All things considered, you should have expected it. You know better than to make deals with dragons.
WARNINGS: 18+ | light smut—no descriptions of anatomy used for the reader; possessive undertones; dragon trickery; blink and you'll miss it Celtic Dragon mythology and folklore
WORD COUNT: 1,5K
NOTES: They tempted me with hellfire and pretty imagery, so. Here we are.
It smells of biochar, pyrolysis. The incendiary heat sparks to life around you; a thick, impenetrable wall of stifling warmth, and you blink through the haze, the heat mirage, that swims in front of your eyes, trying to clear the clouds from your vision.
It's hot.
Hellfire. Inferno. Absolute.
Paradoxically, it edges into dry heat—wildfires: burning forests, charred logs, crumbling charcoal, ashes—but your skin is drenched in sweat; sticky, tacky. Hot springs. Lavascape.
You're drowning in Phlegethon, hands clawing at molten skin to stay afloat.
"Shush, shush—"
It's a wheezing rasp. A rumble that rebounds against the carverous, limestone walls and echoes in your ears. The vibrations of it rattle through your chest and dislodge the panic from between your ribs.
"Easy, now."
Despite the smoked-cured softness of the voice above you, around you, in you, it booms through your marrow; the sudden shift of the plates. A tectonic shockwave that bludgeons into you.
"Can't—" you start, words a desperate, aching whine. "Can't—John—it's so hot—!"
His answer is a grunt; a rolling, monstrous sound that shivers across your skin. It's easy, with his front pressed against your back, his words hissed into your crown, to forget that he isn't a man. That his body is made of the valleys: carved from chiselled andesite, graphite, and limestone. Coursing through his veins is ichor and brimstone, fed from the burning pyre inside his chest that blooms tuffs of smoke, and reeks of ash.
He quiets you with another low pur, and feeds the tips of his steel claws into your flesh, anchoring you tight to his body.
And then you hear the fire-painted voice speak from between his nicotine fangs: "I know."
And you suppose he would.
Molten blood. Igneous skin. His voice is Pyroclastic: tephra falling from his heaving chest.
With the exception of his pointed, angular claws, his hands almost look human. Almost.
But when they grip your hips tight, the skin of his palms feels too thick. Too velveteen. Like the soft underbelly of a reptile.
Those claws hold you steady as he slides the full, burning length of himself into you. The blunt press of his cock splitting you apart, and the rasp of his knuckles, rough with blackened osteoderms protruding from his thick skin, makes you shiver. It feels like sandpaper when it prickles over your flesh.
You try to gasp but the oxygen in the room is swallowed by the flames. Try to move but his weight on your body is a plutonic ash bed. A prison.
Jewels and gems nip at your skin when you ramble to find purchase on the treasure trove of his nest, to find something to hold onto while your body is slowly consumed by the unrelenting heat of him stretching you into a shape you do not recognise.
"Tryna run?" He mocks. "Thought you could handle it, mm? Wasn't that our deal? Do you know what happens to little humans who try to break their promises?"
You want to bite back something scathing, something dripping in venom and cruelty, but the words are ground into peat salt when he presses the full weight of himself onto you, using the momentum to snap his hips harder, faster, than he was before.
(You swear, swear, you feel the white-hot tip of him digging harshly into your sternum.)
But he's merciful—to a degree—and his hand lifts, drops in front of your nose, claws gleaming in the flames that surround his den, his prison, his home.
You take in the sight of his heat-scorched skin—a chromosphere of living magma: blistering red dusted with fine ash. It's pretty. Stunning. You're mesmerised by the ripples of fire running in thick rivulets beneath his carbonised pelt, and you know, then, why he's so sought after. Respected. Feared.
(Who would try and run afoul around a man, a being, a beast, who has hellfire burning in his veins?)
The brief respite splinters when he shifts forward, pushing himself as deep into your body as he can possibly go, and the world around you lists sharply on its axis when he pulses, branding you from the inside out, turning your body into a magma chamber that only fits him—
You can't breathe—haven't been able to since you rocked up to the smouldering cavern on the side of a mountain, and demanded he make a deal with you. It's hard to acclimate to the carbon-rich air that thrums around you like a thick curtain of plasma, threatening to consume you whole.
"Easy, now, pretty thing," he purrs again and the deep rumble that spills from his expansive chest seems to glue to each bone in your body, reverberating deep within your liquifying marrow.
