Prompt! Victuri (of course), royalty locked into a tower guarded by a dragon. Please and thank you!
(um. this prompt made me go ‘how do people even get into towers with dragons, anyway’ and it … went to a weird place.)Sara Crispino has been under dragon-guard ever since she turned thirteen. The keep itself isn’t so bad, she supposes; the amenities are decent and there’s no end to the number of enchantments that keep the lone castle flourishing.She is going to have words with Mickey when she gets out, though. Not if. When.
It’d be lonely if it wasn’t for the dragon that guards her; a magnificent black creature with hints of silver and incandescent burgundy in the gleam of his scales. Eros, they call him, and this castle is his doom; she senses that something keeps him here just as he’s obliged to keep her. The dragon, for all that he frightened her at first, is something like an old friend now; so much so that she’s gotten to see his real shape – just once, on the last hunter’s moon – as he walked below the gate in moonlight, long hair drawn into a knot at the nape of his neck, leaving warm footprints in his wake in the snow. As a dragon, Eros has an incredible wingspan, and breathes terrible fire, and has talons that Sara has personally seen mince the foreign men who come from time to time to slay the beast and win her hand. He looks different in the moonlight; lonely and vulnerable and a little bit wistful, like he’s wishing for something he’s afraid to put words to.
The men who come here are likely not what her brother had in mind when he had her sent here; quite the opposite, in fact. She’s seen them, sometimes alone, sometimes in companies, charging in on their war horses with their banners raised. Sara is not old enough yet to know anything about love, but she thinks it cannot possibly look anything like that. How they’ve managed to ascertain that her hand can be won by such an act of violence and hatred is somewhat beyond her. Men are such idiots, she’s told the dragon, more than once, and he’s huffed little rings of smoke in response, as though he almost agrees.
Which is why she’s very surprised, a year later, to see someone else beginning to cross the bridge, walking forward under the light of another wintery moon. At this distance she can only make out the fine, pale gleam of his hair; it’s long and the wind gives it a life all its own.
Eros stands at the gate, a man in the moonlight, and she hears rather than sees the sound of him drawing two curved swords. “You cannot pass,” he warns the stranger.
“I’m not here for her, love,” says the man in the moonlight. “I’m here for you.”
