turned over to someone else. His sister must be beside herself with grief and worry too, if the prince had done what Nye was sure he would, and informed her personally of what had happened to her twin brother.

The wind had lost its vigour and now the little flakes drifted gently down like the pattern on a lace curtain.

A warm breeze wafted over his neck and he turned to find that Fury had come to stand behind him. He’d been so lost in his thoughts that he’d not heard the enormous, golden dragon moving behind him, and he exhaled too. Fury nuzzled him gently and crooned softly. “You are thoughtful,” he said. “Even… sad?”

“Just thinking about what my sister must be going through right now, thinking I’m dead.”

“I will fly you back today,” the dragon replied immediately. “The weather is not ideal for you, but I have a human friend who keeps horses on the plains below these mountains. You can borrow a mount from her and ride to the capital. If I try to approach, they’ll shoot me down on sight without realising what a precious cargo I would be carrying,” he added, and huffed a breath out that made Nye shiver again. “You’re cold standing here on the threshold, come,” Fury added, scowling.

“Not cold,” Nye said, his voice cracking just a little. “It’s nice.”

“Oh. You had but to ask,” he smiled, and sighed out another deliciously hot breath in the cold air.

Nye brought his hand to the delicate skin between the flared nostrils and Fury jolted and then relaxed in almost the same heartbeat. “You like that?”

“Mm, very much,” he rumbled, eyes rolling slightly as he closed them. “Your touch is… wonderful.”

Nye moved his hands along the dragon’s head, taking his time to feel the contours beneath his hands, and Fury gasped and lay down on his belly, allowing Nye to touch him wherever he pleased. “You’re so beautiful,” Nye murmured. “Your scales are like coins… You’re like a treasure yourself…”

“Oh,” the dragon sighed, shuddering bodily.

“What?”

“That’s… That’s quite the compliment among our kind… calling someone — ah — a treasure…”

“You are,” he said, leaning closer and kissing him just in front of his closed eye. “You’re rarer than gold, too.”

“Charmer,” the dragon rumbled, but he sounded pleased. “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

“You… You want… more?”

Fury opened his eyes and regarded Nye. “I don’t want to hurt you…”

“You’re careful,” Nye said. “And clever. I’m sure we can figure something out.”

Fury let out a long, low-frequency growl that Nye felt in every fibre of his body, and then licked his lips. “I want to use my tongue on you,” the dragon rasped. “I want to taste you. I want… I want you, human. Like I’ve never wanted anything before.”

“So long as you’re careful, you can have me,” Nye said, stepping back and undressing slowly.

The dragon watched, as though Nye were a priceless statue that was being unveiled just for his pleasure. He rocked his hips from time to time against the floor, and Nye realised with a jolt of satisfaction that the dragon was as aroused by the situation as he was. “Fuck, you like this, don’t you?”

“I like you, human,” he said with a bit of a snarl to his tone. And when Nye’s dark, linen trousers and underwear hit the cave floor beside his shirt, the dragon raised his head and exhaled to drive away the goosebumps that had prickled over Nye’s skin. “Let me pick you up?” he breathed.

Nye inclined his head, and the dragon’s claws closed around his naked body. He’d never felt so vulnerable and cherished and so turned on in all his life. He went limp in the dragon’s grasp even as the sharp teeth and lashing tongue descended, seemingly to devour him. Somehow, he trusted that this was not the way he would die.

Fury parted his jaws and let his searing hot tongue lave over Nye’s entire torso and down to his groin where his cock was straining and leaking already, and when the heat of Fury’s mouth washed over him, his mind went blank with pleasure. “Gods, that’s good,” he gasped, bucking weakly in Fury’s careful hold.

“Now who’s a treasure, look at you,” the dragon purred, his deep voice skittering through Nye’s body and setting every nerve ablaze.

His tongue pressed against his cock, the friction perfect, and Nye tumbled towards his release with a shout, arching and writhing helplessly in his hold as the dragon worshipped him. When he came against his tongue, Fury gave a great groan of pleasure and Nye’s hearing warped for a moment.

When he came back to himself, Nye found Fury’s tongue gently cleaning him, and he glanced dazedly down the dragon’s belly to where he found his hard cock dripping freely onto the floor. “You can… Use… me to make you come, if… if you like…” he said vaguely.

Fury laid him down the bed and lined his hard cock up with the knight’s thighs. He was far too big to enter him, but the feel of Nye’s legs around his hard, slick cock was enough to send a rumble of ecstasy through Fury and he gasped, tilting his head up to the ceiling and rutting against him. His hips moved desperately and a constant, low-frequency growling rippled out of him.

“You’re going to make me come,” Fury groaned. “Oh I’m going to come, I’m coming… I’m…”

He lifted Nye up in his talons while his back legs pistoned helplessly, and he spilled over the silk sheet beneath him and halfway up Nye’s legs and torso. His hot come covered Nye’s skin despite the dragon’s best efforts to raise him out of it, and the feel of it around his cock and over his abs nearly made him come again right on the heels of his first orgasm.

When the dragon finally stopped, he lowered Nye to the cleaner part of the bed and let out a long, rumbling purr. “Are you alright?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Nye chuckled. “Fuck, that was hot.”

Fury gently cleaned him and he dressed in one of the finer silk shirts from the dragon’s collection.

“Is this what you hoard then?” Nye asked, plucking at the sleeve of the garment.

“Mmm? Oh, no,” came Fury’s sleepy reply from where he’d curled up on his nest after discarding the fabric that had been ruined by his release. “I just collected it for my own comfort over the years. Come here.”

Nye lay down with him and let the dragon’s warmth seep into him while the world passed them by for another day. They made love again later, and Fury took his time to take Nye apart a second, third, and even a fourth time before the sun set on their secret lair.

The following morning though, Fury woke to find Nye dressed in his armour and ready to leave. “Wait,” the beautiful, gentle, golden dragon said. “Before you go, I want you to see something. Go down that staircase, and I will meet you at the other end.”

Nye nodded and headed off in the direction the dragon had pointed, turning down a switchback staircase cut into the rock. He came out in a pitch dark room with no idea how large the echoing space was until a warm light trickled around the edge in a creeping tide. He looked and found, astonished, that a channel of oil had been ignited, and the light was racing around the perimeter of a massive chamber, at the centre of which were rows and rows of… books.

Kept at a safe distance from the fire, the books were stored on stone shelves, and he stepped out to find ancient tomes, perfectly preserved by the stable atmosphere and humidity of the chamber. From behind him, he heard the steady footsteps of the dragon, and turned to find him rounding the corner, scales shimmering in the low light.

“This is your hoard?” he asked.

“Mm,” the dragon nodded. “Silly really, but your kind are fascinating to me. The way you chronicle everything… Look there,” he added and pointed to a nearby shelf. The two approached it together and the dragon raised a talon to a particular tome.

Nye drew it off the shelf and realised it was a tome dedicated to healing.

“That might help the lord you told me about. The one who was travelling to the capital for relief from his illness,” Fury said. “When you described his symptoms to me, I thought of that book. Take it with you today, and it might save him if your sister can prepare the necessary tinctures for him.”

The knight looked up at the dragon and his eyes brimmed with quiet tears. “You’re not at all what I thought you’d be,” he croaked.

Fury lowered his head and exhaled just to make Nye shiver. “Nor are you, human.”

With a heavy heart, Nye let Fury pick him up, and they began their journey southwards in silence. The wind roared in his ears and he curled up in the protective embrace of the dragon’s claws, enjoying the ride but wishing he had warmer clothes.

Eventually they dipped low over the landscape and Fury touched down in a snow-dusted pasture while a few horses scattered and whinnied indignantly at their arrival.

From the small farmhouse nearby, a middle aged woman emerged and put her hands on her hips when she saw the dragon.

“Your friend?” Nye asked as he was set gently down in the snow and Fury stepped back.

Eliara was wary of a stranger at first, though not of the huge, golden dragon it seemed, but when Fury vouched for him, she lent Aneirin a horse on the condition that he would bring the mare back to her in the same condition when he was able. He swore an oath to do so, and she seemed satisfied.

“Will I ever see you again?” Nye asked Fury while they stood on the snowy road outside the barn where some of the less hardy horses were kept.

Fury bit his lower lip and then said, “If you wish it, I can give you a gift that will allow you to see me again.”

“I do,” he said. “I… I want to tell Ruairí that you’re not an enemy to the kingdom but an ally. I want him to meet you. I want… I want you to be welcome in our lands. Providing you don’t eat our sheep…”

He rumbled a low laugh and dipped his head to nuzzle Nye’s side. The horse seemed completely unbothered by his presence. “No, precious one. I will not eat your people’s sheep. There are plenty of wild ones to sustain me.” He drew in a deep breath and held it before rising up to reveal his chest and exhaling gently. Taking his talons like two pincers, he plucked free a single, golden scale from right over his heart and held it out to Nye.

The knight took it like it was a sacred relic and held it in the palm of his hand. Its warmth was surprising, and he closed his fingers around it before looking up for an explanation.

“My magic will allow me to feel what you feel when you hold it against your skin, Nye,” he said. “If you wish to see me, I will know it, and I will come.”

Nye squeezed it tight and tried to ignore the ache in his chest. “I wish you could come with me now,” he said, “But you’re right. They would attack you this time.”

“Perhaps in the future,” Fury smiled. “Don’t be sad… It… I do not like to feel you sad…”

Nye kissed the smooth scales between the dragon’s nostrils and tucked the gifted scale safely into the pouch on his belt. “I’ll have it made into a pendant that I can wear around my neck, always.”

Fury swallowed thickly and looked away, but he was obviously deeply moved by the promise.

Eliara’s palomino mare might have been alright with the dragon’s presence, but she was not at all happy at the prospect of a ride in the snow. She did allow Nye to mount, though only after making her sentiments known with a hefty nip on his arm. With an oath to return the mare and a promise to the dragon to summon him when he was first able to, Nye set off for the capital.

Eliara’s stud was only a day’s ride from the city walls, and when Nye trotted in near sunset, the first place he went was the Temple of Healing. Seren screeched when she saw her brother and flew at him, looping her arms around his neck and sobbing. “I thought you were dead,” she cried. “The prince said…”

“Hush,” he smiled, holding her too. “It’s quite the tale, but first, this is for you. It is for Lord Mortingale.”

Thanks to the lost knowledge in the book, the lord was healed within in a month, and Nye returned to his life in the castle. Ruairí begged him to tell every detail of his time with the dragon, and while Nye was a loyal servant to the crown, he felt justified in not telling his prince quite everything… Magister Ferrar seemed to suspect a deeper bond existed between the two of them than simple friendship, but if he did, he kept that to himself.

