Archive of Our Own

This heat was not Katsuki’s alone to bear.

He knew this. Knew that he would have preferred the heat of a body. Or a season, the sun shining down on his back and warming his skin. But this heat was his inheritance. Older than the Dominion. It is a necessary act. That of which Runeks of Solmark have done for centuries. Forged in a fire of their own creation. This is what will last when the towers with names carved in them topple. This is what will last when the banners that crown the mountain pass fade.

This is what must last.

They were the lucky ones. It was them, his people, who saw the dragons descend from the sun to look upon them with something like recognition. And it would be Katsuki who continued this legacy.

The children and young drakes of the Solmark and Draconian alike knew this. They were told the same stories of mountains rising from the spine of fire gods and valleys carved by great dragon talons. That the rivers were warmed by the blood of ancient rituals that flowed bright and molten in its earliest days. The Dominion did not worship the dragon’s flame because it was dangerous, they worshipped because it was proof that their sun god Solhar had not abandoned them.

It was said the first Runek of the Solmark Dominion walked out of the heart of a volcano carrying a freshly born dragon in her arms. A wyrmling of a thing. She bore the fyrhal,  the sacred capacity to carry life in a way blessed by Solhar’s own breath. And the dragon, still blind and shimmering with an infant’s heat, recognized her as kin. It was this bond that shaped the first law of the Dominion. That Solmar’s ruler would be from this lineage of the fireborn, and they must be picked by the fire itself.

Of course, centuries pass. Dynasties rose and faltered. Clans united, feuded, reconciled, feuded again. The Dominion grew from a scattering of highland tribes into a great federation of nations tied together by ritual and the ever burning sun. Yet even with Solmark’s expanse, the rule remained the same. Every Runek was expected to bear this capacity. And every true ascension to the throne required the Thren’kai, the holy union of dragon and king.

This is the fuse that births the Dominion’s power.

Dragons did not choose lightly. Their bonds were touched by fate, whispered into existence by ancient prophecy. Some imprinted on their future Runek as they drew their first breath. Others took years to feel the call. But when a dragon chose, the bond was an unbreakable thing. Dragon and monarch became two halves of the same whole. And when they mated under Solhar’s blessing, the land itself was said to quicken like a thing unborn.

With that being said, not all generations were so fortunate to be chosen. Some rulers went unbonded. Some rulers bore the fyrhal but never felt its heat. Some eras were spent without a dragon descending from the peaks to gift future Runeks their own hatchling as though the sun itself had dimmed upon them.

Even still, Solmark endured.

So why must it be him?

Why must the Dominion whisper with such anticipation because of his skin? His organ? His sinew? Why must destiny burn within him?

To avoid such destiny, Katsuki, Runek Ascendant, took his first of what would be six baths alone.

He was half submerged in the high bath, the mountain air thick with steam and resin. The burning ember in a golden chalice beside him pulsed like a heartbeat. The bathhouse stood open to the highland peaks on one side, its stone archway overlooking the valley that sloped down into the Dominion. Dawn light cut through the mist, slicing mountains into layers of lilac and gold. Far below in the villages where the clans worked among terraced fields, his terraced fields now, faint fires burned to greet the morning. And far above, the sky stretched pale waiting for the sun to climb high enough to crown it. 

Katsuki watched the light creep across the peaks. Watched the smoke drift in tendrils from his plate of burning resins. Watched damn near everything except for his own reflection in the bathwater.

His skin prickled with warmth.

He should not please himself now. Not today of all days. Not on the morning of his Thren’kai.

And yet his fingers moved anyway, following the line of his belly until they brushed the faint ridges of the fyrhal sigil etched into his skin. A soft shiver ran through him. The air seemed to tighten as he purged the old year from his skin. The priests would do their part with oils and chants and purification rites, but for these last breaths of solitude his body was still his and his alone.

