This is a short work of erotic fiction containing furry, or anthropomorphic, characters, which are animals that either demonstrate human intelligence or walk on two legs, for the purposes of these tales. It is a thriving and growing fandom in which creators are prevalent in art and writing especially.
All characters are over eighteen and clearly written to be so, as in all of my stories.
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Cynder swung her head back and forth, spreading her gigantic, bat-like wings that had, before, struck fear into the hearts of so many souls. Her heart panged for that time - not because she wanted to go back to it but because it was a time when she had not been herself, under the control of another, and yet there were still those that blamed her for all that she did. Her black scales held the souls of so many, the armies that she'd commanded marked in the crimson of her belly, the deaths in her wake so far behind and yet so close that she sometimes felt as if she was back in the moment, trembling as pain rained down.
The only thing that got her away from that broken reality was flying and, so, Cynder flew, chasing her tail and beating a path from the death and horror that had become her past, as much as she had tried to evade it, at the time. Things beyond her control had come to pass, however, and it would have taken a much stronger dragon to stand up against the darkness when, of course, she'd only been a hatchling. But she could have done something...
No. Don't think like that.
She turned sharply, cutting down low across the river in Avalar Valley, although the cheetahs still ducked from her. They hadn't minded her as much when she'd been smaller, but a hatchling, and working with Spyro to, as it was, save the world, but it was different now that she was an adult, stretching her wings out. She was nowhere near as scrawny as she had been as a young adult either or an adolescent, having filled out but gained a regal, leonine air, her body long and sensual, tail flicking back and forth as she flew. The blade at the tip was good for more than just cutting a path through the air, proving its worth in attacking too, and she was careful to keep it clean and polished of a night when she set down from her flight.
For all Cynder did was fly, gnashing her jaws and letting the gleaming white of her horns strike fear into the hearts of all, even though that was not her intention. She knew that it happened solely from her being out, flying, but if the other option was locking herself away and meditating or secluding herself in the worse fate of teaching hatchlings what it was to be a dragon (but not a hated one) in the world...well...she wasn't about to take that on her head. She wasn't much one for hatchlings, even though she'd found great pleasure in the act of mating and egg-laying.
Ah... Yes. That was a better thought. That was a thought that she was happy to run with, skimming the tops of the deciduous trees as birds chattered angrily beneath her. But they were beneath the dragoness' regard as she soared on, barely needing to flap her wings at all as she relished in her strength, the security of her power. And it was a good kind of power too, what thrummed through her body and made her who she was, her breath abilities licking at the back of her throat, yearning to be set free.
Oh, what the hell. With a wicked glint in her eye, she called on the power of the wind, her lungs inflated, expanding massively. Sometimes, it surprised even her just how much they could billow out, her chest taking on more and more, all for the purposes of one of the rare abilities that she could never be sure whether were due to her being a black dragon or because she had been touched by the darkness. It was not something that she particularly wanted to delve too deeply into herself but she had found more than a touch of magic at the tips of her claws as she matured, learning more than the four breath abilities that she had been graced with too: poison, shadow, fear and, of course, her favourite, wind.
There was nothing like the power of the wind licking at her scales, teasing her, begging her, goading her on into a flurry of furtiveness, showing her the power of nature. Poison was delightful and something that was a fierce talent to hone during battle but it had not proven to be all that useful after the war had ended, their foes defeated where they had risen. Wind, however, could shape the elements, cut through the sky, send her tumbling and turning in a shrill keen of joy, bringing just a little bit of life back to her wings when she wondered if she was turning into a monster again.
And, so, she let loose, working up a twister that stayed high in the air, hurricane-strength winds bringing in fresh air, air that was ripe and fertile with rain. The crops needed to be fed and they could not linger in such dry weather for long, fields of wheat waving gently below. But her winds did not need to touch those when she had such divine control over them, shaping the air with her wings and sending it forth to do her bidding.
Crack!
The wind toppled a tree - an old one that was threatening travellers with weak, hanging branches, branches that could have dropped off and struck anyone at any time. It was huge with twisted, gnarled roots that had sunk into the ground, anchoring it deeply, but it had proven to be no match for the dragoness and all that she was in the world to represent. Her winds were shaped and pulled, sending a touch of shadow into them too so that they more aptly slipped around one another - something that should never have been possible when it came to controlling the very matter of the air itself but, ah, for Cynder the impossible had simply been laid into her claws. And who would she be to complain about such a thing as she brought a moderate downpour to the crops, fat, greedy droplets of rain sinking into the dry earth?
She smiled. The crops would grow. Her maw parted, a howl in her throat, triumph begging to be ripped free in the scream of her breath, her wind and her storm, caressing and tingling down her scales. She'd earned that much.
"Oi! Demon!"
Jaws agape, she paused, wings beating, keeping her aloft as she hovered, looking down. Below her was a seemingly exceptionally angry mole farmer, hopping about from hind paw to paw as if he couldn't keep himself still, eyes blazing even from such a distance. Before she could even close her maw and ask him, as a friend, what had gotten him so worked up when she was merely playing with the elements, he launched into a tirade.
"There may have been an alliance, you she-demon, but we don't want the likes of you around here!" He howled, throwing his fists in the air, though he was hardly intimidating in his diminutive stature. "Laying waste to our villages, destroying Warfang city... Have you no shame?"
Cold sank into her stomach, a chill that hit her as if she had gulped down a hunk of ice without considering the after-effects. It was sudden but not unexpected as she stared numbly down at him, feeling as if her body was being held perfectly still even though she was, quite clearly, in flight, hovering. She had to stay there, not allowing her body to drop, her twister spinning itself out, fading without her energy to hold the wind. Her breath caught in her throat, tightening there, but she could barely breathe let alone find the breath with which to let words out into the open air between them. Never before had there been so much space between her and another creature, the mole screaming. Was he infuriated that she was still there or that she was who she was? Something else? There wasn't the nuance in Cynder left to care, words washing over her, each one coming with a tiny barb that latched into her soul amongst all the others that had come before.
It didn't matter that she'd been one of the ones trying to protect Warfang city. They still saw her as a monster and the tales that had been spun had unravelled out of control, painting her as something even worse than what she had been. He didn't care. He was just one mole. But one mole was like the cheetahs that avoided her, like the dragons that didn't know what to make of her, like the hatchlings that cowered and told tall tales of her worst sides and none of her best.
Cynder's chest tightened. Would that always be all she was to them?
She hung her head. There was no sense hanging around while such lies abounded and she turned her tail on the mole, still screeching and flailing, yet his words were all ones that she had heard before, the insults the same. She had to get away before the burning anger in the pit of her stomach melted the ice, however, seared right through it from the inside out, glaring out in a seething roil of molten fury. It was coming, Cynder knew it was, and that was just why she had to get out, to get away, why she had to fly and fly and fly, all just to keep the monster inside her pinned down and tamed.
Away. She left him behind, the world that she knew, the luscious, fertile fields that she had brought fresh life to, far behind. There was only one place she could go that she knew no one would roam, no one would come, for it was barren and not even she had been able to study it enough to learn just how she could bring life back to it. The rocks called her, the crags and the shadowy hollows: perfect for a dragoness like her that had lived her life in the shade of those better than her, stronger than her, always more than her.
The flight there passed in the blink of an eye, scales crawling and itching white-hot, rage searing through. She didn't see what she was doing as she poured fear onto the land, scraggly trees that bore no leaves and had not done for many years crumbling into dust as if they had never existed. The ground there was hard and cracked and yawning into open canyons, the type of land that could have been something if not for the wars, the conflict between the darkness and the people who populated the kingdom back at that time.