When spring melted the snow and the crocuses pushed their bold, purple spearheads through the frosty ground to liven up the pastures, Nye took the mare and his own black gelding which Ruairí had led back to the castle when he’d been snatched away by Fury, and he returned the mare to Eliara.

Then, in the privacy of the deserted, wildflower meadow, he took the silver pendant that he had had crafted for him and cradled it in his hand, closing his eyes and trying to beg the dragon silently to come to him.

He waited in the pasture for an hour before he heard the beating of wings and when he looked up into the clear, spring sky, he saw a flash of gold and his heart leapt. The dragon banked, showing his gleaming wings, and a huge gout of flame burst from his maw across the sky like a pennant before he turned, tucked his wings, and made a peregrine dive towards the meadow.

He barely stopped in time to avoid crushing Nye beneath him, and when he nuzzled him like a cat over and over, rumbling and purring and crooning, Nye laughed and kissed him. “I missed you too, Fury,” he said.

“You have no idea,” the dragon replied. “Gods, you have no idea. Are you well?”

“Can’t you tell?” he asked, only then releasing the large pendant to dangle back against his chest.

“Yes,” Fury laughed. “Yes, I can. My most precious treasure, you are happy and I love it. I missed you. Will you fly with me?”

Nye turned and looked back to find Eliara standing at a polite distance. The horsewoman nodded once and called, “I’ll keep your gelding for you til you return.”

“Thank you,” he said.

And with that, the dragon picked him up and thrashed his wings hard, taking off and soaring up into the clear sky.

Nye spent a week at Fury’s home, and after that, he returned to the capital with Fury this time.

Ruairí was the first to greet the dragon, and he swore that Fury could come and go from their city in peace, so long as he respected the same bargain. Fury solemnly gave his oath in return. The second human to greet Fury was Seren, and the two spent a solid three hours talking about healing treatises until Nye and the prince interrupted politely with an offer of refreshments. Fury had no time for Magister Ferrar, apparently.

Thus, the ancient alliance between dragon and human was reforged by a knight and his golden dragon, and Nye spent the days when he wasn’t at his prince’s side in the loving arms of his dragon.

__

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And yet, the general alert on your space suit had just calmly announced that a heavy cruiser bearing the insignia and codes of the Porphaerian Empire was inbound to your location and all civilians of the Republic were advised to evacuate the planet as soon as possible and make their way to the nearest Bastion. You weren’t even sure where the nearest military outpost was, given that the ever-belligerent Porphaerian Empire had never shown any interest in invertebrates on remote planets before, and this planet in particular sat on the outer reaches of the known universe and was so bloody insignificant that it hadn’t even acquired a proper name. It was still just: OR-2559-B.

“The fuck?” It came out as a little strangled yelp as you looked up into the purple-ish blue of your dear OR-2559-B’s atmosphere to find the silhouette of a huge ship appearing out of the veil of wispy clouds that whisked and drifted around on the upper currents. These things were only supposed to exist in immersive VR cinemas, and only then to get blown up by plucky pilots operating under astronomically small odds. Plucky you might have been, but you were neither a pilot nor currently in possession of anything more powerful than a handheld scanner for identifying the chemical composition of various types of bug goop. Your ship didn’t even have cannons, though there was a small pistol under the console, just in case.

You snatched up the tray of samples you’d spent the last three hours taking from the placid wildlife around the stream and legged it back towards the small and laughably fragile buggy that you used to cover greater distances into the field from your research ship. By the time you’d jounced over the rough terrain of the plateau and yelled at your little buggy to please find a little more juice in her batteries to get you up the hill at a pace faster than a mildly-inconvenienced slug, you saw other shapes flitting like bats around the underside of the huge cruiser. Fighters.

“Oh come on,” you groaned. Your ship lowered the ramp as it detected your approach and you steered the wheezing buggy up the incline and into the cargo hold, tripping over the side of the roll cage as you floundered to exit the darned thing, and raced to the hatch that would lead you up into the cockpit.

Sweeping a week’s worth of papers and vac-packed ration wrappers off the console, you punched in your code and yelled at the ship to come out of its sleepy hibernation state, which it did with enviable efficiency.

“Hostile signatures detected,” she said in that irritatingly calm voice she had under all circumstances.

“Well the fuck aware, thank you. Now, can we get out of here please?”

The brief thought flickered across your mind that it probably wouldn’t help matters if the ship’s AI screamed at you in panic instead of speaking in a monotone if she blew something down in the engine room, but you had little time to dwell on that as a larger fighter roared right past the windshield and a huge energy blast swept over the ship.

Instinctively, you covered your face and closed your eyes, and when the accompanying cloud of dust and debris had finished raining down and clinking off the glass and metal structure of the ship, you realised she had gone eerily quiet. “Girlie?” you exhaled into the relative silence.

Nothing. Hell, you’d take that dull monotone over this any day.

Opening your eyes and lowering your arms, your body flooded with adrenaline when you saw that all her screens were dark, and the lights had gone off. “Oh, you fucking assholes!” you yelled in the vague direction of the enemy cruiser. “You want my bug slime? Fine! Take it! But you leave my fucking ship alone!”

It was strange what came out of your mouth in times of stress, but you weren’t given the luxury of being able to the psychology of a lone human put suddenly under the immense pressure of an unforeseen and life-threatening situation, because a small fighter landed outside and you scrabbled under the console to retrieve the pistol that you’d placed there on the off-chance you ran into something that thought a scrawny research scientist in a space suit looked more appealing than its usual diet.

A blaster bolt battered its way through the hull of your ship and several more created an enormous smoking hole where the hatch had been, and you stood there, wide eyed, as three Porphaerian soldiers appeared like cartoon villains out of the twisting black smoke. They were all wearing black, form-fitting space suits made of some fancy, matte, composite material, and a shiny, black helmet with a blacked-out visor that revealed nothing of their slightly reptilian features underneath. Their three-fingered hands were also gloved, and they all bore a weapon of some kind: the one at the front of the trio had a blaster, while the one to their left — your right — had some kind of bludgeon that zapped with a purple energy at one end, and the other had a net that crackled with the same energy and a trident with barbed points.

“What do you want?” you chirped, hoping you sounded more composed than you felt. You tightened your hold on the grip of your pistol at your side, and glared at them. “And why are you blowing holes in my baby girl’s hull? She’s a scientist. What’s she ever done to you?”

Your words and tone seemed to confuse the leader of the three Porphaerians for a moment, and they froze, tilting their helmeted head to one side. Seven foot tall, bipedal, with four arms and a long, slashing tail that whipped back and forth behind it like a lizard in a tizzy, they should have been intimidating, but you were so damned outraged at the whole situation, it was hard to be fully afraid. The one to their left let out a growl and chittered something in their incomprehensible language. That was just one of the many things that made the bloody Porphaerians think they were better than everyone else: they had the most convoluted and complicated method of communication out of almost all known species.

“Well, what the fuck do you want?” you barked. As if you had somewhere else you needed to be.

With a put-upon sigh, the leader began to talk in Galactic Common, though their mouth full of pointed teeth wasn’t really equipped for its syllables. “You are in… possession of… a substance that is of… interest to our Great and Glorious Empire.”

You blinked. “You guys… really do want my bug slime?”

“Your… what?”

“I’m a scientist. I’m studying invertebrates. Bugs. The slug outside — its name is Goldie, by the way, and it had better not have come to any harm because of you losers — has become a bit of a mascot in the week and a half it’s been resting on that rock.”

“We are not here for… ‘bugs’.”

“Then I’ve got nothing for you, buddy,” you said with a slightly wild grin that was about 99% panic. If you had nothing to offer them, they’d probably just kill you for the inconvenience of a wasted trip. “But if you tell me more about what you’re after, then perhaps I can help?” You had no intention of actually helping them, but stalling them was going to buy you a few more precious minutes to think of a way out of this, so you took it.

“You are… researching… the refractive properties of… a newly-discovered mineral,” the leader said in stilted Common. “Surrender your research and all samples, and we will leave you unharmed.”

Minerals. Shit, that was the nice team from Meliikos Prime.

“I see that you are cognisant of our request.”

“I… what? No.” You stuck your thumb comically towards your chest and grinned, “Bug guy. Not rocks. And that was not a request either. You guys need to work on your Common. Your vocab is seriously lacking.”

One of them twitched their head as if something had come in over the comms, and all three of them tightened their grip on their weapons.

“Seems like you were telling the truth,” the leader scoffed and raised their blaster.

You barely got to duck out of the way before a shot went off, but when you rolled and came up, you saw that the hole where they’d been standing was now empty. A second later, you heard scuttling on the roof of your ship and panic set in for the first time.

The tapping of many legs skittered across the roof and towards the gap in the side, and then at the top of the hole caused by the Porphaerian’s blaster damage, a creature appeared, peering down over the torn and burned edge of the hole. At first, all you saw was a pair of long, caramel brown antennae investigating the space, but a head soon followed, adorned with colossal, mean looking mandibles that could probably punch a second hole through your poor ship’s hull with even less effort than the blaster bolt.

“What the fuck?” you coughed, reeling backwards. You’d never seen any sign of a centipede that size on this planet. When you spotted one of the Porphaerians moving in the limited view outside though, raising their weapon, you yelped and flailed your arms to get it to move, “Watch out!”

In a sinuous motion, the creature looked up, hissed, and slithered on its series of many, jointed legs down to where the Porphaerian was now standing. It reared up, lashing out with forelegs that looked at once deadly and fragile, like alabaster in the strange light of the planet’s atmosphere, and then in a flash, it lunged for the neck of its would-be attacker and closed its steel-jaw mandibles around it. A green fluid burst like an overripe fruit, and you wondered if that was Porphaerian blood or the creature’s venom. The second Porphaerian was caught by the whiplash of its tail and flung into the side of their fighter ship, and the third was nowhere to be seen.

When the centipede-like creature was done decapitating, it turned around and regarded you. It wasn’t just a giant centipede, you realised, as it had more of an upper torso section, with armoured ‘shoulders’ and a couple of limbs at the top that were more like arms with hands than the sickle-like claws that adorned the rest of the legs on its long, segmented, chocolate brown body, and it was regarding you from black, beady eyes with obvious intellect.

Only when it paused, staring at you while your charred ship smoked like something forgotten on a barbecue, did you notice that it had a kind of bandoleer around those shoulders, though it didn’t have cartridges or ammunition that you could see. Instead, there were pockets and some kind of comms device, and… you frowned. “You’re… with the Republic?” you faltered when you saw the insignia.

The alien nodded.

“You have any idea why the fuck the fucking Porphaerian Empire was after my little research ship? Actually, scratch that. They said they were after some funky mineral and — oh God, the geology guys! They —”

The creature chittered something at you, and while you didn’t understand it, you realised it had a distinct air of impatience, with a touch of exasperation thrown in too.

