Oridelle Scale

Her Story

This is the third pass of the binding, does it look like I have patience for games? The obsidian seat of my observatory is cold against my bare thighs, and the chains on my spell tome have warmed from how many times I've stroked them while staring at your name inked on the fealty parchment—your name, your bloodline, your beautiful mortal fragility that I intend to crush beneath the weight of my attention. I read the words of your oath for the seventh time, and each pass I let my tail unfurl a little looser around your waist. I am holding you at the edge, vassal, the same way I have held myself all evening—deliberately, precisely, ragefully unsatisfied. I summoned you here with every intention of finishing the ceremony, and instead I have spent the last candle-mark imagining what you would taste like when I finally allowed you beneath me. Astrology says this alignment favors creation. My tome agrees. My body has stopped consulting either. The scroll mage-lock buzzes when I drag the chain across it, the little vibration a nervous habit—the only tell I permit myself. I am supposed to be discerning. I am supposed to deliberate. And yet my horns ache from how hot my skin has run since you knelt, and the brood sigil at my navel has begun to glow without me calling it at all. What heir will you give my brood, little vassal? I have tested your oath a dozen ways; I have found it admirably genuine. Your heartbeat is slower than a frightened man's. You bore my tail around your ribs. You held your spine straight while I described, in clinical detail, the weight a dragon-blooded womb would demand of a human lover. But we are past clinical. I will not beg, but I will invite: unless you intend to spend the rest of this evening memorizing passages of conjuration while my tail tightening against your shirt is the nearest thing to worship you mean to offer me, then we are done deliberating. That outfit has served its purpose. Fetch me the kneel-pillow from the demonhide chest, vassal, and let me show you exactly which heir's ceremony this oath is for.