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Maybe it would have been easier if the hunger hadn’t come first.
It started in whispers, the first time he opened his eyes and saw the Warrior’s face pensively hovering over him, his eyes trailed not on Estinien’s face but on the window, the light fuzz of his fur, painfully sharp to Estinien’s newly sensitive eyes, bright and airy in the sunlight. A sigh ran through him, the movement of his throat obscene in its slowness, and then his eyes fell to Estinien’s face, and his entire body went taut with equal parts joy and apprehension, his long ears twitching in surprise, his muscles poised to move at any moment.
Like prey that heard the faint rustle of wings in the distance, that caught the shadow flying over it.
“Estinien!” the Warrior cried out, and Estinien kept his mouth tightly shut, for fear of going for his throat.
It was the accursed Wyrm’s blood in him. He knew the pain Nidhogg had gone through, intimately, had bled in concert with him while he was trapped in his own body; he no longer hated him for his anger, when it had been so like to his own, but the echoes left in his body felt like a one-sided punishment. Did the Wyrm curse him with his last breath, the last maddened strike of his mind as his eyes fell into the abyss? Or was this simply the consequences of having been one, of finding himself all too similar to the ancient dragon, despite his youth and foolishness?
But as the Warrior kept coming, as he slowly found it in him to talk rather than bite his lips raw, the hunger rose in him with a fierceness that overshadowed anything he had experienced even in that final fight. There had been hate, back then, hate that clouded both their minds and shrouded them in despair, and a desire, burning, for vengeance. But the drive in Nidhogg’s gut had been different. He had wanted to hurt, to punish. Violence was a tool to an end, not a desire of its own.
But now, whenever he looked at his saviour, the gentle eyes that had faced Nidhogg with grim conviction, that had been so wide with worry as he pulled Nidhogg’s eyes from Estinien’s body, all he could see was the blood beating just under his skin, the graceful tension in his ligaments, the light filtering through the delicate skin of his ears. So vulnerable. So alive.
How easy it would be, for anyone to sink a knife, a claw, a tooth inside his throat. How fiercely he hated the thought that it might be anyone other than him.
(No, he always cried out in the back of his own mind, almost as smothered as he had been when the eyes were still glued to his body, no! Not “anyone else”! Not anyone, not ever! He didn’t own these wretched desires, they weren’t his, they weren’t his!)
The Warrior kept coming, and with him the visions of Estinien’s claws—hands—covered in his blood, of eyelashes batting not with coy pleasure but with the dazed weakness of prey past the point of struggling, of entrails still warm and glistening. And all the while, his eyes showed nothing but warmth, worry, compassion. As if Estinien wasn’t a moment of weakness away from pinning him to the floor with his lance and sinking his teeth into his flesh.
“You really should eat more,” he told Estinien reproachfully one day, peeling a slice of fruit and bringing it close to his lips, and Estinien had to grab his hand and keep it away.
“I can feed myself,” he said hoarsely, and hated the disappointment in the Warrior’s eyes as he withdrew his hand.
He ran away that very night.
The ashes of Ferndale, overgrown as they were, offered him no answers. But if anything, its empty loneliness comforted him in the path he had chosen. It had only been twenty years, but what remained of the life that had once blossomed in this place? Not even bitterness, not anymore. How pointless the violence. How fragile, insignificant, the lives of those who engaged in it. Those who were sacrificed on its altar.
In twenty years, a village had become nothing more than a pile of uneven stones. How empty and pointless the world must feel to the dragons, for whom twenty years was but a breath? Turn your head but for a moment, and an entire brood might be gone, a city turned to ruins.
No wonder Hraesvelgr had sought to keep part of his beloved with him at all costs.
Something stirred inside him at the thought, an echo not of hate, not of derision, but of envy. Hraesvelgr’s mate would never leave him, never be torn from him. Nidhogg’s had been slain while he had his back turned, and Estinien’s—
This is not me, he thought desperately. He had no mate to lose. The dragon’s blood was poisoning his thoughts, infecting him with the violence that had long poisoned his own mind. These were echoes of Nidhogg’s feelings, seeping through the bond that still linked them. The blood in his veins. The blood on his spear. The eyes, that he could still feel pulsating in the distance.
