A Perverted Path to Victory

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Sara

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The transition between icy hellscape and jungle boiling pot wasn’t as stark as Sara expected. It wasn’t anywhere near natural, but it wasn’t a hard line. The snow fell at an even gradient for a hundred meters or so, each step forward requiring her to push less of the fluffy powder out of the way, until eventually she was standing on cool, mushy ground, wetted by an occasional flurry of snow blown across the invisible barrier. She paced back and forth a few times with her magical senses open, trying to find some dividing line or other sign of what spellcraft was responsible for the feat, but she was too overwhelmed. It was like swimming through bubbling lava in search of a warmer patch of molten rock. Garen may have been doing his best to teach her how to use her spellcraft properly, but this city was overwhelming beyond anything she’d ever tried to prepare for. There was no point in even trying.

Instead she set off on foot, tearing off her gambeson and tying it around her waist as the heat worsened. She’d forgone her armor for this little venture, thinking it unnecessary, though at Evie’s insistence she’d kept her dagger, sword, and a concealed pistol. Beneath it, now bared, was a simple shirt, rough-spun wool left undyed, as always. If it wasn’t for her height, pale skin, and luxuriously long black hair, she would’ve looked like any other human commoner in the capital.

And there were others, she discovered. The cobblestone pathways that criss-crossed beneath the leaves and branches of the capital were far from abandoned. Even though it was well past midnight, she passed couriers, message runners, and drunken meanderers. There was even the occasional city guard type carrying simple blunt quarterstaffs for their weapons.

They also looked terribly bored. Though she only passed a rare few, not a single one of the guards sported an alert expression. They were tired, distracted, or outright disregarding their duty to play dice and card games on street corners. There wasn’t the slightest bit of concern to any of them.

And there were children running through the streets, she quickly realized. Boys and girls of every age and ancestry, giggling and cheering and hushing one another when things got too loud, lest some adult poke their head out of a tower’s window to yell at them. They weren’t street urchins like she’d seen in every other city, either. They were bathed, clothed, and well-dressed. In fact, pretty much everyone was. Some of the people walking around were even overweight, which, unlike in her old life, was so uncommon that it was downright impressive. It was damned hard to put on that much weight as a commoner. Virtually impossible for a people like the Sporaton or Tulian peasantry, in fact. Food was clearly plentiful here.

This city hasn’t seen anything of the war, she thought, turning a corner to follow the impulses of uncertain instincts. There’s not even any meaningful crime, is there?

She passed a merchant’s cart. The medieval equivalent of a hotdog vendor rolling up and down the streets, but this one was selling small trinkets and charms modeled to evoke the favor of different divinities. The cart had been left unattended by a tower’s doorstep, all of its products still out on display. Anyone walking past could have grabbed one.

Seems like a pretty nice place, Sara admitted. Don’t have to worry about much here. So what’s the catch?

She glanced upward as she passed between two particularly close buildings, squinting at the underside of a bridge a hundred meters overhead. A sharp-eared elf stared back down at her, leaning over the railing with a glass of dark wine in one hand. Sara could tell that she’d been recognized. The elf was calling to someone else, pointing at her with a jubilant laugh.

A lizardfolk man who’d been jogging her way with a package in hand heard the laughter. He looked up, saw the elf, and skidded to a halt, looking down at Sara with wide eyes. He turned on a heel and scurried down a different road, moving twice as fast as he’d been before.

Well there you go, Sara thought. No wonder it’s peaceful. It’s hard to get away with crime when you’ve got a divine Big Brother watching down on high your entire damn life.

She knew some people would be more than happy with that arrangement. Lots of people, in fact. Hells, the ones she’d seen so far were happy. Children playing safely in the street, goods left unattended without fear of theft, and, so far as the average mortal citizen was concerned, heralds of the gods living just overhead. A safe, comfortable existence. She could see how people in a war-torn land would like that. Would love that, in fact. How they’d fight to get it.

Sara’s Blessings tracked that lizardfolk man as he skirted two blocks further down, heart thumping in his chest. He was nervous. Deeply nervous. Concerned, too. Concerned for her. He hadn’t recognized who or what she was, nor what she’d done. Only that she was being pointed at by the elves. Now he was worried about her safety almost as much as he was his own.

Worth it for some people. Sara sneered up at the onlookers. Not for me.

She ignored the elves, striding quickly away even as they began to call out after her. She took a few rapid detours down a series of roads, keeping close to the walls to hide her profile. She doubted they’d bothered to follow her, but it was better safe than sorry. A crowd of paparazzi was the last thing she needed.

