#elf partner

[shadow-0f-the-dragon]

Welcome home, love

[faikazahaya]

Ashes and Shadow sleeping all cuddled up <3 (who needs pajamas or blankets when you have a massive furnace for a wife?)

[shadow-0f-the-dragon]

Decompress with Your Dragon Wife

Shadow doesn’t announce himself.

He slips into the room with his head ducked low. Stringy bangs act as a meager curtain against the onslaught of Too Much.

Too much sound, too much light, too much smell. Too many thoughts rattling on in his head. Just too much.

Ashes is coiled near the far wall in her true dragon form, large and warm, a scroll the size of a wagon unfurled between her talons. When he gets close enough for her to notice, she lifts her head from her reading.

“Shadow?” she asks. While her voice is soft as it could be for a dragon, it was still toomuchtoomuchtoomuch. “Are you—”

He doesn’t answer.

Instead, he approaches on silent feet and ducks beneath the folded arch of her wing. Dragonhide closes around him like a blanket, the world narrowing to darkness stitched with only the faintest ember-soft light bleeding through.

The air under her wing is hot from the fire in her core. It seeps into his bones, loosening something tight and aching in his chest. Her flank is a wall of warmth, steady and unyielding. He curls up on the floor pressed flush against it, knees drawn in and digging into her hide, his forehead resting against her scales.

The scales rasp against his skin when he shifts. They're not sharp—never sharp—but rough and textured, a feeling that grounds him. He brings his fingers up to drag along valleys and ridges beneath the pads of his fingers, following the natural rise and fall of the tapestry of her scales. Each pass sends feeling shivering up his arm, a reminder to himself that she is safe, that he is safe.

Ashes hums, doesn't ask anything more. Shadow thinks she might recognize he isn't in a state to talk. He's thankful.

Her heart beats against his forehead, deep and powerful, a slow, even rhythm that drowns out the noise still echoing in his head. Not panicked. Not upset. Steady. Ba-dump—pause—ba-dump. A tempo older than language.

Her breath plays along with its own rhythm, a warm rise and fall that moves his body almost like a babe being rocked to sleep.

Shadow exhales, relaxes for the first time in hours.

He closes his eyes and lets himself sink into her heat, into the dark, into the steady certainty of her heartbeat—until the world softens at the edges and finally, finally lets him sink into oblivion.

[shadow-0f-the-dragon]

Baby wants uppies

[shadow-0f-the-dragon]

Your Dragon Wife (and your baby)

Shadow curls into the deepest corner he can find, knees hugged tight to his chest, bare toes digging uselessly into the stone. There is no familiarity to latch onto. No magic humming beneath his skin—no wind magic to loosen from his chest, no currents to chase and braid and calm himself with. His power is gone, cut from him so cleanly it aches like a missing limb.

Everything had been chaos and more chaos before this. Disowned. Dragged away in chains. Salt and iron and fear. A ship groaning under storm winds until the sea rose up and swallowed it whole.

And now—

Now things are at a standstill.

And he has too much time to think.

He doesn’t have his Safe People to hover near, to ground himself by proximity. He doesn’t have his routines—no familiar corridors, no set meals, no predictable schedule. Just Cave and Unfamiliar and the constant whispering of his newfound telepathy clawing louder and louder inside his head—too sharp, too close, Too Much.

He presses his hands over his ears, rocking himself. Back and forth. Back. And. Forth.

It doesn't help.

Then—

A sound cuts through the dark. Echoing against stone halls.

Crying.

A baby crying.

Shadow bolts upright so fast his head spins.

His nephew.

His baby nephew!

How—how could he forget? The only piece of his old life not torn away. The only Safe Person he has left. Small and helpless and still here.

He’s moving before the thought fully forms, scrambling out of the shadows, feet skidding on uneven stone as he follows the sound blindly. His heart pounds hard enough to drown out the whispering in his head.

He rounds a bend in the cave and skids to a halt.

Someone is there.

Tall. Slightly too tall to be an elf. The lighting paints her hair the same molten orange as Ashes’ scales, and when she turns, wings shift at her back—smaller than the dragon’s, folded close, four slender horns crowning her head. A tail flicks unconsciously behind her.

She’s definitely not an elf.

Elf-like, sure. Also dragon-like. Like she was trying to be something in-between.

Shadow’s breath stutters.

They’d been taken in by a dragon. Ashes. That name, carefully exchanged with the along with the few words they could understand between their languages. He hasn’t seen hide nor wing of anyone but her since waking here—

The patterns form a picture in his head.

It must be Ashes.

Just. A disguise?

Before he can ponder further, the baby cries again—louder this time, closer.

Shadow’s focus narrows on the lump in the woman's—Ashes'?—arms instantly.

There!

Tiny. Wrapped in cloth far too big for him. Face scrunched red with distress, fists clenched tight as he wails.

His nephew.

Shadow takes a stumbling step forward. His hands shake as he reaches out for his baby.

The world narrows to nothing but the baby in his arms—the last thread tying him to everything he lost—and for the first time since the storm, since the chains, since the darkness of the Curse swallowed his life whole—

Shadow holds his baby close to his chest, Ashes at his side.

And breathes.

[shadow-0f-the-dragon]

When Shadow is overstimulated, the best cure is the dark, quiet hollow under Ashes' wing. He can curl up against her flank, up against the soothing rasp of her scales, and listen to her heart beating. ❤️

[shadow-0f-the-dragon]

Anyway, here’s Ashes and Shadow, height difference exaggerated, because I love them and I suffer.

(I'm drawing them so much right now because I might be sick lmao)

[shadow-0f-the-dragon]

mORE DOMESTIC DRAGON FLUFF PLEASE!!! I BEG