Chapter 110: All His, All Hers
"So, what do you think about my castle?"
Days ago, the first ti Bess’d been hauled up here, she had in too much terror, her mind screaming about dragons and captivity and the vertiginous drop outside the window. She hadn’t processed the place at all. She also didn’t realize the woman who commanded dragons and miracle recipes was also looking around wide-eyed.
The castle itself was a paradox of brutal geography and elegance. It was carved from the mountain, the creator persuaded the stone into arches, buttresses, and soaring, rib-vaulted ceilings.
The predominant stone was bone white, veined with threads of obsidian and pale quartz that caught the high-altitude light in cold, glittering sparks. It was majestic, but dark thanks to the surrounding mist.
"Dark?" Oathran asked later, after they’d settled Bess in a chamber that looked more like a cathedral workshop. He and Cecilia walked alone through the heart of his domain.
Cecilia didn’t answer imdiately. Her head was tilted back, her sea-glass eyes tracing the lines of the interior.
The doors were tall, scaled for beings who asured their height in wingspans. The ceilings were so distant they seed to hold their own weather, lost in shadowy vaults. And the spaces... they weren’t rooms so much as vast, interconnected caverns of shaped stone, largely empty.
A giggly smile touched her lips. Did he... often stretch out in his full draconic form here? Did the great white dragon sprawl across these polished floors, his tail twitching as he dread, his wings rustling in the cavern?
Cute.
Fucking cute.
Adorable!
A colossal, opalescent serpentine form, rolling onto its back like a giant cat, claws kneading the air in slumber... wahh!
As if summoned by her thought, the very structure around them groaned. Half of the distant ceiling above the grandest hall shimred, then dissolved. The solid stone fracturing into countless geotric shards that folded back like the petals of a stone flower.
Now, an endless rectangle of cold, cloud-strewn sky was revealed. The vast hall instantly beca a breathtaking courtyard open to the heavens.
A frigid, thin wind imdiately whipped down, snatching at Cecilia’s long hair and sending it streaming behind her.
"Cold?" Oathran murmured. He didn’t even glance up. He simply lifted a hand, fingers making a gentle, dismissive flick.
From the newly revealed edges of the opening, vast sheets of fabric, white as fresh snowfall, light as gossar, unfurled and fell, rippling like slow-motion waterfalls. They didn’t block the view, just tad the wind, turning its scream into a sigh.
Simultaneously, from slots in the smooth floor, hundreds of brass braziers rose with a series of soft clicks. One by one, with a thought from the Dragon Lord, they kindled.
Cecilia watched as their flas danced in warm gold that fought back the high-altitude chill and painted the flowing white banners in amber.
Cecilia turned to him, her eyes wide. "You... do everything with your magic?"
Oathran nodded, "Yes. Why strain muscles when will alone suffices? Don’t you know dragons are solitary creatures? We grow accustod to being our own servants."
"Oohh..." Fascinated, she looked around the transford space again. Then curiously, she asked, "Where... do you, umm, sit?"
"Are you imagining a throne?" Oathran asked, a low chuckle rumbling in his chest.
She nodded sheepishly. Every king had a throne. Especially this king.
Oathran’s lips quirked. He lifted his hand again with a slow grasping motion, as if seizing an invisible scepter.
The stone at the very center of the monuntal courtyard shifted. It flowed upward like liquid rock freezing mid-surge, forming a majestic dais of pure, veined white marble. And atop it, growing from the dais itself as if it had been waiting there for millennia, was a single throne.
It was carved from a single, colossal piece of milky quartz, its lines severe. Elegant. Lonely.
Cecilia gasped. "Oathran..."
"Hmm?" The man tilted his head, his eyes glinting with amusent. "Now you finally realize who your husband is?"
"I... hmm..." she smiled, then it turned into a grin of delight. She spun to face him fully. "Show ! Show
everything! All the rooms!"
"Hahahahahahah!" he laughed. "Very well. Let’s go."
They toured the dragon’s castle.
He led her through hallways tall enough for giants, past libraries where shelves climbed into darkness. They glimpsed treasure rooms that were less hoards of coins and more curated collections of natural wonders. Geodes, pools of captured starlight, forests of frozen lightning.
Armories held weapons that looked less like tools of war and more like sculptures of distilled violence. Research rooms were full of frozen monts of frantic study, with complex astrological models hanging in mid-air and diagrams of wormholes etched into the floor.
Finally, they entered his study. Maps covered entire walls, so showing continents that no longer existed. Globes spun slowly, depicting celestial arrangents from forgotten epochs.
Millennia-old sculptures, so from races now extinct, stood alongside trinkets. There was a perfectly preserved feather from a phoenix’s first molt, a cup that never emptied, a clock that told ti by the blooming and closing of a carved stone flower.
"Where..." Cecilia asked, "...do you sleep?"