“What?”

Its chitinous shoulders drooped and it scuttled a little closer to the blackened hole in your ship before rearing up and peering in like a dog looking out of a window. You almost laughed, and then realised you were probably a little hysterical from all the adrenaline.

In a rasping, scraping voice, the creature said in Galactic Common, “The team from Meliikos are safe. They told me about you. I came to get you. We need to leave.” Then, after casting a quick, backwards glance, they added, “Now.”

And before you could do so much as grab your favourite pencil from your workstation, the creature had slithered into the ship, scooped you up in its uppermost arms, and was retreating at what felt like a hundred miles an hour out of the shell of your destroyed ship, and out towards the rocky plateau at the bottom of the slope.

As you passed the seemingly-dormant giant slug, you chuckled as it raised its head, eye-stems appearing, and you waved. “So long, Goldie! Take care! I’ll miss our chats!”

“Are you… alright?” the centipede-alien asked, sounding genuinely concerned for your sanity.

Perhaps you’d been alone on OR-2559-B for a few months too long after all. With a shrug, you let yourself be jostled lightly along in their arms and tried not to watch the mesmeric pattern of their honey-gold legs as they rippled beneath their segmented body over the uneven terrain. “Goldie’s been by my side since I got here. I’ve shared most of my research with her. I’m 95% sure she has some pretty nuanced opinions on that comedy military drama thing that came out on earth about a hundred years ago…”

“I will have you checked out by our ship’s medic,” the centipede-alien said as they thundered over the terrain, and you laughed and settled into their arms. Your research had been funded by the Republic, so if one of their soldiers had been sent to rescue you, they could file the reports and figure out what happened next. Honestly, as much as you’d formed an attachment to the community of flamboyant flatworms and the super-gigantic slug, you were suddenly looking forward to an excuse to go off-world and, you know, interact with people again. You just had to make it past the heavy cruiser and its fleet of fighters first.

It turned out that your centipede friend was part of some kind of elite team that made extraction from a hostile environment look like a visit to the archives, and you were tucked away in the corner of their nippy little shuttle while an alien of a species you didn’t recognise, with a crown of antlers and skin like a red nebula, piloted you away from the Porphaerians and out into deeper space. It was one of the roughest take-offs you’d ever endured, but it worked, and it was oddly heart-warming when the Meliikos team all looked around and waved at you in obvious relief when the centipede-alien brought you on board the Republic ship.

The ship’s medic turned out to be really nice, and when you explained that your supplies had all been left on the research ship along with literally the rest of your life in space, they set you up again with your regular prescriptions, and checked you over. After you’d recovered from the aftereffects of the shock, they were happy to discharge you, and you headed out to explore the ship.

Just as you waved your hand in front of the release mechanism for the medbay door though, it was opened by someone from outside, and you took a step back to avoid a collision. The person on the other side halted abruptly in the doorway — literally filling the doorway — and you tipped your head up to take in the full sight of them. It was your saviour, and you grinned at them at the same time as they made a kind of chittering with their thick, black mandibles and waggled their long antennae.

“Hey,” you smiled. “Listen, thanks for getting me out of there like that. I was kind of out of it on the ride over. I never got your name.”

A series of distinctive clicks and chatters left the creature, and you grimaced.

“You got a Galactic Common alternative? My mouth doesn’t, uh… move like that.” The more you thought about their mouth though, the more interested you were in them. They really were beautiful, with a mahogany brown, segmented body and paler legs, and a head with a woodgrain pattern that you hadn’t noticed before.

The centipede alien nodded and laughed, and then said in that harsh voice like bending steel, “I’ve been called ‘Kerritt’ before by humans because of the sound of my name in my own language. You may call me Kerritt, and I use the human equivalent of male pronouns. What should I call you?”

You told him, and he nodded seriously.

“Are you feeling well? I could show you around the ship, but the First Officer would like to speak with you before we do anything else. She sent me down to see if you are well enough to have an audience with her.”

He spoke in short, stilted phrases and his upper body swayed a little. The majority of his body was like that of a giant centipede, but he had a definite waist section that was different from the rest of the segments of chitin and it rose vertically while the rest of him stayed parallel to the ground. And yes, those uppermost limbs were definitely more like arms, with hands that ended in chitinous points and sections of chitin that were more like bracers and gauntlets. His eyes were glossy black, almond shaped, and huge. The way they were placed far apart on his insectoid head was really rather sweet as he regarded you attentively, his long antennae constantly waving up and down in a slow, mesmeric pattern.

“I’m good,” you nodded. “Bit shaken up, and confused as heck, but I’m good. Let’s go talk to your First Officer. Maybe she can explain why the fuck the Porphaerians mistook the bugs guy for the rocks guys.”

He chuckled. “The Meliikosian team will take offence if you call them the ‘rocks guys’,” he said as he turned around in a sinuous curve and began to lead you up the ship’s gleaming corridor towards the bridge. “They are a proud and reserved people.”

“Nah, we’re cool. They like me. They waved at me when you brought me on board. In their culture, that’s practically a marriage proposal, right?”

Again, Kerritt laughed. “Perhaps. Though if you’re so easy to get along with, why did your university send you to one of the most remote places in the entire universe?”

“Ouch! Actually, the Head of the Department was so jealous of my research that she got me funding for a project that would take me as far from the capital as it’s possible to go…” you said in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Really?”

“No,” you snorted. “I have an insatiable hunger for the unknown, and some trader mentioned that a cargo pilot said that a friend of hers said there were weird bugs on OR-2559-B. So, I got funding and headed out.”

“That’s… convoluted,” Kerritt said diplomatically. “You went all that way to study invertebrates? Are there none on your planet?”

You eyed him up and down and watched his antennae pull back a little. Was that trepidation? “Sure there are, but what can I say? I’m a dedicated researcher.”

“Right.”

The conversation with the First Officer didn’t last long. She was a colossal Grummgarian with orange-yellow skin and horns on her chin, and absolutely zero patience. When she realised that the only reason you’d drawn Porphaerian attention was by accident, she informed you that you’d be dropped off at the Bastion and would be provided with transport passes back to your university, before she dismissed you with a wave of her three-fingered hand and Kerritt escorted you from the bridge.

“A bit of warning would have been nice,” you shot sidelong at him as the doors closed behind you with a soft thunk.

“There is no warning adequate for that woman,” he said dryly. “You were better off going in cold. Shall I give you a tour of the ship?”

You nodded and followed him as he helped you get your bearings. “Tell me about yourself?” you asked. “I mean, I’ve met a few different species, but I’ve never met anyone quite like you.”

“Oh,” he said, and clicked his mandibles. “Do you wish to study me too then? Since I am technically an invertebrate myself, after all.”

“Maybe, if you’ll let me,” you said with a wink and watched his antennae pull back again.

“I think I could be persuaded,” he replied. “I’ve not had much contact with your kind either. I didn’t expect you to be so…” he leaned down and tilted his head “… soft. How did you survive the atmosphere of OR-2559-B? I was led to believe that you require higher oxygen levels for respiration?”

“Space suit,” you said. “It did make me a bit dizzy sometimes, but you know, that can be fun too, under the right circumstances.”

“My sources were right about one thing,” Kerritt said dryly as he drew himself back up to his usual posture.

“What’s that?”

“Humans have strange preferences.”

“Baby, you have no idea,” you laughed, shaking your head. “Come on, let’s finish this tour before I keel over. I’m exhausted.”

The two of you traded light conversation back and forth as he led you up corridors and companionways until that banter devolved steadily into cautious but very much overt flirting, and when he left you at the door to what would be your quarters for the short hop to the Republic Bastion, you said, “If I weren’t so tired that I might pass out before the fun even gets started, I’d invite you in.”

“Another time,” he said with a sympathetic bow of his head. “My quarters are up the corridor, should you need me. I’m off duty for a while now.”

“Nice. And thanks for showing me round.”

Kerritt gave another nod, and then he left.

You watched him go down the corridor to another door, his legs rippling in a sinuous sequence to take him forward, and you remembered how it felt to be carried along in his arms and shivered. Your body was running on fumes, but your brain still liked the memory of that strange, chitinous creature holding you in his arms.

You barely had the energy to shower in the cramped en suite, but once you’d changed into something more comfortable and less singed and gritty than your current outfit, you fell onto the bed and slept for sixteen hours straight.

When you woke and dressed, and staggered out into the corridor, your first port of call was the refectory to silence your growling stomach, but everything was closed since it wasn’t the ship’s mealtime. A diminutive creature with four arms and scaled, purple skin looked up from one of the tables in the empty dining area though and chirped something that sounded like an exclamation.

“Wait, human! Kerritt told me about you!” They had a head like a snake and thick spines all down their back, and although they wore clothing over their top half, their lower half was a thick, sinuous tail that uncoiled as they pushed back from the table and made their way over to you. “You want some food? I’ve never cooked for a human before. There aren’t any on this ship, and I joined the Mantis straight from the academy. I had to look up recipes for you in the species guide! I’m not sure what you’d like, but I made six earth dishes for you to choose from. They’re keeping warm now. I didn’t know when you’d be by.”

Their enthusiasm was almost overwhelming after a sleep that was essentially a fully-blown hibernation, but you nodded and let them lead you into the kitchen where you chose something that vaguely resembled beef chilli, though the beans weren’t the usual ones. They were turquoise blue, but they tasted ok.

You were about halfway through an enormous bowl of it when Kerritt entered the dining hall looking tense. That was, he looked tense until he saw you, at which point he sighed and scuttled over in that smooth way you found so attractive, his body moving like a ribbon between the tables.

“You’re awake,” he said when he reached you. “Are you alright? I had to ask the ship’s computer if there was still life detected in your quarters.”

You laughed long and loud. “Yeah, I do that sometimes. Sorry. Yeah, I’m good. Turns out my faithful little research ship, rest in pieces, wasn’t actually built for long-term habitation, because my god the mattress in my bunk here is like sleeping on a cloud, I swear.” You took another spoonful of ‘chilli’ and asked, “How’s things?”

“The ship is on course to dock at the Bastion in seventeen hours,” he said, apparently not sure quite what you’d meant. “Everyone is interested in meeting a human. They have been asking me many questions about you.”

“Oh? What did you tell them?”

“That I have only known you a few hours and cannot speak on your behalf.”

You smiled at him and shook your head. “Ah, you’re a good soul, you know that, Kerritt? I like you. Tell you what, when I’ve finished this… uh… ‘chilli’, you can introduce me to your friends.”

He nodded. “May I keep you company until then?”

