Page 19 of Connor and the Dragons

Aeldryc nodded and gave the order. Kessrin took off first, spreading his massive silver wings, clutching the supply basket in his claws, and powering into the air with four wingbeats that blew my hair back. I had a moment to wonder if I was making a terrible decision before Oallian followed, jolting us into motion.

I stood, leaning on the basket’s rim, watching Qoksmere’s landscape unfold below. It was a bit like being on a plane, but bouncier, with enough wind that there were tears in my eyes. We left the city behind quickly, swooping over green pastures stitched together with roads, and a river with fishing boats on it. Oallian’s wingbeats drummed steady from above, and I could feel every one of them through the rigging, and ahead of us Kessrin cut through the sky with the supply basket, graceful and elegant.

We crossed over a range of beautiful high mountains, then reached the coast, and soon, we were above an endless stretch of ocean, and the view stopped being interesting. I sat on the floor of the basket, where someone had been thoughtful enough to give me a little nest of blankets and pillows, and I reached for the satchel Pip had handed me.

Inside, I found a flask of water, and bread and cheese wrapped in a cloth, and a small stack of books, which my bracelet seemed to decode into English without any issue. I wondered why something that could decode an entire language couldn’t unlock a cipher.

I opened the biggest book first, smiling as I realized that it was exactly my kind of thing. A history filled with diary entries and firsthand accounts. Liminia was an island nation that had been settled by wizards who wanted a life away from the vast powers of the fae.

It was vaguely democratic, run by a committee, but somewhere in the middle of that sat the Liminal Order, a mysterious sect of very powerful wizards which every author treated with a strange, blushing formality. Historians only got coy like that when there was real danger involved. I picked up another book, one which seemed to have been written specifically to fawn over the Liminal Order, whether from fear or true worship, I couldn’t quite tell.

I read about their great power and their great responsibility, their customs, and their secret initiation, and mystery-shrouded meetings, which like many things ancient and powerful, read a bit like a BDSM club.

Just as I flipped to a page that contained an illustration of their ritual sex paddle, everything went weightless. The books flew. My stomach shot up into my throat, and the wind went from breeze to scream. I grappled for the basket as I realized we were falling.

Had the rope broken?

I looked up.

Oallian was above me, still holding the basket rope in one fist, and it was the fist that was alarming, because Oallian was no longer a big winged beast. He was naked, human, plummeting, his hair whipping straight up, an alarmed look on his face.

He also had an erection. The fact that I noticed it at terminal velocity said something about how hard it was to miss.

“I’m sorry!” he screamed down at me. “I got too horny!”

I did not have time to unpack a single word of that, because something huge and silver hit us from the side. The whole world jolted, the basket swung wide and snapped back, and then we weren’t falling anymore, we were swinging from the other claw of an ice dragon whose wings were pounding the air hard enough to flatten the sea below us, and Oallian tumbled over the rim into the basket beside me, naked and wide-eyed and still, somehow, hard.

“Why didn’t the fall fix that?” I said, pointing at his boner.

He looked down at his cock, and shrugged. “Honestly, the falling was somewhat exhilarating. Good going, Kessrin! Nice rescue.”

We tilted sideways for an alarming beat, then Kessrin righted us again, flying toward a small rocky island, wings pushing hard. I sat in the swaying basket next to a naked guy who was gripping the rim as if he were the one who should be terrified of all this, and not the one who had just dropped me out of the sky. I willed my heart to return to a normal rhythm. My hand slipped down to my left wrist to check and see that I hadn’t lost my bracelet in the fall, not wanting to think about how difficult communication would become without it.

Kessrin set the baskets down on the rock, landed, and transformed, still breathing hard from the effort of the flight, completely naked and completely furious. “What the hell, Oallian?”

Kessrin was beautiful, his body lithe and willowy, bent with anger as he stalked towards Oallian. If he had not been so tall, he might have read as feminine, his body slim and finely muscled, his ass pert and rounded. And it was at that moment that I realized that androgyny kind of did it for me, especially on a creature as lovely as Kessrin. His pale legs went on for days.

“You DROPPED him.” Kessrin’s voice cracked across the island. Frost raced out from his bare feet in a white starburst. “We were thousands of feet in the air over open water, you lost your form, and you dropped him.”

“I held the rope!”

“With a HAND. A human hand, attached to a falling human body, neither of which can fly!”

“I would never have let go of the rope,” Oallian said, wounded, standing his ground, still magnificently naked. His erection had, if anything, rallied, and was currently pointing itself at Kessrin like an invitation. I found myself staring at the two of them, one pale and furious and beautiful, one bronze and thick and powerful. My brain served up an image, unrequested, of exactly what it would look like if Kessrin climbed on that huge cock and forced it inside him, arching his back and moaning as it stretched him open.

I was on a mission. I needed to stay focused. Even when everyone was being very sexy.

Kessrin’s tirade kept rolling and Oallian kept arguing that he hadn’t done anything wrong while his erection got noticeably worse.

“That’s enough!” I shouted.

They stopped. Both of them turned and faced me, chins slightly down, a naked fire dragon and a naked ice dragon standing on a rock looking exactly like two enormous good boys waiting to hear how much trouble they were in, and I kicked myself for the thought even as it finished happening.

“We’re on a mission. Oallian, get your erection under control and transform. Kessrin carries me from now on,” I said.

Silence. Neither of them questioned it. Somewhere in the back of my head, a voice noted that I had just given orders to two beings older than my entire civilization. Oallian’s cock was still standing at attention.

“You’re not helping your case,” I told Oallian, pointing at the offending cock.