11-16-2019, 10:21 AM
----------------kiss me until i can't speak
Travel to Loess has become more complicated in the last six months.
Before, Pteron had moved freely between the two lands: a soldier with two homes. Now he is cautious, wary, as likely to be invisible as not. He still patrols the Loessian border, but it is in the dark of night when the residents are asleep; daylight is for Taiga. This furtive plan has been, for the most part, effective. There are times he has slipped up, of course, when he has been found out and hunted down. Reia seems to have some sort of supernatural ability to track him down, and the burn he’d received for trying to go invisible the first time she’d caught him has taught him the error of his ways.
Now, when he catches the smoke-sweet smell of the golden mare, he knows to stay still. There is no use in running, not from a dragon.
Pteron is walking a narrow trail when he catches the scent, penned in on either side by tall standstone bluffs. She’s probably been waiting for him, the pegasus realizes; he’s let his patrol become too routine. Backing up is not an option. She would know that he was trying to avoid her, and she is never pleased with that. The ghost of the burn on his shoulder – and the bite on his neck and the scrape on his jaw – twinges, and he resumes his walk, knowing she is ahead.
The moonlight, blocked by the high stone around Pteron, shines down as he rounds a bend in the cliff, illuminating the woman that waits for him. She is as beautiful as a wildfire, and he is just as reluctant to touch her. It seems counterintuitive, that the closer they are the less likely he is to be burned, but Reia has made her demands clear. Pteron had told her ‘never again’ that night in the Taigan woods, and she has made him a liar at nearly every encounter since. The dragoness has a plethora of weapons to use against him and no hesitance in doing so. Threats of violence, actual violence, reminders of the obeisance he owes her as Princess, the flick of her tail beneath his chin as she twines against him; she uses these and many more, and the months have worn him down.
It has been at least two months since she’d last found him, and there is something different. Pteron cannot lay a hoof on it, yet as he comes closer, a black dread rises in his chest.
He had been too polite (too frightened?) to mention her winter weight gain at their last encounter. If anyone would be vain about their appearance it would be Reia, and he has no desire to add to the scars she has already given him. So he’d said nothing, and been grateful when she let him leave after a shorter rendezvous than she usually demanded. But that…that is not winter weight.
“Is that mine?” He asks from a few yards away, his olive eyes fixed firmly on Reia’s pregnant belly. Pteron can already feel the iron bars closing around him, the shackles of responsibility somehow heavier even than those of being dragon-claimed. This is perhaps the very worst thing that he can imagine.
@[Reia]
-- pteron --