In the end, she made it to her destination without getting harassed. The Wyvern Courts, as Fanlah had called this section of the city, hadn’t been hard to find. She didn’t even need to recognize the entire district’s radically different architecture, simply because the scent alone could have led her straight to her destination. The closer she got, the more intense it grew, until her lungs were filled with a mixture of smoking, charred meat, the musky scent of massive beasts, and the dung and fur of plentiful livestock. So thick was the scent that she knew she’d arrived even before turning the final corner. Though she’d spent the last half hour traipsing through snow, jungle, and weaving between MC Escher’s rendition of skyscrapers, the Imperial Capital’s district for wyverns was by far the most alien place in the city. Maybe in all the world.

The first ‘home’ that greeted her was a massive, awe-inspiring disc of solid marble. Plinths that reminded Sara of ancient Greece held a football field-sized stone plate some twenty meters in the air, dozens of columns supporting what had to be a truly unfathomable weight. Each pillar was a work of art unto itself, carved with details so intricate that she could have spent an hour with a magnifying glass studying even a few square feet of their surface.

The wyvern that lay atop it was equally massive, if, in the moment, appearing a bit less regal than its home. The golden-scaled creature was laying on one side, its left leg sticking straight into the air, the right dangling off the platform, broad wings curled around its torso like a child hugging their favorite blanket. Chunks of bloody meat dangled from its half-opened mammoth jaws, and several attendants were using long spears like toothpicks to remove the last remnants of the creature’s meal. It was snoring, and every rumbling exhale blew back the hair of those nearby as if they were standing in gale-force winds.

Huh. My Blessings want to use it/they for this wyvern. Is it a nonbinary wyvern or something? Sara inspected the impulse closer, turning it around in her mind, but didn’t find anything extra to clue her into its reasoning. I know I’ve met some people born with both sets of goods, but they always stuck with one pronoun or another. Shit, does the Empire even have a formalized concept of non-standard genders? Hell, I still hear Kemari as standard English. For all I know they might not even be using gendered pronouns.

As always when it came to her Divinely-inspired translation magic, she was careful not to delve too deep into its intricacies. Garen had warned her that overthinking was a mage’s worst enemy, and it wasn’t out of the question that her investigative process could abruptly unravel Amarat’s hard work in ensuring she heard every language as some variety of accented English. Maybe she’d risk it some day, when she had a lot more formal training as a mage, but that was a long ways off.

Slinking past the marble plinth and its golden owner, Sara skirted the edges of the Wyvern Courts, searching her Blessings for any hint of Fanlah’s dwellings. She was a famous wyvern, obviously, so she’d probably have some place of importance, but what did that mean? Would she live in the center of the wyvern district? On its outskirts, closest to the seat of governance? Would she have the highest place of honor, or would she be given such a premium slice of land that she didn’t even need to build a plateau to live on? With most of the city still asleep, her Blessings didn’t have nearly enough people to eavesdrop off of to answer her questions.

One thing she did take notice of, however, was the sheer number of soldiers guarding the wyverns. While the rest of the city had two or three strong groups lackadaisically patrolling with clubs or staffs, the Wyvern Courts featured twenty-man squads of heavily-armed Imperial Soldiers, long polearms resting against enchanted armor as they marched to and fro. Reaching down to tap the hilt of her dagger, Sara draped an illusion over herself, emerging from the side streets as an unremarkable Imperial message-runner.

The Imperial soldiers weren’t frauds. She’d been in enough fights to recognize that at a glance. A ceremonial guard would have kept their armor polished to the extreme, their weapons held with rigid precision at the exact angle that kept them looking best for passersby. Not these soldiers. They had a mixture of equipment that, while incredibly well-kept and richly made, still sported a spot of dirt or a few scratches, and their gear wasn’t perfectly identical. Some of the soldiers carried their polearms on the right shoulder, others on the left, and they had daggers or sideswords kept wherever was most comfortable for them. Veteran, skilled soldiers who had been given a cozy duty, Sara decided. The ease of their job meant they were relaxed, but they’d spent too long doing real work to have lost the habits that once kept them alive.

Who the hell would be attacking wyverns, though? Is there some kind of internal conflict in the capital itself? Shit, who COULD attack wyverns and be a big enough threat that a bunch of human guards were needed as backup?

It could be an honor guard position, she supposed. That would make the most sense. Imperial soldiers who, having distinguished themselves in the field, were rewarded with easy, prestigious work.

Makes my plan a lot harder, though.

Sara’s instincts were guiding her inward now, urging her to delve deeper into the Wyvern Courts. Still wearing the guise of a courier, she waited until an Imperial guard patrol had passed mostly out of sight, striding forward with a confident, rushed gait.