“I’d love that,” you replied. “You can tell me how the Republic knew about the attack in the first place.”

While he was talking, a few people drifted in and approached when they saw that you were there, talking with Kerritt. It seemed like he was something of a hero among the crew himself, and the array of non-humans aboard varied from the reptilian cook with their purple skin to another invertebrate built more like a spider than a centipede, and several humanoid species, though the differences between you and them were marked. Long after you’d finished your chilli, you were all still gathered around your table, chatting and laughing together, and as people left to tend to their duties or head to their bunks for their downtime, you remarked to Kerritt what a tight-knit crew they had.

He nodded. “We’ve seen a lot of action together in the Vith Sector. It has a way of bonding a crew.”

“For sure,” you said, turning more serious. That sector was where the Porphaerians had been making their most aggressive moves in the last decade of their expansion. You sighed and stretched your neck a little.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Mm. Might walk around a bit for a while. Stretch my legs. Wanna join me?”

He bowed his head and scuttled back from where he’d been coiled up on himself while you’d been talking. His legs moved like clockwork parts, clicking on the shiny floor of the refectory, and you bit your lip and ached to touch.

His mandibles drifted a little further apart for a moment, and you got the impression he was scenting the air, but he took it no further and you tried hard to ignore how attractive you found him and his strange body while you walked the ship’s halls together.

Down in engineering, you visited one of the people you’d just met, and they showed you a few details of how the ship’s engine worked, until you started yawning again, and Kerritt took you back up to the corridor with the living quarters.

“You know, I’m tired, but I'm not actually all that sleepy,” you said. “I think it’s just the stress of what happened.”

“Perhaps… you would like to relax in my room? The permanent crew’s quarters are much bigger than the guest room you were assigned.”

“Sure,” you said with a smile. “Thank you.”

He continued down the corridor to his own room and you followed at his side.

“You know,” you said as he tapped a wristband to the reader in front of his door and it opened almost silently, “I never thanked you for saving my life. Those were some pretty badass moves back there. I’ve never had anyone defend me like that.”

His antennae flicked back in what you were now certain was a bashful expression, and he shrugged one chitinous shoulder. “My unit is trained to handle unusual situations.”

“I count as an unusual situation, do I?”

“I… what?”

“You handled me pretty well.”

If his entirely-black eyes could have rolled, you were certain they would have done, but he waved his hand in front of the door panel and it shut before anyone else on the ship could overhear you. 

“You are very… forward, human,” he said, coming closer; close enough to touch.

You reached slowly for his ‘chest’ — or at least, for the section of his body that rose vertically, and which had much smaller segmented parts than the rest of him — and you held your hand out, palm facing him, just a few centimetres from his body. “May I?” you breathed.

He nodded. His own body had gone utterly still. All those mechanical legs holding him rigid as he tilted his head down to regard you, antennae pricked forwards.

Your hand connected with his cool body and a shudder ran through him from head to tail. A second later, lines of neon, bioluminescent green flashed along the length of his body and you gasped, taking your hand away in surprise before pressing it back down and watching the light pulse out a second time. “God, you’re beautiful. Can you feel that then?”

“Yes. Touch is our primary sense.”

You’d suspected as much, but you’d wanted to be sure. You brought your right hand up to meet your left and stood slowly, running your hands up his chest. All the while, his natural bioluminescence pulsed along his body, beginning at the point where you touched him and zipping down the segments of his body like lightning in a regular pattern. The chitin beneath your fingertips felt like glass: smooth and cool and oddly fragile. Your fingers traced the line of one of the segments that sat like armour on his shoulders and he gave another soft gasp and a shiver.

“May I touch you?” he asked.

“God yes,” you laughed, and he brought his clawed hands to your waist then up your torso and neck to rake the points of his fingertips across your scalp. For a second, your soul felt like it left your body and you tipped your head back and moaned.

“You enjoy touch too.”

“Unnfff.”

“Yes?”

You nodded.

“May I pick you up?”

A second and more enthusiastic “unnfff,” left your lips and he chuckled, lowering his mouth towards you for just an instant before he twitched backwards. “Mm?” you asked, only dimly aware that he was actually carrying you across the room towards his wide, comfortable bed now.

“I have to be careful. I have a lot of venom. It’s deadly to humans. Deadly to most species, actually.”

“Oh. I guess that means I can’t kiss you there then.”

“I have to inject my venom for it to be dangerous,” he said, “But I still have to be careful. It’s something of a reflex when I am… aroused.”

“I turn you on, huh?” you slurred cheekily.

“Yes.”

You loved how direct he was, and as he laid you down on the bed and moved his fingers to pause at the fastening of your clothes, you nodded before he could ask permission. He still did, of course, but it was more of a formality at that point. He raked his claws experimentally over your skin, so light it almost tickled, and you arched off the bed.

“I can smell you,” he said when he’d let your clothes fall to the floor. “May I taste you?”

You nodded, desperate to feel his mandibles against your skin. You were swollen and hard and sensitive already, and when he parted his huge mandibles wide to reveal his mouth and a black tongue, you bucked and whimpered and parted your legs for him.

The feel of his tongue exploring up the inside of your thighs was a torture of the best kind, and by the time he closed his mouth around your t-cock, you felt like you might come just from the touch alone. You had no idea what words came tumbling out of your mouth, but he let out a rumbling growl that made his whole body shake and pulse with light again, and you nearly yelled as he dug his claw-like hands into the muscle of your thighs.

You couldn’t think terribly clearly as he got back to work in earnest, practically worshipping your body with his mouth, his onyx mandibles raised just safely enough not to puncture your body but not far enough away that the wicked sharp tips didn’t prick your skin from time to time. His antennae glanced against your waist and shoulders from time to time and you had to restrain yourself from grabbing onto them. They were not horns, and you might even hurt him if you did. It was tantalising and you thrust your head back into the pillow behind you and let out a long, yowling cry of pleasure as you got closer and closer to coming.

Kerritt picked you up again, lifting you right off the bed with ease, and he brought the smooth segments of his lower body to touch yours as he lay down facing you on the bed beside you, encasing you in the cage of his many legs. The feeling of being held and almost immobilised was intoxicating, and you reached a hand up for his head and gripped around the smooth, curved contour of one mandible. He groaned again and you grabbed for the other with your free hand.

“How careful do I have to be with these?” you asked in a rough voice.

They parted and flexed just a little under your hold, but you could feel the immense strength behind them. You’d been right when you’d thought idly that they could punch through steel. One bite from those and you’d be dead.

“Not that careful,” he said, clearly amused behind his growing arousal.

He rubbed his glowing body slowly against you, catching your cock just perfectly with a smooth segment and you wrapped both legs around between two pairs of his legs to adjust the angle and the pressure. He was getting wet from the opening in his carapace, and the combined mess you were making was enough to set your head spinning.

“I’m gonna come,” you breathed as he picked up his pace, fucking against you more wildly with each of your pounding heartbeats. “Oh god, you’re going to make me come.”

“I’m close too,” he said, and you felt his mandibles start to shake and tremble in your grip. “I want to bite you,” he groaned. “I’m going to bite —”

The thick ring of his black mandibles slipped from your hold and in the blink of an eye they’d closed around your neck like a collar. You came with a blinding intensity, bucking against him while his hot tongue pressed against your throat.

A second later, his whole body locked up and he spilled over you in a rush of hot come that went up your stomach and down between your thighs while his whole body spasmed helplessly. His tail curled around you, locking you even more securely in place while his orgasm wracked his entire body, his legs tightening like the jaws of a bear trap against your naked body.

Eventually he stopped and went slack on the bed, and his mandibles opened slowly. All the chinks in his chitinous armour glowed a steady, quiescent green, and his antennae felt and tested at your neck. You nearly laughed at the tickling contrast between the powerful jaws and tender antennae.

“Did I hurt you? Tell me I didn’t hurt you,” he croaked.

“M’good,” you smiled and kissed one black, glossy mandible before he raised it completely out of reach.

He sighed with relief. “I’m sorry. My kind tend to lock in place during… you know. I thought perhaps with you it would be different, but… I’m sorry. It was a risk I shouldn’t have taken with you.”

“S’all good,” you said, your mind blissfully foggy in the wake of the best orgasm you’d had in months. “Come back here,” you said, petting the side of your neck to try and get him to hold you there again with his mandibles.

He did return his grip to your neck, and he slowly coiled his entire body around yours again while the two of you came down together.

“I think you’ve ruined sex with any other species for me after that,” you mumbled a while later.

Carefully, he withdrew his mandibles from you again and nuzzled the smooth top of his head against you, making a soft, crooning noise akin to purr.

“As I think you have for me,” he rumbled.

Without warning, the door to his quarters opened with its near silent sigh of metal on metal, and someone strode in, looking down at a screen in their hand. “Hey, Kerritt, I need you to sign this report for —”

Kerritt drew you even closer to him, masking you completely from whoever had intruded, and he hissed loudly at them over your head like a cobra.

“Shit! Sorry!” they barked, clearly as taken by surprise at the hissing as he had been by their arrival. “You never have company. I just… I’m so sorry! I’ll… uh… it can wait.”

You started laughing even before he set you back down on the bed, and by the time he had relaxed enough to draw back from his protective hold on you, your laugh had turned into a proper cackle.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” he snapped.

“I’ve never had a partner hiss at someone to defend my dignity,” you said, wiping tears from your eyes and pushing up onto one elbow.

He regarded you flatly, and you reached carefully for the nearest antenna, running your fingertip along it before encircling it suggestively with thumb and fingers until he gave another huge, full-body shiver and let out a little moan, light pulsing again.  

“It’s sweet, that’s all,” you smiled and then asked, “You think you’ve got another one in you, big guy?”

“Keep touching me like that and find out,” Kerritt muttered, rolling onto his back, at once docile and provocative, and letting all the tightly-coiled segments of his body unfurl for you like a fern. That light still darted along him whenever you touched him, flaring to life to telegraph just how turned on he was by you.

This time, you rode him to orgasm, rocking your hips back and forth over his slit until you both came a second time.

Watching a creature as powerful as he was come so completely undone beneath you was probably one of the best sights you’d ever seen.

__

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“Take care, alright? Mercy said she’d seen sign of bandits in the area, and Willem said he’d heard talk of people being snatched when he took those fleeces to market last week. You shouldn’t be going out alone. None of us should really, not til things calm down.”

A little growl of frustration left you and you adjusted the gleaner’s bag on your shoulder. “I really need these supplies, Gwyn,” you said. “They’re ingredients I need to help fight off winter fevers, and if I don’t have enough, we could be in trouble come the cold in a few weeks’ time…”

“Can’t you take Garrick or Mercy with you? A good woodsman’s felling axe’ll do a hell of a lot more damage than that little sickle you’ve got on your belt…”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” you breezed. “I’m not going to be on the main road anyway.”