Oathran smirked lopsidedly. He narrowed his eyes. "Oh, so impatient. Straight to the bedchamber?"
"I just want to see!" she yelled.
Laughing again, he led her to his private chambers. As expected, it was colossal. A fireplace large enough to roast an ox held a perpetual fla that ward the air.
The floor was covered with a single, seamless carpet so vast its edges disappeared into the gloom. It was a very thick, midnight-blue wool. Scattered across it were dozens, no, hundreds, of oversized, plush pillows in silks and velvets of deep jewel tones.
"My other form doesn’t fit this carpet anymore," the man sighed, a bit regretful. He nudged a pillow with his foot. "The mont I turned about twelve, I was forced to sleep in this... compact form."
He pointed toward the center-back of the room.
There, frad by flowing, transparent curtains of silver-grey silk, was a bed. It was large, certainly, but surprisingly simple. A wide platform of dark, polished wood piled with more of the luxurious pillows and furs.
"This room is... beautiful," Cecilia whispered. It wasn’t opulent like a human palace. Just a simple nest. A lair.
She had seen Arkai’s bedchamber. A masculine, practical space slling of pine and fur. Spartan, built for a wolf king who valued strength and hearth. She’d seen Eastiel’s, a blend of brutalist stone and chaotic piles of scrolls, a lion’s den full of strategy and restless energy.
But this... this was different.
"Take off your clothes," Oathran said, pulling her gently deeper into the room.
Cecilia glared at him, sulking. "That was almost romantic. You ruined it."
"BWAHWAHAHWAHAHAHAHA—" his laughter was startled, filling the cavernous room. It faded into a warm sigh. "—haaaa... I see. It does co out like that. Forgive ." He reached for her gently. "I just want you to wear sothing else while you stay here. Sothing of this place."
He waved his free hand toward a blank section of the wall. Another massive, seamless door slid open, revealing a chamber dedicated to attire. A walk-in vault of fabrics.
Racks held garnts, but more striking were the floating, folded stacks of cloth that shimred with their own inner light. Enchanted silks, spider-weave gauzes, fabrics spun from cloud-wool and moon-thread.
He helped her undress. Then, he gestured. The enchanted fabrics responded. A bolt of pearlescent, gauzy material, lighter than air, unspooled from its shelf and drifted toward her. It wrapped around her shoulders, cool against her skin.
Another, a deeper blue threaded with silver like a winter night sky, wound around her waist, forming a skirt that flowed without weight. Scarves of iridescent chiffon draped themselves around her arms.
She stood, stunned, as the fabrics dressed her. "It’s very thin..." she murmured, feeling the air on her skin through the layers, "...but very warm."
"Yes," Oathran said, watching her with satisfied fondness. "Quite nice, isn’t it?"
Cecilia nodded, running her hands over the miraculous cloth. "Do you have a mirror?"
"Mirror...?" The Dragon Lord seed perplexed. He frowned, thinking. "A mirror... Hmm. I’ve never... Let
see if I still have so refined silver and silica stored at the back of the treasury..."
"Are you," Cecilia asked slowly, incredulously, "trying to make
one right now?"
"..."
"..."
"...yes."
"Pfft—" she burst out laughing. "For soone who checked himself out the mont he regenerated at the inn’s mirror, you’re apparently quite the snob at ho!"
Oathran threw his face to the side with a huff. "I just never needed one here! I knew how I looked. It hasn’t changed in centuries, okay?"
Wow, what a confident man!
He narrowed his glowing eyes at her, a grumble in his voice. "Not like you need one either."
Cecilia t his narrowed gaze with one of her own. "Because my look never changes too?"
The man sighed. He reached out, touching the sleeve of her new gown with just the tips of his fingers. He traced the line of the fabric gently up her arm, over the curve of her shoulder. Adoring... slow... quiet.
"You are always gorgeous," he said. "Everything that touches your body suits you." His finger paused, brushing the pearlescent cloth at her collarbone. "Especially white and blue."
He looked up, past her, seeing through the tall window to the infinite expanse beyond.
"The color of the sky."
He said.
"My kingdom."
The sky.
His.
The Dragon Lord’s. And now, hers.
"Let’s prepare Angel’s Baby’s bedchamber," Oathran said, pulling his attention from the sky-draped fabrics of her new gown back to the practicalities of hosting an anxious alchemist in a dragon’s aerie. "Then, we will prepare your room."
"My room?" Cecilia blinked, looking around the vast, pillow-strewn, fire-ward cavern that was clearly his personal sanctum. The idea of having a separate space here felt strangely... formal. "Can’t I just have this one?"
"Ha! Usurper!" Oathran mock-spat. He crossed his arms, turning his nose up with a hmph. But the gleam in his eyes gave him away. "Fine. You may sleep here, of course. This is your nest too."
"But we must still prepare your own study."
Cecilia humd, "Mm, alright."
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