The rest of the ‘homes’ she encountered were no less unique than the first few. She passed a deep crater in the earth ringed with small homes and outbuildings, an entire miniature neighborhood of Imperials living around the gargantuan wyvern they crewed, which was resting peacefully atop massive blocks of jet-black slate polished to a mirror sheen. Next to that was a pavilion of simple dirt and grass, a wyvern even smaller than Fanlah sleeping with all its limbs sprawled limply in a space that easily could have fit twenty of its kind. Another was simply an ominous yawning gap in the soil, a cavern descending steeply into pitch blackness, the soft sounds of a large beast’s breathing wafting out. Each wyvern, it seemed, preferred its own living space. Aside from the truly massive proportions of each ‘home,’ they had almost nothing in common.

Oh my god. Sara stopped, overcome with a realization. This is fucking dragon suburbia. I’m in a goddamn gated neighborhood for dragons.

All at once, the analogues snapped into place. The unique eccentricities of a foreign species became little more than those of a poor-taste McMansion, their density a begrudging acceptance of what was necessary to live somewhere important. Streets occupied by runners and guards weren’t the worshipful acolytes of an ancient tradition; they were groundskeepers and security guards, carefully trimming the hedges and making sure the riff-raff stayed out. The more she looked around and the more she saw gaudy, tacky wealth put on display, the more Sara felt her starstruck awe draining from the Wyvern Courts.

I guess nothing ever changes, huh?

No one questioned her as she darted through the roads, traveling quicker now that she had less of an impulse to gape at every piece of architecture. If you moved like you were in a hurry and looked sufficiently stressed about it, most people were more likely to get out of the way than they were to ask you a question. Especially in a place like this. Combat veterans or not, the guards here were complacent. After all, they were protecting wyverns. Who the hell would be stupid enough to sneak in and attack one of those?

Guess I’m stupid enough to sneak in, Sara chuckled. But I don’t think I’m going to be doing much attacking.

She eventually caught wind of something that tickled her Blessings. Nothing she could define, just a minor intuition that she should turn and head in a particular direction. It wasn’t long until she found what she was looking for.

Fanlah’s Court was as different from the others as she’d come to expect. Held high above the ground on a veritable parthenon of richly decorated stone, the personal herald of Imperequs was one of the few wyverns who seemed to prefer a roof over her head. A massive wooden gate served as its door, though planks had been replaced by entire tree trunks, and it was framed by sharply cut blocks of marble, shale, and slate, each massive stone used as one brick amongst a thousand to create what, for all the world, seemed to be an almost human home. Windows the size of a normal building’s entire wall used wrought iron bars thicker than her wrist to frame stained glass, the flickering of a fireplace glowing from within. Sara was sure her dad would’ve had a better comparison, but to her it looked like the Romans had decided to use the Colosseum’s budget to make a human’s home for a mythical giant. Doors, windows, four walls and a roof, all the hallmarks of an average house, but in proportions far beyond what any normal person could ever make use of.

Clutching her illusory courier’s package carefully in both hands, Sara looked up and down the road to ensure there were no guards present before hurrying up to the pillar. The column was wide enough that she couldn’t wrap her arms halfway around it, yet every square inch of its surface was densely packed with elaborate etchings. Sara could see written poems engraved in the stone, sculptures of battles, depictions of mages and Warriors, and even images of wizened scholars studying in massive libraries. The closest pillar, she noted, had a religious bent, showing acts of the gods, symbols of their power, and renditions of prophets delivering holy words to the people.

Probably shouldn’t use that one, she decided, shaking out her arms and giving her fingers a good stretch. Pretty sure I’m already toeing the limit of total lifetime blasphemies.

With one last glance around to ensure she was alone on the dark street, Sara let her illusion fade, returning to her authentically sweaty, poorly dressed self. Then, taking a quick breath, she put her hands to the pillar, fingers digging into the stonework.

It wasn’t easy to climb ten meters straight up. Especially when her handholds were barely deep enough to get the tips of her fingers into, and they often twisted and curved at strange, unpredictable angles, following the lines of art she was too distracted to appreciate. Still, she was strong. Superhumanly so, by earthly standards. When she wasn’t wearing her armor, she could do pull-ups with one pinky finger wrapped around the bar, could lift stones larger than her torso, and, most importantly of all, had spent three years in a very sexually active relationship with a pair of lesbians. Her finger strength was not to be underestimated.

Y’know what? She thought to herself as she climbed. This is almost what I actually expected myself to be doing, way back when I first picked Amarat for my Patron. Sneaking into important people’s bedrooms in the dead of night and giving them such good head it solves a political problem.

‘Course, she added, huffing out a frustrated breath as her fingers nearly slipped, I thought that was gonna be a HUMAN politician or something. When was the last time you heard of a princess sneaking into the dragon’s lair, anyway?

Probably on certain parts of the internet, if she was honest with herself. But she’d never been the type to frequent those spaces back in the day. Sure, she liked to get a bit freaky with what she watched, but there was a big damn difference between a Newgrounds animation of Raven from Teen Titans getting pounded by tentacles and literal, actual dragon porn. She’d never been the type to go for that. Sure, she’d run across some stuff where the dragon turned into a hot chick or whatever, but fucking a straight-up fire breathing lizard? If she’d stumbled across it, she’d clicked away so fast that she didn’t remember it.