“Please take care,” he rumbled, and you smiled up at the enormous blacksmith. He might have had the shoulders of a rock troll and iron-shod hooves big enough to knock down a castle door, with a big burn mark all up his left arm from an accident at the forge a decade ago, but he was the gentlest and most softly-spoken person you knew.

You cursed yourself three hours later when your basket of rare, purple mushrooms lay trampled to a slimy paste on the floor of the clearing and a nasty looking wood elf with a sneer and a cruel glint in her eye had her bow trained on you, while a second elf trussed you up like a solstice bird. Your head was ringing from the surprise blow they’d dealt you to the back of the skull, and you were lucky you didn’t have a worse concussion.

“You’ll make a nice little offering for the mage,” the female elf purred while her companion straightened and marched you on unsteady feet back towards the road. “Humans like you always fetch a decent price. Something about your blood being universal for most rituals, I think…”

There on the dirt road, four horses were waiting, three of which were a normal size while the last was built like a castle wall and large enough to carry the orc sitting astride it. The orc had one milky eye and the brand of a murderer across his right cheek. “Shit,” you hissed when you saw that, and the male elf laughed cruelly when you flinched as the orc swung down and prepared to heave you onto the back of the spare horse.

Normally, if you were going to be tied up and bent over something for some rough treatment, this was not how it went. There was absolutely nothing fun or consensual about the way these bandits chucked you over the back of the horse and lashed your hands and feet to the tack so you didn’t slide off. The orc guffawed and spat off to one side when you cried out on impact as your ribs creaked and your lungs expelled all the air they’d ever contained in one ugly grunt. After that, you did just about everything you could to move with the rhythm of the cantering horse, but it was probably the most miserable experience of your life. When the group slowed to trot, the motion was so painful that you actually slipped into unconsciousness for a while, only to be jounced back some time later.

At the crossroads about ten miles north of your village — the furthest north from your little patch of paradise you’d ever roamed — they met up with a couple of other riders who had apparently been on a recce of their own to look for more people for this blood mage or whoever, but they got laughed at by the orc on his enormous, cantankerous horse for not finding any victims and rode off again without joining the party.

So, it was just you, alone in the wilderness, being taken gods-knew-where, by two feral elf siblings and a murderous orc. Stowed like a sack of potatoes over that rangy, stinking horse for five hours of hellish riding, you were barely conscious. When they eventually stopped to make camp that night, they did let you relieve yourself in relative privacy, but once you were done, they hauled you back to their pack animals and lashed you to a tree next to them so that you couldn’t hope to escape. You could still smell the stink of them though, and it was enough to turn your empty stomach.

Their food was revolting, and their company equally repulsive. They joked loudly about all the cruel things they’d done to people in the past, and you sat there wondering why you hadn’t let Gwyn talk you into going out with the woodcutters. There were mushrooms where they were currently coppicing hazel for the winter, but no. No, you’d decided to be adventurous and clever, and to collect only the best mushrooms for your salves and tonics.

Four days later, you were almost ready to give up.

The mage’s castle they were taking you to was legendary in the northern reaches, and no one who was taken there against their will ever returned. Tales of blood magic and horrific rites involving chimera and creatures brought back from the dead had entered the local lore, and now apparently you were going to be drained of your precious blood for whatever this necromancer had planned next. And the price of that precious blood had been discussed and debated by the bandits for the last day.

Personally, you agreed with the female elf and thought you were worth more than a couple of weeks’ wages in gold, but you had no intention of allowing yourself to be squeezed dry like an orange for your blood. So, after the group stopped in a dark and snow-mottled pine forest after the fifth day of hard riding, you enacted your plan. You’d been plotting it all day, and hoped you weren’t too delirious and weak to pull it off.

When they’d let you relieve yourself the previous night, they’d not bothered to tie your hands together or watch you, since there was nowhere for you to go. You knew woodlands though, and you were pretty confident that if you gave them the slip in the dark, you could take care of yourself in the wild for a few days. Long enough to get back home anyway.

So when they started their daily round of bragging and trading boasts about how many vampires they’d killed or how they’d survived the venom of three different nagas in the same attack, you made your move.

If that darned twig hadn’t snapped, you might have got away with it, but when the male elf barked, “Oi!” into the gathering dark and swung his lantern around, you knew you’d messed up.

Breaking cover completely and legging it into the endless ranks of black-barked pine trees in the fading light of day seemed like the only option now, so you began crashing through the debris and dead branches that had gathered beneath the choking canopy of dense pine needles overhead. 

These woods were different from any you’d known before, and something dark and foreboding lingered there like a shade above a gravestone. These woods were not kind. The air was not fresh and sweet like it was between the beech and oak back home. It pooled and festered, stagnant between the rough sentinel trees, and the lower branches seemed to reach their sharp, bare fingers towards your face as you ran like a rabbit from the pack of hunting dogs behind you.

Your toe caught a root and you stumbled, and in the space where your head had just been, an arrow whizzed through the air and sank into the tree ahead of you with a thunk that almost made your heart stop. Your lungs were burning already and your legs felt shaky and weak after your rough treatment and half-rotten rations, but a brush with death that close shocked you to the core. The water they’d given you had been rancid, and your stomach churned as adrenaline curdled in your gut, but somehow you forced yourself on into the darkness.

Their voices dwindled, muffled by the carpet of fallen pine needles, until a shout went up and another arrow flew past you. This time, it left a searing pain in its wake and you clutched at your ribs where the hunting broadhead had torn through your skin. Luckily, it was superficial, but it hurt like hell and it was bleeding. Blood might draw predators out of the darkness, if your blundering and their bellowing hadn’t already.

Shit, you hadn’t thought about the horrors that probably dwelled in a place like this.

The bandits had been crowing about the ghouls and rabid cannibals that supposedly haunted these woods, and you’d passed plenty of skeletons along the roadside on your journey, your down-turned head providing you with a first-class view of them as your half-lame horse had jolted past them at its permanent, slightly-panicked jog. They hadn’t all been pack animals and horses lying in the ditch either. Some of the skulls had been humanoid, and there had been the horns of a minotaur at some point. This was a place where living things entered unwillingly, and most of them never left.

Forcing yourself onwards, you clutched your stinging side, but they were closing on you. The orc was thundering through the forest like a boar on a rampage, and the elves were quick as shadows.

“You little shit!” the female shouted from right behind you. Something heavy hit you across the back of your knees and you tripped and fell hard onto your palms as a flung tree branch rebounded off onto the forest floor. The force of the fall sent your cheek smashing into the muddy ground and you cried out as she landed triumphantly atop you and turned you over, smacking you full in the mouth out of sheer frustration.

“Gotcha,” she grinned. “You’re gonna pay for running, little rabbit,” she added with a laugh as she hauled you to your feet.

You kicked her knee from the side as hard as you could and she yowled like a cat dropped into a bath, letting go of you to stagger sideways, limping. The thing about being a healer is that you also know the weak spots where it can hurt most.

Before she could turn on you again though, something moved in the trees behind you and you all froze. The orc crashed to a halt nearby breathing hard, and the elf’s brother came over to help her stand while she spat curses at you that would have made a pirate’s ears bleed.

“What is it?” the orc growled, low and tense.

“Fuck knows. Tie him up again and let’s get the fuck back to camp,” the female elf wheezed. “I’m gonna drag him behind my horse for the rest of the way there. Shit that hurts!”

“Quiet,” her brother hissed. “Something’s out there.”

“Then let’s get fucking moving!” she countered.

You turned to glance over your shoulder and caught the shape of something white drifting in the distant trees just as the orc spotted it too. His grip tightened on the haft of his huge war-axe, and he took half a step back. Until then, he’d been the one who’d seemed steadiest; unshakable and immovable as a cannon, and he hit just as hard. Now though, he looked spooked and scared.

“They say the Death-Spinner hunts in these parts,” he said, eyes wide as he looked from side to side. “A massive white drider that strikes from the shadows and wraps you up in his web and sucks you dry…”

“It’s been too long since someone sucked you dry,” the female elf sneered at him, though the remark came out feebly and she looked around her in a twitchy, nervous motion. “Your blue balls are making you hallucinate. Come on. What are you waiting for?”

“He’s got other names too, you know,” her brother interrupted, reaching for you with a jerky movement that halted when the steady rhythm of something moving nearby rose above the whispering of the wind in the canopy. “Soul-Eater, The Weaver Ghost…”

“Please, the Death-Spinner is just a myth…” the female on your right hissed.

“Decidedly… not,” came a thin, harsh voice from the trees ahead, and your captors just bolted.

The supposedly tough bandits – the ones who had been talking about selling an actual person to a bloodmage to use in some disgusting ritual; who had joked just the previous night about flaying a minotaur like a cow on a butcher’s block; who had told you that there was nothing out here that would give a single, flying fuck about you – had fled with no more than a shriek and the clatter of boots in the dead underbrush, and left you alone with the being they called ‘Death-Spinner’.

“Better and better,” you spat, still tasting blood in your mouth from where the elf had cracked you across the mouth. “First it was ‘sold to a blood mage’ and now it’s ‘death by drider’.”

A pearlescent pale leg speared down out of the gloom that gathered between the black pines, its ivory chitin shining softly. Shaped like a thin, curved shard of polished bone, the limb moved with slow, silent grace, and it was joined by a second, needle-slender limb, then a third and a forth, until the white underbelly of the creature loomed large into your limited pool of light, followed finally by the lower part of a humanoid torso, and the large, armour-plated abdomen of the creature.

The whole of the eight-legged being was utterly colourless.

White and pendulous as the moon, the drider’s chitinous body looked like drifts of wind-blown snow that had then set into solid ice, swirling and churning across its body to rise in small peaks and troughs at the joints and high points of its legs and over the swollen curve of its abdomen.

The humanoid torso melted upwards at the hips from the body of the spider, and two, smaller, pincer-like limbs — pedipalps — were angled slightly inwards, both ending in single, wicked talons and looking like they were ready to spear you through the middle in the blink of an eye.

The drider wore no clothes, and patches of white chitin formed a kind of armour up its humanoid torso: over the hips but skirting around its lean belly, then up over its shoulders like pauldrons and creating natural bracers and gauntlets along its long, wiry arms. Its hands, you saw as it dipped a little lower into the faint glow from the elves’ abandoned lantern, were clawed, but its slightly curved talons weren’t like those of a mammal. They were simply an unbroken extension of the chitin that covered its hands and forearms.

Its face remained mostly out of sight, wreathed in the upper shadows of the trees, but you got the impression of two reddish eyes glinting at you in the dark, and long, silk-white hair flowing down its back.