His elbow falls, chin presses into your crown. He breathes you in, and the world around you shudders, and ripples like the glimmering sea of a heat haze. An optical illusion. A mirage. But one that flexes around you like water; moulding to your body, and filling in all the crevasses and canyons until the plasmic air clings to your skin.
Smoke billows with his exhale. You scent charred tobacco leaves, brimstone, crushed granite, and burning rock—sharp and acrid. The smell sticks to the back of your throat and colours your lungs in a fine layer of rock dust.
The world around you shakes when he growls into your crown, nose pressed tight to your sweat-slicked skin.
It feels like an earthquake rattling inside of you, shaking loose the paper-thin threads of sanity that keep you still beneath his bulk.
"Ah, John—"
His forearm slides closer to your gasping mouth, and you scent guncotton on his skin. Thick. Heady. It makes your head swim, and a fever bloom in your veins.
"There," he huffs into your hair, and the plume of his voice heats the world around you by several degrees. "Now you have something to hold on to, love."
His voice is pinched with something that sounds mockingly cruel, mordant, but there's a softness in the way he holds you close; a tenderness that biles the roughness of his hands, the sharp drag of his claws against your flesh.
"Now," he continues, hand tightening on your skin hard enough to bruise your tremulous bones. "Be good, and let me fuck you."
With that, he snaps forward until he's once buried to the hilt. Fangs prickle across your shoulder blade when he lowers his maw to your skin. Each heavy exhale through his nose leaves a scorching mark over your flesh until it's blistered and raw.
He sets a brutal pace, and each time he sinks in deep, you feel something inside of you splinter, break. It's unlike anything, anything, you'd ever felt before—a liquid pleasure and pain that melts together into burning heat. It feels like euphoria and punishment in the same breath: an equilibrium of salvation and condemnation.
Each growl that leaves his heaving chest shakes the cobwebs from between your ribs, and fills them with ash and smoke. It seeps into your bloodstream, poisoning you with each harsh stroke.
(You forgot that he was poisonous—)
But it's too late.
Lost in the delirious cloud of heat, ozone, and John, all you can do is wrap your tiny hands around the thick of his forearm, nails barely leaving a mark on his thick pelt, and cling to him as he takes what you offered with greedy claws, and gluttonous eyes, pounding you into his bed of furs, and stolen gems and gold. Treasure toppled to the ceiling of the cavern they warned you to stay away from. The precious clutch of a monster who protects his wares with fire and madness. Raining wrath and fury, white-hot rage and red-hot desperation, down on anyone who dares to get close.
It's too much, too much, but you knew what you were getting into when you tried to barter with him.
("Let's make a deal—"
And he'd said, "you must be desperate. Don't you know what I am—"
His noctilucent eyes burned in the dark.
Mocking. Cruel. Hungry.)
All you can do now is hope, somehow, that you make out in a single piece. That all your vibrating atoms stay whole; intact. That you don't lose yourself inside the madness of heat, and burning fire.
That you'll make it out, alive.
—if, of course, he lets you go—
But those hopes are dashed when his molten tongue flickers out, laving a burning path across your neck.
"You'll look so good in all my gold," he snarls, a thundershock right into your core.
And then he sinks his fangs into your neck.
You should have known from the start when he looked at you with hunger, rapacious greed in his keen, sharp eyes that you were not leaving his den again.
(The most precious piece in his hoard.)
Your body is a wicker pyre made to be burned. From the charred ashes, something new will rise. A phoenix trapped in the paws of a beast who likes pretty, shiny things, and will never let go.
(And really, what else did you expect when you decided to tempt a dragon?)
Person A, standing with their back turned: I’ve been expecting you, Person B.
Person B: How did you do that without turning around?
Person A: ... To be perfectly honest, the first couple of people I did that to were not you.
—
Person A: You often use humor to deflect trauma
Person B: Thank you
Person A: I didn't say that was a good thing
Person B: What I'm hearing is, you think I'm funny
—
Person A: Person B was banned from the chicken shack, so we had to go out of town to get some.
Person B: Well, they shouldn’t say “all you can eat” if they don’t mean it.
Person A: Person B, you ate a chair.
—
Person A: Is something burning?
Person B: Just my love for you.
Person A: Person B, the toaster is on fire.