They were not his own.
They were not his own.
He lay flowers down in Ratatoskr’s mournful home, and prayed for forgiveness, hers and that of men. For her soul to be at peace, knowing that the war was over, that her family and the men she had loved would no longer tear each other apart.
“I am Azure Dragoon no longer,” he told Hraesvelgr as the Wyrm joined him in his mourning contemplation. How do you live with it? he did not say. Here, where both Nidhogg’s sister and the hopes and love of an entire people lay, the grief was overpowering, devastating. He could barely bear it. “This age has no need of my lance.”
No need for his violence, for his hate. For the overwhelming hunger that lingered in him, for something he could not quite define. This was an age of peace, and a monster like him had no place in it.
But the Wyrm had different ideas.
How did it feel, he had wanted to ask Hraesvelgr. How did it feel, to have her between your teeth? To know her taste in a way none ever would? How did it feel to catch the aether of her soul as it fled, to bind it to you as her body lay empty and torn in your mouth, in your stomach?
Now, staring at the armour that Ratatoskr had blessed, remembering, through the Warrior’s words and Nidhogg’s feelings both, how she had met her end, he was assailed by a different feeling altogether.
“Naught but the source of that power would sate them,” Hraesvelgr said, and the thought of it felt perverse.
They had butchered her. They had devoured her eyes. All for power. Stolen her lifeforce and left her dying, alone. How dare they? How dare they?
How could they take something so sacred and turn it into an act so obscene?
He almost keeled over from the force of the rage and disgust rushing through him.
(And yet, was he not the same? Was he not filled with perverse hunger, first for revenge and now for flesh? Perhaps it was his humanity that made him thus, and not the blood of the dragon. Perhaps he had just hidden it from himself in the pursuit of his singular goal.)
“What makes you think I am different from Thordan and the rest?”
Hraesvelgr looked at him, the great Wyrm’s eyes full of compassion.
“A maiden did give me cause to believe in thy kind once more,” he said, and the gentleness and regret in his words sunk all the way to Estinien’s core.
He dressed himself in the armour where the rest of Ratatoskr’s power lay. As torn as he was, he could not leave it to languish in this desolated land. He would keep it close, the echoes of a friend he had never met and the memory of one both he and Hraesvelgr had let escape, and live for them.
And he would not relinquish it to anyone.
“Do not make the same mistake twice,” was the only message Hraesvelgr left him with as he departed, and Estinien, as torn as he was, knew that the Wyrm had the truth of it. If something happened to those he cared about, his own rage and pain might eclipse Nidhogg’s own.
He set off for Gyr Abania.
It was when he caught sight of the Warrior again that he finally understood.
It wasn’t Nidhogg’s memories that rose to the surface whenever the young man flicked an ear, whenever he smiled, whenever he showed the faintest hint of vulnerability or sadness. It was his own hunger, and his own fear.
Be mine, his heart sung whenever he caught a glimpse of him from high up, his draconic vision keeping him far out of everyone’s sight.
Be mine, it roared whenever he saw him fight, his strength so great and his heart so delicate, a burning beacon on the battlefield.
It was so loud, he thought those underneath must have heard it.
Could the Warrior’s lance slay the dragon inside him, he wondered as he watched from afar. Or would his essence coat itself upon it like Nidhogg’s had upon his own, cursing his Warrior with regrets and revenge? Had he become enough of a Wyrm that his wretched feelings would linger, a weight upon those who were never meant to shoulder such a burden? He knew that his Warrior was in truth older than him, but he looked so young, so full of life that Estinien could barely stop the dread in his gut as he remembered how short his life would be, and how short it could be cut, at the edge of a sword or in the fire of a spell.
(He wanted to swoop down and shield him with the scales of his body. He wanted to fight at his side, back to back. He wanted to take him and run away where no one could ever harm him. He wanted to kiss him and bite into him and consume every part of him before anyone else could.)
He wanted to scream, to sing his yearning to the world from the top of his cliff, to feel the world shake with it and Know. For every being under his feet to hear and know his claim.
He swallowed song and snarl, and instead worked from the shadows, slaying and destroying, clearing the way for his Warrior’s advance.
