The individual words the priest droned were as meaningless to Alyce as the ancient runes carved into the dark rock at her back but taken together she knew their import.
I had thought to see a few more summers before I heard my last rites.
As a princess of the blood, she had always expected a somewhat longer and more comfortable future. True, she knew her ultimate fate would likely have been to be marriage to some unpleasant old man to shore up her family's uncertain grasp on the throne. She understood that it had not happened yet out of some combination of an aging father's sentimentality and the fact she was the one card left in his hand.
Still, it would have been old man with lands and wealth and finery and mayhap a handsome knight or three in his household to pass the time with. Imaginings of how they might pass that time had seen her through a few dark, lonely nights in her bedchamber.
Not that they were all so lonely, but finding men satisfied to bed a princess without feeling the need to shout it from the castle roof was more of a chore than it should have been...
There were knights and nobles about now, to be sure, some of whom had even enjoyed her favors, but they sat silent on horses that whickered with the fear their riders dared not express. No finery either. She wore a simple white shift, and her blond hair fell past her shoulders unbound. The collar about her slender neck was gold, at least, but the clasp had been beaten shut, never to open. From the back a gold chain fastened her to a great rusted iron ring that had been driven into the black slab behind her, amidst forgotten runes gouged into the rock in some distant age. In front of her, across a field of broken stone, the mouth of a cave gaped blackly, and as she stared at it her blue eyes widened as she caught a glimpse of motion, a flash of flame...
Through her rising terror she found she could still feel a hint of irritation that the priest had come nowhere near the end of his prayers before he, too, saw what she had seen and turned without hesitation to flee up the slope away from the cave, his robes flapping behind him. The knights and nobles quickly outpaced him, their horses hardly needing reigns or spurs to wheel and gallop away. She alone was left to see what came crawling from the cave.
She had seen it from afar, of course, as it had flown through the skies above the kingdom for a fortnight while her father's wise men searched dusty tomes to put a name to the terror and find how to avert the doom it clearly portended.
They found the name. Tanex, the wyrm no man may slay. Tanex the destroyer of kingdoms. Tanex the devourer of maidens. The last offered a potential solution that Alyce thought many had jumped at rather too eagerly. A number of the nobles now galloping for the horizon had bravely browbeat her poor father with threats of rebellion, indeed with threats of violence in his own hall, until he consented she be offered to appease the beast even now emerging into the sunlight.
It was larger than any beast should be, 40 feet at least from the tip of its steaming nose to the end of its thrashing tail, covered with glittering crimson scales, bright as jewels. As she watched, great red bat wings unfolded from its shoulders, and it leapt across the broken field in a bound, landing before Alyce with a sound of cracking stone. She found herself too terrified to scream, too terrified to move as a great reptilian head crowned with four short black horns thrust toward her. Glittering golden eyes, slit like a cat's and the size of dinner plates, stared from underneath them at the chained princess.
Then the head swayed closer, a great forked tongue flicking forth, and Aylce found the spell was broken as her terror returned redoubled. She started at teeth the size of her forearm a foot from her face, and as the furnace heat of its breath washed over her Alyce's mind and body gave out as one and she fell into darkness.
***
The princess awoke to rock and flames and screamed.
Hell, dead, dead and in hell....
Her mind raced in circles as she jerked upright from the smooth stone floor where she had been sprawled. As her eyes focused she could see she was in a great high-ceilinged cave, ascending to a rough circle of sunlight far off to her right and descending to a flickering red-lit gloom to her left. The flames resolved themselves into torches, set in brass sconces of ancient and uncanny design affixed to the walls at irregular intervals.
Alyce looked down at herself. She was still in her white shift, only a little the worse for wear. Her fingers felt the collar at that was still about her neck, its chain reduced to a single link hanging from the back. Where it had been a plain band there were now strange sigils etched into the gold.
"That collar near strangled you when you swooned," a great voice came from her left. "And it was not properly inscribed for the rite, but I have chosen to overlook and correct that."
She looked up and saw that the voice came from a red-lit smoke that rose to cloud the cave a few yards from where she sat. Within that cloud, she could make out the dim shadow of the great wyrm, and her heart again nearly stammered to a stop.
And then the shadow began to shift, something like how shadows shift before a moving candle, twisting, shrinking. As she stared the great wyrm shadow became the shadow of a man, tall, broad shouldered.
Then Tanex stepped from the mist and Alyce started again, for she beheld not a man, but a woman.