Really should get better about calling them wyverns, she reminded herself. Don’t want to get too comfortable and accidentally call Fanlah a slur.

Sara reached the top of the pillar, only to discover a problem. The platform’s ledge was a couple meters behind her. Far out of reach.

Well, shit.

She craned her neck around, fingers trembling as they held tight to an engraving of a woman holding a flaming sword. She tried to find any other way up, some little nook or cranny on the underside of the platform that she could use to get closer, but there wasn’t one.

Shit, she thought again. Alright. Guess I’ve just got one option. She looked down to the street below, lined with enchanted glowing cobblestones. She sighed. If this doesn’t work, it’s gonna hurt like a motherfucker.

Bracing her feet against the pillar as best she could, Sara closed her eyes, taking a deep breath.

Then she flung herself backward.

Her right forearm scraped along the bottom of the platform, providing just enough friction to keep her from flinging herself into the open air. The instant she felt the edge slide past her elbow, she threw her left hand up and around, slapping the top of the platform, praying that there would be something for her fingers to dig into.

Her fingernails seized on the grout of a tile, all her strength thrown into that tiny moment. She jerked to a stop, legs flailing out behind her as she spun around. A maniacal laugh burst out of her for half a second before she swallowed it, getting her other hand up and around to pull herself up.

Getting herself onto solid ground was trivially easy. Doing it without giggling at her success was the main obstacle. Ever since she’d gotten her Levels, she’d wanted to do shit like this. Sneak around a city, do a bit of parkour, and slip through the window of a pretty girl that she just knew she was about to wrap around her finger, only to disappear into the dead of the night. Judging by her Blessings, that was probably what a Champion of Amarat was supposed to be all about. She didn’t regret her Class going as far off the beaten path as it had, but she could admit, at least in the privacy of her own mind, that doing things the ‘right way’ was a nice change of pace.

Sara dusted herself off as she stood before Fanlah’s home, giving it a once-over. Standing up close, her mental comparison to ye olde architecture— Greek or Roman, she didn’t know what to compare it to, which definitely would’ve pissed her dad off— seemed even more appropriate. Sure, it wasn’t all marble, but it was still a giant building made out of fancy chiseled stone. That was how everything in Rome looked like. At least it had in the TV show version of Rome, anyway.

Huh. She looked around. There weren’t any human-sized doors. Just the giant castle gates at the front of the home. Hurlish could’ve dragged those open easily enough, but Sara wasn’t sure she could. Even if she was strong enough, the slow, terrible creaking of massive hinges as she grunted and groaned with effort probably wasn’t going to be the entrance she was looking for. So what next? She definitely wasn’t going to smash one of the giant windows and leap inside. Her Blessings told her Fanlah was home and awake, and she was pretty sure that breaking and entering to a wyvern’s domain was a quick way to get charbroiled.

In the end, she decided to go with the oldest, most reliable of tactics:

Walking up and knocking on the door.

With one hand folded behind her back and a smile on her face, Sara stopped up to the thick wood and drew her fist back, then struck it with three quick, powerful blows. A dull thud shook the air, just loud enough to be heard.

“Hello! Visitor for the wyvern Fanlah!” She yelled in a sing-songy voice.

Silence. Then, a few seconds later, the sound of claws hurriedly scraping on stone, a sound so similar to a dog running on tile that Sara nearly burst out laughing.

“Chosen— I mean, Sara Brown?” Fanlah called. “Is that you?”

“Hope you don’t mind a late night visitor!”

“I- no, well, but I wasn’t aware-”

There was a deep, powerful boom, followed by a prolonged clatter of falling objects.

“Gods!” Fanlah hissed. “A-ah! One moment, please! I wasn’t, er, expecting guests!”

This, Sara reflected, is not what I expected from a wyvern.

Wyverns were not quiet creatures. Sara was treated to a chorus of clanks, crunches, and grunts of effort as Fanlah rearranged her home, doing her best to do the wyvern’s equivalent of shoving dirty laundry under the bed. Sara’s Blessings couldn’t quite parse what exactly was going on behind the wall, but she could tell Fanlah was as stressed as she was giddy with excitement.

Naive excitement, at that, Sara realized. She’s just happy to have me over. She doesn’t have a single indecent thought in her head. Not yet, anyway.

Sara slipped her dagger from its sheath and tugged at her shirt collar, pulling it taut so she could give it a neat, cleavage-exposing slice. Sheathing the knife, she hauled her belt up and tightened it a notch, tucking her shirt into her pants so that it would stay taut against her frame. She shook her hair out, letting her Blessings sweep the sweat of her late-night stroll away, and then gave it a few pats and brushes of her fingers, making sure the black waves had just the right amount of tasteful curl.