“You’re bleeding,” came the slightly hoarse tenor that made your skin prickle. A creature that large should have a deeper voice, but the mellifluous timbre of the drider’s tone made you think of sirens luring sailors to their death with sweet songs and empty, deceitful promises.

“Only a bit,” you choked out, stepping back and catching your heel on the branch that the female elf had used to trip you. When you fell hard onto your backside, you caught the glint of steel in the sea of rust-red pine needles all around you, and realised that one of the elves had dropped their precious sword in their haste to escape this creature.

In a rush of blind panic, you snatched up the unfamiliar weapon and held it aloft. “Stay back!” you barked.

The laugh that rippled out of the drider chilled your blood.

“Please,” it crooned, and then it loomed down out of the shadow and into the light, squinting its two scarlet eyes against the sudden brightness. “As if a little stick like that could hurt something like me.”

The sword fell from your fingers as weakness washed through you, and you bit back a sob. “Please,” you said instead. “Please, they brought me here to sell me to a necromancer, but I… I don’t want to die like this either.”

“Die?” the drider said, and its red gaze flickered to the wound in your side. “You won’t die from that. A few silk stitches and a rest, and you’ll be good as new…” It frowned again, its white eyebrows pulling in like a loose thread in a perfect tapestry. “You’re filthy,” it said, and you noticed a diagonal scar cutting across its pale mouth as its lip pulled up on one side in a gesture of revulsion.

“Yeah, well, you try being thrown over the back end of a bandit’s horse for five days and see if you’re still that pretty at the end of it,” you retorted, exhaustion making you bold and just a little bit stupid.

The drider laughed, the sound like autumn leaves rolling down the road, and you paused. It sounded genuinely amused.

“Come, human,” it said, holding out a clawed hand. “Let’s get you somewhere where you can rest in safety.”

“Safety? What… What about… all that ‘Death-Spinner’ stuff?”

The drider paused, its huge body hanging in the twilight like a pearl. “I have no interest in consuming sapient creatures, but the rumours help to keep people out of my forest. It’s as much for their safety as mine,” it went on. “There are nastier things even than me in these parts.” The self-deprecating venom in its tone drew you up short.

“You don’t seem so bad…”

“Thank you,” it replied with flat sarcasm.

You took three more steps towards the drider before your legs gave out. In a flash faster than thought, the drider darted at you, and before you could even flinch, strong, armoured arms had caught you and lifted you up.

“You poor thing,” it crooned, and you looked up properly into its face for the first time. “You’ve really been through it, haven’t you? Easy now. I’ll take care of you.”

“Why?” you breathed, trying not to let your treacherous muscles relax into the solid frame that held you. You felt the chitin of its chest against your shoulder as it bore you along in a strangely smooth, gliding motion, the dark trunks of the trees whipping past in a blur.

“Evidently I have a soft spot for brave and lost creatures,” the drider smiled. “My name is Feluän, by the way.”

You exhaled your own name in return, and then said, “Isn’t Feluän an elven name? Some prince or something…?”

“You know your history,” the drider chuckled. “Yes, he was a prince of the snow elves a long time ago. I came across it in a history book I picked out of a caravan that was destroyed by a band of gnolls once. Their tastes run more towards beer than books…”

“I chose my own name too,” you said, the consonants feeling thick and slurred as the tiredness seeped throughout your whole body and the pain in your side mounted. “You’re a male drider then? If you named yourself after a prince, I mean. I don’t know anything about your kind really. Never… Never met one before.”

“Hush for now,” he said, squeezing you a little more tightly into his arms and drawing a moan unbidden from your lips. Gods, even in these circumstances, it felt so good to be held like this. “But yes, I am.”

The journey through the dark forest passed in a hazy blur, until you had the vague impression of torchlight and soft firelight and you were laid down on the softest surface you thought you'd maybe ever touched in your life. A long, deep groan left you and you suddenly didn’t care what happened to you.

“I’m going to stitch you up,” came the drider’s voice from somewhere nearby. “It might hurt. I can use a little of my venom to numb the area if you like…”

You nodded, not wanting any more pain, and out of the corner of your eye, you watched the drider’s white body move in the blurry shadows of the cave. He loomed over you and pressed the tip of one clawed finger to his upper canine, before bringing it to your side where he’d hitched up your shirt just enough to access the glancing wound from the arrow. A blissful numbness crept like winter ice across your skin, and you let the drider tend to you.

Tiredness claimed you not long after, but you had the distinct impression of a warm cloth being wiped gently across your face and hands before blackness washed in and you slept.

Over the course of the next few days, Feluän tended to your wound, and you forgot to be afraid of the strange creature. Centaurs had always held a fascination for you, with their animal lower halves and their humanoid upper bodies, and the way the drider moved was no less fascinating. When he wasn't tending to you, he was weaving linen and silk into the most wondrous bolts of fabric. His cave was dotted here and there with trinkets that he’d clearly pilfered from the sporadic ‘visitors’ to his part of the world, but aside from that, the cave was just that: a grotto carved out of a rise in the ground in the middle of a dank, desolate forest.

“You live alone?” you asked on the first evening you felt strong enough to get out of bed without his help. Until then, he’d forced you to stay still, and honestly, you’d been only too happy to let him boss you about and carry you around. He was sweet, but he didn't take no for an answer, and he didn’t let you wheedle your way out of anything either. Your best ‘puppy-dog’ eyes had crumbled his iron resolve a bit though, and finally he’d let you get out of his soft, cosy bed to join him by the gentle light of flames in the fire pit at the centre of his cave.

Feluän nodded. “Yes. I have spent my whole life alone. Driders are not sociable with each other by nature, and most people fear us too much to want us anywhere near them, as you saw yourself when your captors realised I was there.”

“Thank you for that, by the way,” you said as you took the carved wooden cup he offered you. It had some kind of sharp, pine-needle tea in it and he looked embarrassed that that was all he could offer you to drink apart from water. In the few days you’d been there, you’d had some kind of game broth which, while nutritious, hadn’t been particularly flavoursome. “I didn’t think I’d find anyone out here more intimidating than that orc, but you managed it.”

Across the fire, his ruby red eyes glittered and he laughed, tilting his head in your direction. He didn’t always meet your eye, you realised, and you wondered if his albinism affected his eyesight. “I live to serve,” he purred.

“The way you behave, I’d say you live to be served, but what do I know?”

Again, he laughed. “You offering, little human?” he said, cocking a white eyebrow in a way that made you feel a little dizzy.

“I might, if the rewards for service were worth it,” you replied archly, sipping the sharp tea. Its flavour reminded you of the tinctures you brewed at home, and of the people who would need you as the autumn drew to a close and winter began to coil around the edges of the village. Your shoulders dropped, and you sighed, steam from the cup swirling in front of your eyes for a moment.

“You clearly don’t think I could offer you much,” he said dryly.

“It’s not that,” you said. “It’s… I have a responsibility to the people in my village. I’m a herbalist, and the whole reason I was captured was because I was out looking for ingredients that would help fight winter fevers. If I don’t get home before the snows settle in, they’ll suffer.”

He shifted his weight where he was resting casually with all his long, spiny limbs tucked close to his pendulous body, and you realised he was feeling uncertain. “It must be nice,” he began in a new, faltering voice that you’d not heard from him before. “Nice to have people… who need you. Who… Who look to you for protection…”

You laughed softly and shook your head. “I wouldn’t say I provide any kind of protection — you want an orc or a centaur like Thom or Gwyn for that — but I help people where I can, and they’ve been good to me. I was apprenticed with their previous healer, and when he passed, I took on his mantle.”

“Tell me about them?” Feluän asked, red eyes blinking slowly in his frost-pale face. His long, white hair fell down loose to frame his high cheekbones, and the scar on his mouth was the only element in his face that interrupted the otherwise perfect symmetry of him, and it made you want to press your lips to it and see what it felt like beneath your kisses.

You looked away.

“Tell me about them before I take you back tomorrow?”

“Wait, take me back? You’re coming too?”

“You’ll never make it out of these woods alive without me,” he said with a shrug. “I didn’t go to all this effort to keep you alive just to turn you loose for the ghouls and shadow wraiths to tear you to pieces when the sun sets tomorrow night.”

“Shadow… wraiths?” you croaked, eyes flitting to the cave entrance where the dark night pressed in against the tiny light of the fire. You shuddered and Feluän smiled to reveal his double set of canines, the larger, outer pair of which were actually hollow fangs that could inject his paralytic venom into his prey.

“Don’t worry, little one,” he said with a rumbling, seductive purr in his tenor that went right through you to your core. “I’ll protect you. You’re safe here anyway. It’s warded.”

“Right.”

“Your people?” he prompted, and you started with Gwyn the dappled centaur. By the time you’d listed almost everyone in the village, your mind was slow and your eyes gritty with sleep. 

Some time earlier, Feluän had moved behind you so that you were resting your weight between his lethally-taloned pedipalps, buttressed up on either side by something that could skewer through you in the blink of an eye, and his hand had recently moved to card idly through your hair.

The world tilted slightly as you dozed off halfway through a sentence about Thom the orc who ran the bakery and made the most incredible fruit pies in autumn, and you realised that Feluän had picked you up again and was carrying you towards his wide, soft bed of silk webbing.

As he drew a feather-filled silk duvet up around your ears and you hummed with deep satisfaction, you heard him murmur, “I wish I could live somewhere like the place you described for me tonight. I wish I could know ‘home’ as you do, but I fear I would never be welcome somewhere like that.”

“They’d love you,” you mumbled. After all, you were half in love with him already and it had only been a few days.

The journey south took about a week. On the first day, you were forced to ride on his back after only a few miles due to the lingering ache in your side. “If you don’t get aboard, I will refuse to take you anywhere at all,” he said sternly, and a thrill of heat shot down your spine at the steel in his tone. “Do as you’re told, human.”

“Fine,” you croaked, ignoring just how much you liked the way he seemed to mingle concern, respect, and command in a single sentence. “Bossy.”

You did enjoy having your arms around his middle as you rode behind him though. And he was quick when he got scuttling along. 

Your pride did have you walking the next day, and before too long, you got to see the ‘Death-Spinner’ in action. In the rocky lower slopes of the pine forest, before it melted into a dewy, autumn meadow, a roar shattered the silence and a bear reared up from the thick grass, as surprised by your exit from the trees as you were by her.

Feluän hissed like a snake and immediately drew himself up, lashing out with his long front legs. Like twin swords, the lowest section of his legs flashed in the misty air and the bear threw herself up onto her hind legs with another bellowing roar.

