He looked at the scales. He looked at the chest. He reached out. His fingers found the seam between two of the massive scales. He gripped. He pulled.
The scale peeled back.
The skin beneath was dark red and steaming. He reached deeper. His arm went into the body. She heard the wet, interior sounds of a hand moving through organs. She looked away. Then she looked back. She was a warrior. She had field-dressed kills.
His arm emerged.
His hand was closed around the dragon’s heart.
It was the size of his head. Dark red. It pulsed — still pulsing, even torn from the body, the massive muscle of it contracting in slow, powerful rhythm. The heat coming from it was not the ambient lava heat. It was its own heat. Internal. Alive.
"The dragon’s heart," he said. He turned it in his hands. The surface was dense and layered, the tissue of it built for a creature that could breathe enough fire to melt stone walls. "I told you I would give you something."
Edda stared at the heart.
She was a dragon slayer.
She had killed a drake. She had spent fifty years studying the creatures. She knew what a dragon’s heart contained — the condensed, accumulated, compressed power of a being that had been alive for centuries. The fire. The endurance. The physical reinforcement. The lifespan.
A dragon’s heart was a myth as a gift. It was something spoken of in old stories as the reward given to legendary warriors by gods. The kind of thing that was theoretically possible and practically nonexistent because you could not simply tear a dragon’s heart out and offer it to someone. The body that received it had to be compatible. Had to be strong enough. Had to be prepared.
Her eyes went to his face.
Then back to the heart.
She felt his cock between her thighs.
She felt the accumulated seed in her womb.
She felt the week of training — the sword forms while being fucked, the healing in the seed, the ways he had pushed her body past every limit she had thought she had.
She reached out.
She took the heart.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
She felt his gaze on her face. The measuring quality of it. She did not look at him. She looked at the heart in her hands. It pulsed against her palms. The heat of it was immense. Not burning. Not scorching. Just overwhelming.
She turned.
She walked to the nearest flat rock. She lay down against it. She spread her legs. She reached behind herself. Her fingers found the crack of her ass. She spread the cheeks apart. Her anal — the ruined, gaped, well-used ring that had been colonized for seven nights — tightened reflexively at her own touch.
"Please," she said. She looked back at him over her shoulder. Her old eyes were steady. "Enjoy yourself, Dragon Lord."
She pressed the heart against her lower belly with one hand. Her other hand kept herself spread. She felt the pulse of the heart against her skin. She felt the heat of it through her flesh.
She was offering herself.
Not as submission. As a container. As a warrior who understood that transformation required a vessel and was offering her body as that vessel with the same deliberate focus she had once brought to battle.
He chuckled.
"Now you are a trained woman," he said. His voice was warm. "A bitch, I would say."
He walked to her.
He took the heart from her hand. He held it in his left. His right gripped his cock. He positioned the head against her anal. The ring recognized him. It opened. Welcomed. Remembered.
He pushed.
SKHLRK—
"Aaahn~"
The first inches entered. The familiar burning fullness. The walls stretching around the girth. She pressed her face into the hot rock. The rock was not burning her. The mana seal was still around them, though thinner now, maintained by his passive will.
He kept the dragon’s heart pressed against the small of her back.
He pushed it forward. Against her skin. Into her. Not physically. Magically. He was channeling the heart’s power through his hand, through the point of contact, into her body. Through her skin. Into her blood.
She felt it the moment it entered her.
Fire.
Not the temperature of fire. The nature of it. The expansive, consuming, transforming nature of something that had been burning for centuries. It moved through her bloodstream like light through water. It hit her heart. It hit her lungs. It hit her spine. It hit the place where her warrior soul lived — the dense, stubborn, fifty-year-old core of a woman who had refused to stop fighting.
And it hit the place he was fucking.
The fire met his cock inside her anal and the sensation was catastrophic.
"AAAAAANGHH~!! HIIEEEENGHH~!!"
Not pain. Not entirely. The pain was there — the deep, searing pain of dragon energy converting human tissue, reinforcing it, burning away the soft parts and replacing them with something that did not break. But underneath the pain was heat. Healing heat. The dragon lord’s intent was there too, she realized — not just giving her the power but guiding it. His cock was the anchor. His seed was the medium. He was fucking the transformation into her.
He was saving her while breaking her.
"Master—" The word came out cracked. "Master— it is too hot— I cannot— my heart— it is burning—"
PAH PAH—
"AAAAAANGHH~!! HNGHH~!!"
"Your heart is expanding," he said. His voice was steady above her. "Your body is being rebuilt. The dragon’s power is finding its home. This will hurt. Let it hurt. Do not fight it."
"I am— hah— a warrior— I— HAH— I do not know how— HAH— not to fight—"
PHAAAAACK—
"KKKKHAAAAAAANNGHHHHHH~!!"
"Then fight me," he said. "Fight my cock. Try to push it out. Use every muscle you have."
She did.
Her anal clenched. Every muscle in her lower body contracted simultaneously. The walls gripped. The ring tightened. The internal muscles that had been broken and rebuilt for seven nights engaged with the full, fifty-year-old strength of a dragon slayer who had been told to fight.
He drove deeper.
The battle of it — her body fighting to expel him, his cock fighting to stay — created friction. Heat. Pressure. The dragon energy flowing into her found the resistance and used it as a channel. It surged. It flooded.
She felt something crack inside her.
Not a bone. Not a muscle. A barrier. The ceiling of what her body had been willing to be. It cracked and the dragon fire rushed through the gap and she screamed.
"AAAAAANGHH~!! MASTER~!! MASTER PLEASE~!! IT IS TOO— IT IS—"
PAH PAH PAH—
"KYAAANGH~!! HNGHH~!! MASTER~!! AAAAAANGHH~!!"
She looked at her hands.
Her skin was changing.
Not obviously. Not grotesquely. A shimmer. A reddish sheen. Like sunburn, but deeper. Like something underneath was pressing outward. The tips of her fingers were dark. The skin on the back of her hands had a texture — faint, barely visible, the suggestion of scales forming beneath the dermis.
Her eyes changed.
The pupils elongated. Not to slits — but the edges of her irises shifted color. Deep amber. The color of a drake’s eye in firelight. Her vision sharpened.