She stood near six and a half feet tall and was shamelessly naked. A cascade of untamed red hair, red as rubies, red as flame, cascaded from her head and past her shoulders. Her skin was flawless, with a red tinge Alyce had never seen before. Her breasts were...very large...Alyce reddened herself and looked down. Her arms, her legs, her body was smooth and sleek but muscled in the way she had most certainly not seen on her father's champion knight when she wasn't peeking in him bathing after a hard sparring session....
She retained her wings, reduced but still jutting past her broad shoulders. A long, slender tail whipped behind her, red-scaled and snakelike. The nails on her fingers and toes were black and long. Alyce could make out a faint tracery of faintly-red scales on her fingers, on her feet, fringing a face that was human and strong and beautiful. Four black horns jutted from beneath her hair. She smiled and sharp teeth glinted.
Her eyes remained the same, golden, catlike, glittering.
"You are...Tanex?" Alyce stammered, her mind hopelessly confused.
"Taneth," the serpent-woman answered back, spreading her wings as flame flickered from her nostrils. "Have the people of this land truly forgotten the sound of my name? I slept too long, I fear."
She stalked closer, staring Alyce in the eyes, stretching her wings and arms wide, seeming to grow even taller as she approached. "I am Taneth, the Bright Devouring Flame, Queen of Earth and Sky, get of the First and Nameless, Goddess of Wyrms. No man may slay me," she pronounced. "I have slept an age beneath this land, and I rise now to claim what is mine."
Alyce's mind continued to whirl uselessly. "You...you are a woman," she said, scrambling to her feet.
"No, I am a dragon. A female of my kind, but a dragon," she said, hips swaying as she walked closer. Alyce backed against the wall, but the dragon walked on, pressing up against her. "It pleases me to bank the flames of my glory in this form for the comfort of mortals," the dragon said, tilting her head to the side with a smile. "Do you find it...comfortable?"
Taneth's naked skin was smooth, dry and feverish, radiating a heat Alyce could feel through the thin silk shift. Her breath was hot on Alyce's face, but not the sulfurous foulness she expected, but instead smelling faintly of some exotic incense. A long, dark, forked tongue suddenly snaked from Taneth's mouth, and Alyce flinched as it lightly stroked the side of her face. "I can make you more than comfortable," the dragon purred.
"You..I..." Alyce stammered. Her mind whirled, as she dimly remembered whispers of perversions between the serving girls. "You...want to be with me...as a man?"
"My dear pet, you wound me," Taneth answered. "I am a dragon. A sorceress. A demigoddess. I can show you pleasures no man has conceived."
The breath of the dragon was hot on her face, her crimson lips so very, very close. The golden eyes seemed to be growing, and Alyce felt as though she were being drawn into their depths. She could feel her breath quickening, her skin flushing, and an odd restless sensation begin to grow deep inside her. The eyes were so big now, the lips so close...with a supreme effort Alyce wrenched her gaze away and turned to the side.
The dragon pulled her head back, with a look Alyce could not quite understand. Puzzlement? Disappointment? "I will not take what is not given. It is not our way. But do you know what you scorn?" she said. "In my time I have consorted with queens of old, with nymphs, with goddesses. All of them shook with pleasure at my touch. And you refuse me?"
"I...I...it's not...I can't..." Alyce stammered.
"Very well," the dragon said, her expression closing somewhat. "Perhaps I have slept too long alone. Do you desire anything? Ask what you will, and I will grant you what I can."
"Would you...would you grant me leave to go?" Alyce asked. The dragon gave no answer but a low chuckle.
"I am your slave, then," the princess said.
"No, not that," the dragon said. "You are no slave. I will not force you to obey."
"You will release me, then?" she asked.
"No!" the dragon answered with an expression of annoyance. "Are you dimwitted? You were given according to the terms of the ancient pact, for as long as you shall live. The Old Law is unbreakable. It is all carved into the very rock you were..." She trailed off. "Of course. During my slumber, your people forgot how to read the runes."
"No...no one has ever known," the princess stammered. "They were carved by forgotten folk, before our people came to this land..."
She flinched back as the dragon began bellowing in laughter. "Ha! Then you really did not know," she said. "What did you expect was going to happen?"
"We thought...I thought...you were going to eat me," Alyce said.
The laughter that followed was more unexpected and somehow even louder. "I would love a taste of you, pet, but no," the dragon said as she paused for breath. "You are not my dinner. You are my wife."
Alyce stared dumbstruck as Taneth chuckled. "You are surprised? Your kings have been gifting spouses to each other for as long as you have had kings, and to my kind just as long. When last I walked these lands I usually had two or three princesses or princes about, all left at that very rock according to the Old Laws, not to mention the concubines, the slaves and the thralls and the ones I took in battle. Would-be dragonslayers bring a certain fire to their lovemaking, once they have been properly brought around..."