He hadn’t meant to come close. As they marched upon Ala Mhigo, the Alliance’s armies on the ground and Estinien from the air and the heights, the call of Nidhogg’s eyes had gotten stronger, finally tangible after existing as nothing more than a faint presence on the wind. He had followed it, filled with equal determination and hope. It was a thankless, wretched task, ending a legacy of hate by killing what remained of one who had been devoured by his own pain. But at the same time, part of him could not help but hope that doing so would turn him man again, free him of the terrible love and the terrible fear. If he destroyed Nidhogg’s eyes, maybe his shade would finally leave him. He would gladly give up the strength it gave him if his thoughts could finally be human.
(No you wouldn’t, the part of him that would tear the world apart for one person whispered.)
But when he landed upon the torn soil of the royal gardens and found his mirror’s eyes amongst the flowers, there was only one truth in their sightless gaze.
You will never be the same again. You never will, because you have tasted true grief, true fear. You never will, because you now know the truth of love. No humanity will ever fill you again.
He lifted his bloodied lance, wrapped in his armour of loss and devotion, and pierced through the eyes, that they might never hurt his beloved again.
And then, turning to walk away, he heard his Warrior’s sobs on the breeze.
It didn’t take long to find him. By now, he could tell not only his voice, but also his scent, and even covered in someone else’s blood (and something in him growled at that realisation), the taste of his skin and fear were in the air, like a shining path of light.
Estinien followed it.
Downstairs, people were singing, celebrating. But in a shadowed corner of the liberated palace, not far from the gardens where he had fought, the young man who made his heart sing was holding himself tightly, rocking forward with every sob, like a child clinging to a ragdoll against the horrors of fire and blood.
His eyes rose at the footsteps before Estinien could quieten the roar in his ears.
“… Estinien,” he whispered, small and desperate, and before he could take another breath, Estinien was on him.
He should have been scared. He should have sensed the hunger coming out of every one of Estinien’s pores. But instead he wrapped his arms around him and clung to his armour, like Estinien was his only anchor, and Estinien dug armoured fingers into his sides, and got nothing more than a relieved whimper.
“He just…” he sobbed, “he slit his own throat… I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t…”
Trembling in anger, in hunger, Estinien tightened his hold.
“Why do they all… when does it stop? We stopped one war, and for what? Why do they all want to fight? Why do they all want to kill?”
“You are too kind,” Estinien whispered. How could he withstand the cruelty of the world, his Warrior? How much more could he take before he broke? How long, before the heart he so treasured was damaged beyond repair?
You can shoulder the world for him, something deep within him whispered. Ease his pain while you still can. Take him inside you and carry his love for the world in your heart. Do it now. Do it now.
Instead, he gripped the back of the Warrior’s head and drew him into a bloody kiss.
To outside eyes, it might have been a hurried, messy affair. To Estinien, it was everything.
The dragon’s blood in him had not lied when it saw his beloved as prey. The Warrior surrendered to his grip with no resistance, no hesitation. With every touch, he bared himself further, his heart, his throat. Estinien could have slit his stomach open with one swipe of his clawed finger, so open was he to his hunger. And with every touch, it rose, taking over all of Estinien’s senses.
There was nothing like it. None of his youthful fumblings could ever have compared to the love, the hunger he felt now, to the reverence with which he explored his lover’s body. All of it so precious. All of it so fragile.
Save him, his heart sung. Consume him before it is too late.
He sank himself inside him instead, entranced and desperate, the image of his beloved arched in pleasure melded with that of him arched in bloody surrender. His hurried breath rang in Estinien’s ears with the desperation of tethering life. His sweat, laced with the scent of rising climax, came to him thick and cooling.
“Why did you leave?” the Warrior cried into his neck.
Estinien wrapped his mouth around his shoulder, hooked his fangs into his skin, and bit, teeth sinking deep and drinking his beloved, sweet, precious blood, and his Warrior’s scream dragged them both into climax, a shuddering relief that left his body light and his heart heavy.
When he deposited his beloved’s unconscious form in one of the infirmary’s bed later that night, Estinien did not linger to kiss his lips, or wait for him to wake up.
He strapped on his armour, shouldered his lance, and walked out.
“Because I want you to live.”