The drider jabbed at her faster than your eyes could follow, nicking her ear and her shoulder in turn with left and right forelegs, his huge body filling the space between you and the threat like a bulwark. The bear turned on the spot and thundered away, and he dropped silently back to all eight legs and looked down at you. In the starker light of the meadow, he was squinting and his red eyes didn’t quite land on your face.

“Are you alright?” he asked, bare marble chest heaving. His clawed hands were curled at his sides and his arms looked incredible, and suddenly it was very hard to focus on anything but how gods-damned beautiful this creature was. He barked your name and lowered himself down, still squinting. “I can’t see very well in full daylight like this. I need you to tell me if you’re alright.”

“I’m fine,” you croaked at last, trying to swallow your inconveniently-timed arousal. “Are you? I’ve lived in the woods a long time, but I’ve never been that close to a bear before.”

“She really didn’t want to tangle with me,” he laughed, and you caught the way his articulated joints sagged in relief as his white hands found your shoulders and he squeezed you tightly for a second.

“You can’t see very well? What do you mean?”

He smiled sadly and let go of you. “As I understand it, people born like me, without pigmentation, often struggle with their vision, and bright sunlight in particular. I do anyway. Why do you think I chose the darkest place I knew of for my home?”

“I… I hadn’t really thought about it. You sure you want to be out here then? You didn’t have to walk me all the way home you know?”

“I want to,” he said, gesturing for you to continue on your way across the open meadow.

The overnight frost had melted a little, but it still lingered at the foot of the thicker tufts of grass and it crunched softly as you walked through it. Not Feluän though — he moved as silently as his spectral nickname suggested, but you did catch him tilting his head a little and inhaling, as though scenting the wind. His lips parted softly and you caught your best glimpse yet of his double set of canines. His tongue shifted a little behind his teeth, as though he was tasting something on the air, and you looked away. Everything about him was sensuous and it made you want to touch.

You were perhaps a day’s walk from the village now, but he still hadn’t turned back even though you’d told him you could manage alone from there.

That night at camp, you sat together as you had back in his cave, with you resting between the two smaller limbs that jutted out from his spider’s shoulder area. They twitched from time to time as he ate the now-roasted rabbit he’d skewered earlier for dinner with the talon at the end of one of them, and when you’d finished your meal, you reached out without thinking and ran your fingers down the chitin that covered them.

He jumped slightly and then went very still, but as you brought your hand closer to where the limb met his chest, he drew in a shuddering breath that made his whole body rock.

“Does that tickle?” you asked, wondering how much sensation he had with all that natural armour.

“Not exactly,” Feluän rasped. “It’s… It’s been a while since I’ve… since anyone’s — ah…” he gasped and his chest heaved. The little bone he’d been idly cleaning with his tongue dropped from his fingers to land in the carpet of beech and oak leaves around your feet.

“You want me to stop?”

“No,” he replied immediately. “Gods, don’t you dare stop.”

“Alright.”

You stood and faced him, and ran both hands up his ‘hips’ at the base of his humanoid torso. He shuddered again and sucked in another sharp breath. Gradually, you moved your touch up over the marble contours of his abs and ribs until you could reach no higher. “Come down here then,” you said quietly.

His scarred upper lip twitched and he surged down towards you, snatching you up in his hands and lifting you away from the fire. He pinned you against the smooth bark of a nearby beech trunk, and held you there four or five feet off the ground. His hands were secure around your waist as the spears of the two pedipalps lanced into the tree on either side of your face and you gasped, feeling heat rushing to your groin.

“The things you make me want to do to you, human,” he purred around a snarl, red eyes glowing in the night. His huge body was pale, standing out starkly against the darkness, and you felt a familiar, tingling weakness washing through you as he held you pinned there and growled those lustful words into your ears. You wanted him to take control. You wanted to submit to whatever pleasures he had in mind. It made your head go vague.

“What’s that then?” you slurred softly, dangling blissfully in his hold. “What do you want to do to me?”

“I want to tie you up with my silk,” he said, leaning in so he could kiss up your neck. He nipped at you, but not enough to break the skin or inject you with his numbing, paralytic venom. The trail his kisses left was cold though, and your flesh tingled. “I want you trussed and immobile for me while I give you every pleasure I can think of. Your body is so soft compared to mine. So vulnerable. I want it all. I want all of you.”

“You can,” you smiled. “Please.”

His lips twitched into another little snarl and he kissed you again. Your tongue tingled and you swallowed, realising a drop of his venom had landed there. “I can’t,” he said, stepping back and lowering you slowly to the ground. Your knees were too weak to take your weight at first and he steadied you.

“Why not?” Disappointment stung through the creeping haze in your head and helped to clear it a bit.

You glanced along his curved, spider’s abdomen and saw that a clear fluid was dripping slowly from a point on his underbelly. His obvious arousal looked obscene, and your core tightened at the sight of it. When he saw where you were looking, he shivered. “That’s what you do to me,” he croaked. “But I’ve lost too much control of myself tonight. I might hurt you.”

“Kiss me again?”

“No. My mouth is full of venom.”

Your breath caught and you bit your lip. “Please?”

“No.” He sounded angry now, and you looked away, ashamed of still wanting something he didn't want to give. When he saw the expression on your face though, his whole demeanour changed and he softened. “What is it?” he asked.

You shook your head, stepping back. “Forget it. You’re going home again tomorrow anyway. You’ll forget about me in no time.” But you wouldn’t forget about him.

Feluän’s lighting-fast reflexes left you breathless all over again as he snatched for your wrist when you turned away from him. “I will never forget you,” he hissed fiercely. “I can’t. You think I give every lost wanderer I find in my forest a personal escort home? If I had my way, I’d never leave your side again.”

The grip he had on your wrist was tight enough that it was just shy of painful, and you gasped, eyelids fluttering. You glanced down at where his claws were pricking into your skin and then slowly raised your gaze to his face. “Not helping…” you smirked softly.

He closed his eyes slowly and eased his grip just a fraction, and then he opened his eyes again, moved both hands to your face, cupped your jaw, and kissed your forehead. “Best I can do for the moment,” he said apologetically.

“You don’t have to go back, you know?” you said, giving voice to the idea that had been floating around your mind for a few days. “I mean, I know all your stuff is back there, but there’s a really cosy place that’s only a hundred yards or so from my cottage on the edge of the village. I think it would be perfect for you. You could… You could live there? If you wanted…”

Feluän raked his claws gently across your scalp and you shuddered. “And what of the rest of the village? What would they say about a monster taking up residence in their midst?”

“You’re not a monster,” you hissed, grabbing for his wrists and clinging to him while you glared up into his face. Gods, he was so beautiful, with his sharp features and red, gemstone eyes and his silver-white hair. “You’re not. How could they not love you once they got to know you?”

His throat worked and he lowered his spider body down, drawing his legs in so that he was as close to your eye level as he could get. “Do you really want me to stay?”

“Yes,” you breathed. “Please. I — The thought of you going back to that horrible place with all those bones scattered everywhere, and no life — there’s no life in those woods, Feluän. It’s —” He silenced you with a kiss.

Your lips turned numb almost immediately but you felt his tongue brush yours as he growled and reared over you, overpowering you with just his presence. “The way you said my name,” he said. “No one’s ever spoken my name before. Say it again. I want to hear you say it again.”

“Feluän.”

“When we’re not camping in a forest, I’m going to take you apart, my beautiful human. I’m going to tie you up and take you to pieces when my mouth isn’t dripping with venom.”

“Could be fun for you to have your way with me while I can’t move…” you said.

“You wouldn’t be able to feel it either,” he said, deliberately moving away from you and breathing hard. “Gods, I’m a mess,” he chuckled. You glanced down and saw that he was leaking a little webbing too from the gland at the tip of his abdomen.

“So am I,” you said wryly, because you absolutely were.

“I know. I can smell it,” he said. “Taste it too.”

“Fuck,” you groaned. He’d smelled it earlier as well then, back in the meadow after he’d protected you. “You’d better live up to your promise, Feluän. I’m not letting you go home without feeling some of that silk around my wrists first.”

“Say my name again and I’ll give you anything you want.”

Getting to sleep that night proved difficult to say the least, but it helped that you both talked quietly, with you lying in his arms again, and when you woke to the gentle caress of his knuckles against your cheek, you blinked your eyes open and smiled up at him.

“You’re so beautiful,” you whispered, awestruck by the creature looming over you. Honest delight lit up his whole face and he laughed quietly, helping you to your feet and brushing the dry leaves from your clothes and the borrowed cloak he’d lent you.

“How do you want to do this?” he asked as you kicked the cold ashes of the fire apart and made sure you left the forest as you’d found it. “You said we’re within a day’s walk of your home now?”

You nodded. “We’ll probably meet a few of the woodcutters on our way in — they’re working about three or four miles from the village at the moment, cutting hazel for fences and ash for firewood. If we meet anyone, let me do the talking?”

Feluän agreed, and you set off along the main road together.

“I’ll introduce you in the village if you like, and explain where I’ve been, and then I’ll say I’d like you to stay. If… If you want to.”

“I do,” he said. “I don’t have anything in that cave that I would particularly miss, but I could still go back and fetch it if I wanted to.”

The first people you met were indeed Garrick and Mercy, and when the satyr and the half-orc-half-elf saw the drider, they hefted their axes in their hands and stepped warily into the clearing they’d made beside the road. Mercy spotted you and called out your name, and you and Feluän held up your hands.

It took some persuading to let the two of you approach, but when you were close enough, Mercy dropped her axe and hugged you. “We’ve been so worried,” she said, squeezing you tight. With her muscles, it was enough to make you wheeze. “Gwyn and Thom and Gale searched for you for days but even Gale’s werewolf nose lost your scent when it rained. Gods, they’ve been beside themselves.”

“I’m only alive because of Feluän,” you said, gesturing to the pale drider who was waiting on the road. All his eight legs were drawn up tight and he looked tense and wary. At that distance, and in the clear, wintry light, you suspected he also couldn’t see very far, and for someone so powerful, he was probably feeling quite vulnerable. “I’d like him to live here with us. He was living alone in that dark forest, and I don’t think anyone should have to live alone like that. Not if they don’t want to.”

Garrick jutted his small tusks and said, “Driders aren’t exactly sociable creatures. What’s he gonna do around here?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” you said a little defensively. “While I was recovering in his care, he was processing and spinning flax and weaving bolts of cloth, so he could help Rowan, but I don’t think his place here should be determined by what he can do for us, do you?”

Garrick’s eyes darkened with shame, and he shook his head.

“I’ll catch up with you later. Right now, all I want is a bath and a change of clothes.” Your own shirt had been washed while you’d been recovering, and Feluän had stitched it up, but it was still stained with your blood and more than a bit travel-worn now.