Finally, the great doors were flung open, swinging on their hinges with such enthusiasm that Sara had to leap backward to avoid being crushed. Fanlah’s serpentine neck darted outward, her jaws clamped shut in an attempt to hide her panting breaths.

“To what do I owe this pleasure, Sara Brown?” Fanlah asked. The night echoed with a loud bang! as the doors to her home slammed against the far wall.

“If anything,” Sara smirked, looking up as she stepped into the wyvern’s shadow, “I believe it’s me that owes you pleasure, no? I never could have made it to the capital without you.”

Sara wandered straight past Fanlah, meandering into the building without waiting for an invitation. She kept a gentle smile on her face as she turned around, admiring the interior.

It was worth admiring, honestly. Whether or not the Wyvern Courts were an otherworldly rendition of upper-class suburbia, she had to admit that Fanlah knew how to live a life of luxury. Her home was one big room, the roof some fifteen or twenty meters overhead, and most of the space’s light came from a fireplace the size of a wagon, a roaring bonfire casting flickering shadows across the vast hall. A flat-topped table level with Sara’s eyes held a still-opened book that stretched two meters from edge to edge, each page thick enough to withstand the less-than-tender manipulations of wyvern, covered in script large enough for Fanlah to read with ease. Chandeliers of glowing crystals dangled from the stooped ceiling, though they weren’t shining at the moment, so the only light in the home came from the fireplace. Collections of fine artwork decorated the walls, gathered in clusters of similar designs. There were gemstone-encrusted crowns, shimmering oil paintings, and a great deal of assorted weaponry, most of which looked quite unlike the tools of war Sara was familiar with. Her Blessings, those that gave her a basic familiarity with any kind of martial equipment, told her that they were meant for combat between wyverns. Long pikes with sickle hooks intended to slice through the harness of enemy crew to send them tumbling from the skies, shields that were enchanted to resist flame, and ensorcelled armor that emphasized lightweightness more than any protective enchantment.

The room’s center piece, however, was a vast collection of pillows. Each feather-stuffed bubble was larger than a king-sized bed, and there were dozens of them, collected in a small depression cut out of the room’s center, creating a pond of soft luxury. It was where Fanlah had been when Sara arrived, she could tell, because there was the evidence of a hasty attempt at fluffing the pillows back up to make them look unused. It hadn’t been successful in the slightest.

“So this is only one of your houses?” Sara asked. “It’s damn nice. Why bother having any more?”

Fanlah hurriedly spun around to follow Sara, using her long tail to drag the doors closed behind her. Crawling closer with that peculiar gait wyverns used on the ground, she laughed uncomfortably.

“Well, truth be told, I don’t believe I need a home even this nice. Alas, when one serves the mighty Imperequs so closely, you find a great deal of sycophants gifting you objects and dwellings that you truly don’t need.”

“Tell me about it,” Sara said with a snort. She walked up to the table, grabbing the edge and hauling herself up. “The amount of poorly disguised bribes that my staff in Tulian turn down each week is ridiculous. Lots of foreign powers seem to think you can buy the favor of a Champion with a fancy knife and gold tiara or some crap.”

She plopped herself down on the edge of the table, swinging her legs girlishly as she peered down at the book. Fanlah was still by the door, using one thick claw to drag a human-sized chair out of a corner, only for her to freeze when she spotted Sara.

“Oh! That book is-!”

Sara scanned the pages.

The Chosen of Emotion are amongst the most rare of the Divine’s otherworldly agents, yet, as is appropriate for their demesne, they seem to linger longest in the hearts of those who knew them.

“Catching up on some research?” Sara asked, shooting Fanlah a shit-eating grin.

“It seemed prudent!” Fanlah huffed, scurrying across the marble tiles as fast as she could. Once again, Sara was struck by the peculiar way she had to move. It reminded Sara of bats walking along the ground, but Fanlah’s… elbow? Knee? Whatever the middle joint was best called, it had a collection of precisely manipulable digits, four on either side. Considering their similarity to fingers, Sara was almost tempted to say Fanlah was knuckle-walking like a gorilla, but that didn’t quite work either, considering her weight was resting on the first joint after the shoulder.

“I’m surprised there was a book out there on Chosen that was sized for a wyvern,” Sara said, gripping the thick paper and heaving it over to turn the page. “Was it originally human-sized, then you had it scribed like this for you?”

“Yes I did,” Fanlah said, her head shooting forward to nose under the book’s cover and toss it up, flipping the leather-bound volume shut.

Not, however, before Sara could catch a glimpse of what was on the next page. An addendum written in a different script and ink from the main text, much more fresh than the rest.

…seems to be no limit to the romantic activities of the Chosen, particularly when they claim the domain of Emotion. I will have to find another source to corroborate these assertions.

