Their love is a strange thing,  stronger than the mountains nestled just beneath the horizon with their snowy heights and sloping shadowy depths, and yet not without their avalanches and crumbling erosion. But it had always been a volatile love between them, even on that first day when they had crashed together with wild and fire like molten silver in their flashing eyes. The first time she had known the lonely void of his absence was that same day, when he pulled away and turned his dark gaze elsewhere. He had lit a flame in her heart, a wildness she caught and kindled, and without him it had dimmed like fire suffocating without air.

It was the day everything changed.

From time to time she even found herself wondering if she would still be this version of herself if not for that day, for the wildness in his eyes that set her veins on fire, for the secrets she had seen there that at one time she had ached to unravel. Or would she still be cowed and quiet in her not-fathers shadow, a dutiful puppet quietly grateful that he had bothered to care at all for a strange little filly soaked in the copper of her mothers blood. Would she be a hated queen of an oppressed kingdom with a heart that grew icier and colder and so much more like Rodrik than she ever wanted to be.

It didn’t matter though, not really.
This version, the one with Makai at her shoulder and their children scattered throughout was the only version she cared to be.

Her lips touch the skin on his neck, trailing upwards to follow the curve his throat and the arch of his jaw, smiling once when the flat of her teeth grazed the side of his dark, whiskered mouth. She loved these in-between moments. These times when they were content to just be, content to bury themselves in the depths of their togetherness, when his eyes were full of wild and dark and something unnameable instead of fever-bright with the sickness that took him from her. She touches him again, softer this time, pressing the curve of her smiling mouth to the hollow beside his jaw.

“Are you ready to be a dad again?” Her smile deepens when she shifts away to look at him more closely, the aching green of those bright eyes glowing where they settled to trace every curve and angle of his dark, regal face. “I love you, Makai.” And her swollen belly bumps gently against his side as they walk.

There is a flash of color just ahead, a wrinkle in the world though she thinks she must have imagined it for when she turns to look there is only a stranger the color of warm sand watching them. She slows to an uncertain stop, her ears flicking in and out of the red tangles of her dark chestnut mane. Another second passes, two beats of her quiet heart, and a pair of mahogany dragon wings lift to fill the space above her shoulders. Still though, she says nothing. But there is magic in the air, she can feel it like a dozen sets of eyes prying at her skin and she cannot help the way she shifts closer still to Makai, those eyes wide and luminous where they lock on the stranger.