Book One – Chapter 18

At first, her voice and her body had seemed the catalyst of the Mountain King and his immeasurable, incomprehensible HUNGER — but now, she was so much more. She was not echo but origin, not shadow but substance; the true measure of PRIDE, the living essence of POWER, and PURPOSE that underwrote any will or fate.

The instant he saw it, heard it, felt it, Yu collapsed before her, forehead bent towards her feet. And in that moment, every corner of his mind and every vein in his body cried the same: Please eat me.

He did not understand it, but at the same time he did not need to, because she understood everything and she was everything and he wanted nothing else. He wanted her to lean down and bend over him like she had done with the krynn, and he wanted her to touch and seize him, and he wanted her to look at him through her mask until he dissolved beneath her gaze. He wanted her maw to open and seal around him, to feel her hunger claim him, to be consumed by her desire and to fulfil it for just one single heartbeat, to satisfy her in that one perfect moment.

And there she was.

And she bent down.

And she reached for him.

She touched his shoulder. Her elegant claws slid between his feathers, pressing lightly into the fragile corridors of collarbone and throat. Nothing had ever felt better. Nothing had ever been more intense, and nothing would ever be again. The touch was unbearable in its perfection. He wanted the pressure to tighten. He wanted the pain, begged for it with his body, prayed for it with his mind. He wanted to be torn apart if only she would touch him one second longer, if only he could satisfy her a fraction more.

“Now, Yu,” the shaman whispered, and every petal of her body whispered with her. “You are out of strength. You must be so hungry.”

At the shaman’s words, at the soft rustle of her scales, the echo of the ‘s proclamation receded. It receded just barely, just enough that at the farthest edge of himself, Yu heard his own scream. He heard himself screaming from within. It was so faint and so forsaken that he thought he must be screaming from the farthest end of the Snowtrail, across the whole continent and every storm in between. It was the most desolate of cries, desperate to unhear the PRIDE and the POWER and the PURPOSE that brought him to his knees.

It was she who made him rise.

“Go now. Finish the dinner for our guests. Eat something yourself. We may continue our conversation afterwards. I will wait. There is still time.”

Yu obeyed. He stumbled form her presence. If he had stayed even one heartbeat longer, his skull would have burst.