“Aw, why’d you try to hide that?” Sara pouted up at the massive creature towering over her. “I was just getting to the good part.”

Fanlah’s head reared up to its full height, her wings shifting and rustling like a bird puffing its feathers to bathe in a cool rain. An embarrassment reaction, Sara’s Blessings informed her.

“I- you- what could you possibly mean by that?”

Sara hopped to her feet, standing on her tiptoes atop the table to get as close as she could to eye level with the wyvern.

“Did you think I came for a late-night rendezvous just to chat? I’m the Chosen of Emotion, Fanlah. I can read you easier than that book.” She leaned forward, letting her clothes fall loose, giving the wyvern a view straight down her shirt. She sprouted an evil grin. “Not that I would have needed divine intervention to recognize what was going through your head, in case you were wondering.”

Fanlah recoiled, her wings fluttering and half-flapping, fighting the instinctive urge to fly away in an embarrassed panic.

“Sara Brown, you cannot possibly—”

“Just Sara’s fine.”

“—mean what it seems you are implying, are you?”

“Why not?” Sara walked along the table, feeling a bit of arrogant pride in the way that Fanlah’s neck twisted to follow her every step. “You’re an impressive wyvern, you’ve shown more than enough interest in me, and yes, if you want to look at the cynical angle, you seem like a fine friend to have amongst the Imperial elite.”

Fanlah was utterly at odds with herself, now. She was panting heavily, occasionally snorting and huffing between stutters, and that same stench of rot Sara had smelled before was filling the air. With a small prod of her Blessings, nothing that Fanlah could notice, Sara shifted the wyvern’s natural breath to smell like mint and roses.

“But… you really mean to…?” Fanlah shook her head, long neck wriggling as she blinked several times. “Are you so blatantly admitting you wish to… to take advantage of my favor?”

“That’s not the only reason I’m interested,” Sara said with a shrug. “Not even the main one, really. And besides,” she gave a prolonged, exaggerated lick of her lips, “sometimes getting taken advantage of can be pretty damn fun.”

Fanlah stared, locked into immobility by her disbelief. Despite all the ways she’d been fantasizing about Sara, she hadn’t even begun to imagine something would actually come of it. Wyverns and humans, it seemed, didn’t regularly intermix.

At least not publicly, Sara thought with a chuckle. I bet there’s just as many freaks here as there were on earth. They must just keep it on the down-low most of the time.

“Well?” Sara prompted, spreading her arms. “What do you say? I wish I could’ve taken things a little bit slower, but I don’t have much time in the capital. Do you want to find out what a Chosen tastes like or not—”

Fast as a striking snake, Fanlah’s head shot forward. Sara discovered the true extent of the wyvern’s flexibility as her neck wrapped twice around Sara’s torso, squeezing the breath from her lungs as Fanlah flapped once, throwing herself back through her home.

Sara was dropped into the bowl of massive pillows with a whuff, blinking in surprise. Damn was she fast. Looking left and right, she saw Fanlah’s wings pressed down on either side of her, the wyvern’s heaving torso right above her, neck craned down and around so that the wyvern could look her in the eye.

“Are you s-sure, Sara?” A long, sinuous tongue ran along thickly scaled jaws. “I’ve only mated a few times before, and I worry for you. They were… vigorous affairs.”

Sara’s heart began to thud in her chest. Fanlah was fucking massive. One of the smallest wyverns she’d seen, but that didn’t mean shit when compared to a feeble human body. Her torso was broad as an elephant, her tail thick as Sara’s chest, and her neck was five or six meters long, ending in a set of jaws that could have swallowed Sara’s lower half whole.

No backing out now, though.

“Vigorous?” She flashed a taunting smile at Fanlah. “Are you threatening me with a good time?”

The wyvern flushed, reptilian eyes blowing out from narrow slits to black orbs.

“A Chosen in my chambers…” she murmured, shifting her limbs back and forth nervously. “I never dared to dream of the day…”

Sara reached a hand up, pressing her palm to the scaled chest over her head. It was hot to the touch— almost painfully so. She didn’t pull away.

“A few years ago,” she purred, “I didn’t think I’d ever see the kind of magic that could light a single candle. Now I’ve flown on the back of the world’s swiftest wyvern. Isn’t it funny how fortune can shift our ways?”

Fanlah shivered at Sara’s touch. That was quite the motion on a creature of her size, shaking the entire collection of bed-sized pillows Sara was laid upon.

“I… am honored,” she breathed, lowering herself so that Sara could more easily feel her chest. Then she laughed nervously, a raspy, echoing noise in the hall that was her home. “And I am also rather clueless. What can one such as I do for so frail a creature as you?”

Fanlah’s neck was still bent under herself, its remarkable flexibility allowing it to come close. Sara reached up to touch the wyvern’s jaw, stroking her thumb along the thick scales there.