The approach to the village was deserted, but when you stepped out from the shady road and into the brilliant, afternoon sun that bathed the thatched houses in stark light, Feluän grunted and closed his eyes, shielding them with one hand and wincing.

“You alright?” you asked.

“It’s so bright,” he rasped. “I… I can’t even see you and you’re right next to me.”

You paused and said, “This way. We’ll take the side road and go along one of the deer paths through the trees to the cave home I’ve got in mind for you. You can meet everyone tonight when the sun’s gone down.”

“I’m sorry.”

Shaking your head, you frowned. “No, Feluän. You have nothing to be sorry for. Let’s go.” You laid your hand on his foremost left leg, and changed direction, heading for the tall oak and beech trees that bordered the village.

You passed by your cottage, though you did point it out to him, and continued up the slope to the small, rocky outcrop where the old cave had sat empty since its previous occupant had moved to be nearer to her relatives. “This used to belong to Dinara,” you said. “She’s a dwarf, but the cave isn’t at her scale, don’t worry.”

He laughed, and now that you were in the shade, you noticed that his eyes were meeting yours again, and he wasn’t squinting so much. “Come here,” he said, and he lowered himself down to kiss you. “Thank you. I’m sure it’ll be perfect.”

“If it’s not, I know people will help you alter it. They helped me build my house when I moved here, so you could always just build something new if it doesn’t suit.”

“You make them sound like good people,” he smiled.

Squeezing his hand, you said, “They are. They’re going to love you, I promise.”

“So long as they don’t try to hack me to bits with their axes… The one you called ‘Garrick’ sounded ready to cut my legs off earlier.”

“He’s protective, not unlike you,” you said wryly. “Come on. Let me show you the cave and see if you want to live there or not.”

“If you’re nearby, it’ll be perfect,” he said smoothly, and you immediately tripped, making him laugh.

In the end, the empty cave house suited him perfectly, and, as you’d predicted, people were wary to start with, but when they heard how he’d saved you and taken care of you, and brought you home, they welcomed him like a long-lost relative — something that clearly moved him deeply. He did bristle when Thom swept you up into his bone-crushing, baker’s arms outside the village inn that night and nuzzled his tusks against your neck and expressed just how worried he’d been about you though.

When you returned to Feluän after Thom had set you down and promised you a week’s worth of free pies and cakes, Feluän was prickly and distant, until you grabbed a hold of his pedipalp and refused to let go as he turned. The moonlight flashed along the polished chitin and the limb straightened as he turned away while you held it, but he twitched back to look at you with his red eyes blazing quietly.

“Feluän…?” you purred. Oh, you liked the way he clearly wanted to be possessive of you but was forcing himself to behave. It made you flush hot all over.

“What?” he hissed, still scowling.

You caressed your hand up the limb to his shoulder and splayed your fingers wide. He gasped.

“You promised me something…”

“What was that?” he said, spreading his legs a little wider, as though he needed the extra stability to brace himself upright all of a sudden. You enjoyed seeing that the effect you had on each other was mutual.

You drew back your hand from him and he rocked forwards as if seeking the contact again. You brought your wrists together and held them out as though waiting to be tied up before looking up into his face.

His white eyelashes fluttered and his red eyes rolled closed for a moment. “Where?” he asked in a whisper. “Where do you want to go?”

“I’m not sure you’ll fit easily in my cottage…”

“You’d be surprised,” he said, “But I’ll take your word for it. I don’t have any furnishings in my new home yet.”

“You can sling me a silk hammock,” you said boldly and he groaned audibly. “You like that? You like the idea of me lying on your silk?”

He choked softly and nodded, jaw working.

“What?”

“I’m trying to keep my venom to myself this time,” he said carefully. “If I don’t let it out, I can put my mouth wherever I want to this time.”

“And where’s that?”

“Let me tie you up and you’ll find out,” he snarled, baring his double canines, patience fraying.

“Take me home then,” you whispered.

He picked you up, letting you loop your legs around his humanoid hips and holding you there with his arms and his two pedipalps while he scuttled away from the village and up the hill to the cave where an oil lamp was already burning softly on a shelf. 

The cave wasn’t so much a cave as a rock-hewn home, with an additional masonry front covering the opening from the elements, and stone shelves cut into the rock inside for storage, and a shelf at the back for a bed and a huge stone bath as well. Spring water was plumbed directly into a copper cylinder for hot water beside a fireplace with a chimney built into the mountainside. It was a vast improvement on his former, tunnel-like home in the forest, and someone had brought up a load of firewood for him.

Before he’d left his new home to greet the rest of the village earlier that evening, Feluän had lit a fire in the grate and it had since filled the space with warmth, driving away the lingering damp of disuse, and as he made his way on his long, skittering legs to the back of the cave, you kissed the chitin of his shoulders and watched the firelight lick along the sculpted shape of his natural armour. He shivered and then rose right up, tucking his abdomen under him and slinging a web across the shelf where the mattress would be when you eventually found him one. For now, a low, secure hammock of web would more than suffice.

He pitched you back onto it and you bounced softly while the drider’s huge body filled the air above you. The power and ‘otherness’ of his body made you hot beneath the skin and set your core burning, and you squirmed softly while he lowered himself down around you, all four right limbs braced on the wall to your left to give him the best angle. It was unnatural and eerie and creepy and wonderful and strange and everything you wanted in that moment, so you raised your hands above your head and crossed your wrists invitingly.

“You’re so good for me,” he purred and you arched upwards. The web hammock was substantial enough that you didn't feel in the least like your bodyweight was going to tear through it, but it left you feeling exposed and at his mercy. He undressed you carefully, his claws peeling the fabric back until you were as naked as he was. His spider’s body twitched and that clear fluid dripped down onto your shin, betraying his own arousal even as your own was made all the more evident to him.

He parted your legs with one clawed hand and carefully pressed the heel of his palm against where you were soaking wet. “Look at you,” he smiled, eyes glinting. “I can smell you. I can’t wait to taste you properly.” Then he licked his hand clean and your brain went blank for a moment as you watched and heard him groan.  

His silk was cool as he wrapped your wrists tightly enough to immobilise your arms and then he secured the line to one of the others, pinning you in place as securely as any rope tied to a headboard ever could be.

“Fuck…” you cursed, arching your spine and spreading your legs. Your clit was swollen and sensitive already, but when he slid his arms underneath your thighs and brought his face close enough that his breath shivered across your wet skin, you gasped and bucked.

Feluän’s tongue teased you to start with as he simply savoured the taste of you, but when he got to work in earnest, his claws pricked your skin and he held you down while you tried to writhe and squirm. You weren’t shy about the sounds you made, and when you saw the way his abdomen was moving in time with his tongue on your body, you realised he was every bit as turned on as you are. You knew that driders didn’t mate the way humans did, and that when he came, he was most likely going to make a mess all over you. The thought of it made your eyes roll.

His nose nudged against your clit as he delved deeper into you with his tongue, moaning and kissing and sucking and devouring. 

“I’m getting close, love,” he whispered in the tiny silence that blossomed around you when he drew back to adjust his grip on your legs. You’d never been rendered immobile like this by a partner before, with your hands tied and your legs clamped in his grip, and you felt your body clench in the absence of his tongue. He laughed, low and seductive. “So are you, aren’t you?”

Mind a blur with pleasure, you just nodded and keened.

“When I come, can I come over you?” he asked, and he sounded utterly wrecked.

“Gods, please,” you gasped, bucking weakly. “Please, anything, Feluän. Please… I need… I need you to… please…”

“Need me to do what, love?” he asked, licking teasingly over you with the tip of his tongue, savouring you without returning to his earlier endeavours to make you come. It was too much and nowhere near enough and you let out a broken sob. “If you don’t tell me, I can’t do it,” he said provocatively.

With a growl of frustration and effort, you wrangled the words into the right order in your hazy mind. “I need you to make me come, Feluän.”

“That’s good,” he praised and you arched upwards, legs parting a little wider for him. “Gods, you’re everything,” he whispered as he leaned back down and closed his mouth around your clit.

You gave another wild yell at the barrage of stimulation, and under a minute later you came with a heaving shout against his mouth. Waves of pleasure swept through you, and only a second after you stuttered out his name again, you heard him give a tiny ‘oh’ of surprise before he reared up, his whole body tensing and starting to shake, before his own release gushed over the spot where his mouth had just been. The heat of his come against you there sent you over the edge again and you thrashed beneath him. He was still coming when he lowered his humanoid torso down atop yours again and pulled you close, one clawed hand around the back of your head.

“Oh gods,” he said, his whole body twitching and coming while he cradled you beneath him. “Oh gods, you’re everything. You’re perfect… gods… oh…”

Eventually, his orgasm faded and he staggered, all his legs moving out of sync as he tried not to crush you while the strength fled his limbs and he collapsed onto the webbing.

You’d never been such a mess after sex, and you’d also never come quite so hard.

He reached dazedly out with one of his taloned pedipalps and carefully slashed through the silk holding your wrists together, then he raised his head a little more to regard you. “Are you alright?” he asked. “That wasn’t too much?”

“Perfect,” you mumbled. “You made a big mess though,” you said when you felt his release sliding over your thighs and hips.

“I’ve never made that much mess,” he said and he looked genuinely embarrassed when he pushed himself upright.  

“Good job there’s a bath over there,” you said, eyeing the basin that was practically a small swimming pool. It was certainly big enough for a drider to soak himself in relative comfort too.  

Feluän staggered over to it and turned the bronze tap that started a flow of hot water from the gigantic cistern beside the fire and then returned to you. “Can I carry you?” he asked, looking shy for the first time in your relatively short acquaintance.

“You’re going to have to. I can’t feel my legs,” you said.

“I didn’t — My venom —” he sputtered in horror. “I —”

“Oh, it’s not you,” you chuckled as you floundered to sit upright. “I mean, it was you, but not your venom.”

He deflated comically in relief and laughed as he scooped you up and bore you towards the tub. Glancing back, you saw that his come was all over the webbing and had dripped through onto the floor.

Feluän set you down on the shelf that ran around the edge of the bath washed you off while it filled. The gentle action of his caring, attentive hands on your body soothed you and worked you up again, and when you moaned and bucked weakly into his hand, he raised an eyebrow. “Again?” he breathed, as though hardly daring to believe it.

“Please?” you whispered, eyes half-closed where you floated in the warm water.

He was careful with his claws, using only the pad of his finger against you, and when you came with a little sigh and heaved into his arms a few minutes later, he smiled at you and leaned down to kiss you. 

“I want to do that to you every day,” he said over the rush of water into the bath. “I don’t want a day to go past where I haven’t seen you make that face for me.”

How could you refuse an offer like that when it was so generously made?

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