(WIP) Fragment 1: "Breaking Off an Engagement"

When he relied on furs to keep him warm, Elysian wore only white- blue-eyed wolf, snowbears of the frigid flat north, snowy hare and arctic fox. Tonight bearskin shrouded him, buttoned against the tundra’s winds.

It was no protection from his storming fiancée.

“Vhat do you mean, you cannot marry me?! Vhy then did ve get engaged?” Zvetlana’s gaze was fierce enough to drive him back over several steps of castle floor.

“Men of duty do not have happy homes,” Elysian said. His voice was as quiet and gentle as ever, the back of a fawn between wolves’ teeth. “Even if I did not die on the field of battle, you would lose me to the pressure, or to the time apart.”

Elysian didn’t like telling lies. His hands were pressing into the white fur to hide their trembling, their lukewarm sweat. “I betrothed myself to you for both our sakes, Zvetlana. I am leaving for yours. I only regret that I would’ve been no kind of husband to you.”

This much, at least, was true.

Zvetlana crossed one ivory hand over the other, pulling her engagement ring from her finger. She whipped it at him with such fury that where it struck his cheek, blood welled and ran, and the sound of the silver denting itself on stone mingled with her voice.

“Regret and rot then, cowardly varrior!”

Elysian didn’t look down at his fingers when they came away bloodstained from his face, but kept his hands at his sides, and his eyes to the floor. Under the fur, his shoulders carefully stiffened into a show of false coldness as he walked away.

Outside the caves, castles, and hearths, the night was piercing cold; Elysian, a foreigner, found it colder. He ducked his head into the collar of his coat, the spilt blood freezing on his face, and shivered against the chill.

An enormous, shimmering shape blotted out the stars. Elysian felt their minds touch before he heard the wingbeats. The husky, feminine thoughtvoice of the dragon Terebridys was as familiar as his own inner dialogue, and markedly more certain. |Either I’ve left you out here to freeze far too long,| she said, sensing his despondence, |Or things did not go well with Zvetlana.|

Elysian watched her land in a flurry of upturned ice chips. Amid the desolation, it was as if a new castle had been built of reptile-hide and spines, for Terebridys was nearly five stories tall. Ice split and permafrost crackled under her weight, her vast feet flattening lichen to paper.

|I couldn’t do it.| The man heard his own voice slightly amplified in his mind as he slipped his answering thoughts back to her across their mental connection. |I told her soldiers make dreadful husbands instead.|

Terebridys made a thunderous sound in her throat that, had she been smaller, might have been a “hrmph!”and tossed her snout at the horizon. |Warriors make fine mates,| she said.

The blond dragonrider formed no more words.

Elysian and Terebridys carried the highest rank of their empire’s dragonback army: ilún, roughly translatable as war-leader. There was always pressure on any ilún to marry in the hopes of passing their skill in battle on to sons and daughters, and in the last years before he began courting Heiress Zvetlana, Elysian had been trying the Imperators’ patience with his bachelorhood. When finally he saw that he could no more escape a ring and a woman’s bed than he could the battlefield, he had set his eyes on Zvetlana because she was a friend- and because the tundra was far away from his homeland and his worries. Had he had greater nerve, had he been better suited to leadership, he would have told her the truth before they married.

He would have told her he was a gay man.

But the Imperators ruled as they wished, and no one they appointed ilún had ever been caught in bed with the same sex. With no way of knowing whether she would betray him nor how he would suffer if she did, a man courageous enough to lead the charge against an army of dragons had quailed. He was ashamed; he missed her; he was miserable; his secret was safe.

|Come on,| thought Terebridys, nudging his shuddering back with her snout. |Let’s go home.|

Terebridys laid the tip of her enormous tail in front of her human, who clambered between two of the spikes and held on. She lifted him to her vast shoulders. Elysian walked over her scales to the base of her neck, where the rows of spikes along each side of her back converged into a single line along her spine. At this height, the air was even more frigid, so he leaned forward until he was almost lying on his stomach, close against her back for warmth. Terebridys spread her wings, and kept low to the ground as she took off into the night.

***

Home was the Delmont empire's vast territory, several days’ flight on dragonback from the icy expanse Zvetlana’s family ruled. The climate improved steadily as they traveled. The landscape filled with life and colour, the sun swelled with warmth. Terebridys was the colour of mother-of-pearl; rainbows shimmered and writhed over white scale with every movement of the light. Her horns reflected the pale blues and blue-greens of abalone shell, and the overall effect was dazzling in the brighter sky of their own country. Her scaly sides flashed with laughter when she heard Elysian silently swear never to go north again.

|You may not be saying that when the Imperators find out your marriage is called off, dear one,| she said.

Elysian didn’t want to care at the moment. He wanted to curl up in her cave with a book and a blanket, or find someone to crush in a game of chess. Woefully, the duties of ilún meant that he spent a lot of time away from both books and blankets.

Terebridys swooped near to a wide beach, where the bright ocean sucked and lapped at the sand. She had spent the entire trip home trying to use the influence a dragon had over their human counterpart’s emotions to push him into a better mood, and this tended to give her cravings for saltwater fauna.

She flew over the ocean until she spotted a pod of orca whales. Terebridys waited until an older one surfaced for breath, then plunged her forefeet into the water and drew back, sending up spray as her hind toes split the waves. Elysian leaned forward with the dive, then drew up as she banked her wings while the draft from her wingstrokes pounded dents into the surface that scattered the other orcas into the depths. The dragon bit the head off her prey as soon as she began gaining altitude, an act of mercy, and spat the stripped bones back into the sea.

|Delicious!| she teased the warleader, hoping the sensation of her hunger sated spreading through their mind-bond would remind him how hungry he was and make him eat. Elysian had picked at his food without eating a decent meal since that Zvetlana had thrown jewelry at him.

|I’m sure.| Elysian’s weight on her back was distributed in such a way that she could tell he was hunched in his gloom.

Terebridys chewed the meat from her second bite, swallowed, and gave a displeased snort which sent a shower of sparks from her nostrils. |You can’t sulk forever.|

Elysian watched the last of the whale bones fall, and pursed his lips as they flew back to the shore.