“Well, for starters, you’ve got a damn impressive tongue there. I wonder what you can do with it?”

“What I can… oh!” She reared back, shuffling to get space. If Sara had thought a wyvern simply walking along the ground looked like an awkward creature, a debilitatingly-horny wyvern trying to throw it in reverse at emergency speed was absolutely comical. She had to bite her cheek to keep from laughing as Fanlah’s claws slipped and slid and tore up the pillows, apparently totally unaware of her own clumsiness.

The moment Sara’s body was no longer in the shadow of Fanlah’s torso, she dropped. Sara felt the room shake from the impact, a dull boom echoing, and she briefly wondered if the rattle she felt from the floor was something the support beams below were built to handle.

That thought fled in an instant. Fanlah’s sinuous neck slithered along the pillows, her wide, almost puppyish eyes locked straight onto Sara. She stopped a few feet a way, her newly freshened breath wafting over Sara’s body in hot, heavy gusts.

“I warn you again, Chosen,” Fanlah husked, “when wyverns mate, it becomes… difficult for us to control ourselves. I will do my best, but-”

“Trust me,” Sara laughed, “don’t worry about it. If I can take Hurlish of Tulian’s finger-banging me as hard as she can, I can take you.”

A blend of growl and whine emanated from Fanlah’s throat. “I am no smith. She may be powerful, but she is not-”

“She’s stronger than you,” Sara interrupted. “A lot stronger. Trust me.” Sara wiggled her hips, lifting them up a touch so she could begin drawing her pants down her legs. “Besides, this is what my Class is for. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but—”

Fanlah’s neck shot forward with the speed of the snake it resembled, her mouth gaping wide. Sara caught a brief flash of gleaming three-inch teeth, then her entire lower body was engulfed.

“O-o-oohh holyfuck!” Sara squeaked. “Godfuckingdamn you’re fast!”

Fanlah wasn’t listening. The tip of her snout was rubbing against the underside of Sara’s breasts, her long, powerful tongue writhing against Sara’s lower half.

It was thick. That was the first thing Sara noticed. She’d known wyverns could use it like a limb, picking up and manipulating things with it, but she’d never seen it next to something that gave her a sense of scale. Not until she felt it curling and circling up her still-clothed legs, a tightening spiral that ended with it slipping through the waistline of her pants, pulling down.

Fanlah turned her head aside in a flash, spitting Sara’s pants across the room, and then she was latched back on, thick, wet flesh rubbing against Sara’s lower half.

Fanlah’s mouth was hot. Boiling hot. Hot enough that it probably should’ve been causing pain, but her Blessings were shielding her from that. Instead she found her lower body immersed in a steaming, sticky sauna, one rimmed by razor-sharp teeth that nipped and poked at her as she reflexively twisted in the wyvern’s grip.

Her tongue was big. Bigger than Sara thought at first, and, though it was probably her imagination, seeming to get bigger every second. Fanlah was desperate. She licked up and down Sara’s legs, rubbing her raw with that fat, throbbing appendage, and the entire time Sara was being shaken by a primal, hungry growl.

Not a tongue! Sara’s half-panicked, half-elated mind shouted at her. Not a tongue! That’s a fucking tentacle!

Okay, yes, it was technically a tongue, but gods be damned if the difference didn’t matter to Sara’s hindbrain at that moment. It was flexible enough to wrap around her leg four or five times, strong enough to drag her weight around, and it was absolutely dripping wet with saliva. Sara had spent too long on the internet to think of it as anything else, and all kinds of old videos were flooding her mind as Fanlah continued to lick and slobber at her.

“T-t-tassstess… good? I’m guessing?” She nervously stuttered out. She probably should’ve tried to be more suave, but who could blame her for slurring her words? She was halfway in the mouth of a predator the size of a fucking house, yet she was getting licked like she was an idol of worship. There were a lot of conflicting sirens blaring in her brain at the moment.

Fanlah pulled back just long enough to speak a single sentence.

“Even your skin and sweat is Divine, Sara Brown.”

Then she was back down, switching to Sara’s other leg.

Good gods she’s got a wet mouth. I’m fucking soaked, Sara thought. Then she giggled uncontrollably. In more ways than one.

It seemed Fanlah, at least for the moment, preferred Sara with her all-original hardware. Considering the absolutely lethal threat that a hip-pounding session from a multi-ton creature riding her cock would be, that was fine with Sara. What wasn’t fine, however, was the fact that Fanlah’s tongue was now wrapping around both legs, keeping them squeezed together.

“Y-y’know,” she gasped out, wriggling in the grip of Fanlah’s mouth, one hand grabbing a long tooth for some semblance of leverage, “the real fun part is between the legs, not around them.”

She almost regretted the words. With a primal rumble reverberating through the home, Fanlah’s tongue pulled off Sara’s legs so quickly that the copious saliva was the only thing saving her from brutal friction burns.

“Since you’ve never given head before, I can give you some p-OOINTER—”

The broadest, thickest part of Fanlah’s tongue slapped against Sara’s pussy, so wide that it forced her legs open. Fanlah dragged her head up, tongue spilling from her mouth, sliding the entire length along Sara’s bare cunt.

It was absolutely brutal. Hard friction and heat moving along her thighs, lips, and clit, traveling even further up to snag her shirt and physically tear it off her, bearing her to the open air. She shivered and shook, legs clamping down on the racing tongue even as she felt saliva drip down onto her, the wyvern’s long lapping motion lasting far longer than it ever should have.

By the time Fanlah’s tongue reached its end, Sara was shaking like a leaf. She’d gone from ‘pretty horny’ to ‘borderline overstimulated’ in one long slurp, and, looking down at the wyvern between her legs, they were far from done.

She spread her legs even further, fingers wrapping around a tooth to try and drag Fanlah back in.

“C’mon, big girl,” she purred, half-delirious. “Is that all you got?”

Fanlah whined with need. In a flitting stab so quick it was only a blur to Sara’s eyes, the thin tip of Fanlah’s tongue speared into her core.

“F-FUCK!”

Sara’s back arched as she was mercifully filled, the wyvern stuffing her past full in the space between heartbeats. The boiling heat of Fanlah’s mouth returned to wrap around her entire lower body, and then Sara suddenly found herself lifted, Fanlah’s jaws dragging her high above the pillow. She was suspended in midair, a tongue writhing against her, in her, and she could do nothing more than hold onto the wyvern’s teeth for dear life.

Fanlah’s eyes were glazed with lust. She growled, licking and licking and licking, greedily drinking down everything Sara’s body had to offer. Her tongue was so fucking long that it was wrapped around Sara’s chest, rough skin running and scraping across her nipples, winding down along her ribs and through the cleft of her ass, finally diving up and into her pussy with reckless abandon.

Sara may have technically been more helpless during sex before. When she had a collar on, or when Hurlish had a solid grip on her. But never before had her inner self, that lizard-brain part of herself that sat far behind her higher reasoning, been so deeply aware of just how outmatched she was.

This was a fucking massive wyvern. She was in her mouth. Fanlah could bite down on her with the barest twitch and end it all. She was completely, utterly at the woman’s mercy, and instead of suffering some brutal injury, what was happening?

She was getting some of the best head of her life.

It usually took a while for Sara’s composure to fall apart. For her moans to get more high-pitched and girlish, for her hands to start squeezing and scrabbling at the bedsheets. Not this time. In mere moments she was gasping insensibly, calling out Fanlah’s name, using what little grip she could find to shove herself against that magical fucking tongue that was taking her apart piece by piece.

Just like she’d been warned, Fanlah was lost. She was swallowing time and time again, growling and shivering, her wing-elbow-things stomping against the ground every time another gush of Sara’s arousal rolled down her throat. The air was filled with feathers from her feet scraping and shoving against nothing, tearing the bedding to pieces, and she’d finally let her eyes fall closed, all her focus on the woman she was eating out.

Sara wasn’t much better. She could feel that tongue consuming her. Writhing and twisting and pushing against every sensitive spot she could ever have. She threw her hips up against it, trying to stuff herself even further, and soon her Blessings began to accommodate her, allowing more and more of the wyvern’s tongue to delve deeper into her. She felt her cervix stretch and twist, bulging and allowing itself to be pushed back by the intrusion in a way that should have been impossible, yet it was that impossibility which drove Sara’s pleasure even higher. She was gasping, moaning, laughing, and forming tears at the corner of her eyes, so overwhelmed was she.

Her climax broke through like the collapse of a dam. She couldn’t stop it, couldn’t even pretend she wanted to stop it, and she shouted out as it arrived. Recognizing it for what it was, Fanlah’s tongue shoved deeper, rough skin curling and scraping against every nerve, sending white spots, hot flashes, and chills of goose pumps racing along every inch of Sara’s skin. Her slick arousal pumped and flooded into the wyvern’s mouth, making her partner all but roar with satisfaction, gulping it down with a feverish desperation.

Sara went slack all at once, her spine dropping to dangle almost painfully far back in the open air. Fanlah had just enough of her sense left to lower Sara to the bedding (or what was left of it) before she actually hurt herself, though she didn’t pull herself off of Sara’s body for even a single second.

“Is that…” Sara wheezed.

“Mmhhgmh?” Fanlah hummed, one green eye opening. Sara saw disappointment rising there, borne of an assumption that this was all the evening would be.

“Is that…” Sara repeated, propping herself up on her elbows to look the wyvern in the eye, “...all you got?”