He let his head fall back against the carved stone’s edge, throat exposed to the rising light as his hand dipped lower into the water and then between his thighs. He let them fall apart, either knee peaked above the water like mountains as his hand dove deeper. The meat of his palm settled over his mound and rubbed against the prickling of blond hair there. His hand warmed rapidly against himself, fingers cupping and massaging until a wetness grew.

If ever possible, he opened his legs wider, letting the meat at the bend of his knee press hard against the stone walls as he sank lower. Chin to the waterline now. He spread himself slowly, the first touch to his prick was with his ring finger. A gentle caress to wake himself up that slowly skirted down until it was his heel that was at his cock and fingers at his hole. He was already dripping arousal before he began his bath and what he found between his legs only proved the same. He mapped the shape of his own need with the heel of his palm, massaging small circles over himself as his fingers spread his hole wider and inserted themselves inside. The feeling gave with too much ease. Ease that, if the priests knew, there would be questions about.

He wished for his dragon. For the furnace heat of Eijirou’s breath curling against his throat. He wished to be caged against furs, sharpened nails barely breaking the skin. His fingers sank deeper as memory spilled through him. He let his fingers mimic the way Eijirou would pet his cunt as he nosed at his neck like he couldn’t help himself. And calling him greedy when Katsuki would push his hips up for more. 

His other hand found his nipple and rolled it just the way Eijirou did when he wanted Katsuki wet and whimpering before even being fucked. Katsuki bit down a groan as he imagined Eijirou’s thigh slotted between his, the slick sound of skin catching. The way his cock always throbbed so hard he could feel its pulse before it was inside of him.

“You take me so good, fireborn,” Eijirou would say against his mouth as he kept him open with thick fingers. 

The bathwater rippled with his shivering as he curled his finger deeper, hole pulsing, fucking up into his own hand like it could ever compare to Eijriou’s weight pressing down on him.

His breath hitched as heat coaxed through his belly. Finally, he thought. Finally he could feel something other than the weight of the crown and prophecy. Another soft sound escaped him, barely more than a breath as his hips rose an inch from the water.

There is more stretch with the second finger, a collection of his arousal to spread over himself as he brought it back up to his aching cock. The pressure against him made something in his back tense and his breath catch as he began to move in tight circles against himself. More wetness pooled out into the bath the faster his intention grew. More breaths pushed out from a slack jaw as he imagined claws ghosting across his hips and warm breaths against his thigh and a voice roughened by the shift murmuring, “Vashii. Mine. Vashii. My love, my light. Mor’ren.” As if those words belong to him alone.

But then, metal scraped. 

And the door at the far end of the chamber began to shift open. 

Katsuki jerked upright, water sloshing around him as heat flooded his face. He snatched for his cloak where it lay folded on a carved bench, nearly slipping in the process. He dragged it over the edge of the bath, holding it up to cover as much as himself as he could. “Do you knock?” he snapped.

The steam parted to reveal a familiar silhouette. 

Of course it would be his mother.

He dropped the cloak and sank lower into the bath, squeezing his legs tight as Mitsuki leaned against the half open door with the same unimpressed expression she’s used on him since childhood. She was wrapped mostly in her furs sitting heavily around her shoulders, a red wrapping across her chest the only visible sign of her status. The tattoos up her arm were a dark ink that Katsuki would match in one day. Their twin scars across their lower stomachs caught his eye now, hers a deeper shade of pink than his own raised pale skin. He figured that will happen to him some day too.

“That is no way to speak to your Runek,” she said simply, staring down at him. 

Katsuki groaned under his breath. “I am Runek now, I speak to you how I wish.”

“You are Runek when you sit on the throne. For now, you’re still my brat,” she said as she stepped fully inside, letting the door shut behind her. Katsuki tried to sink even lower in the bath in a poor excuse for modesty. It wasn’t shame that burned his ears as, again, that was his mother. She’d bathed him before, she would most likely bathe him again. But of course there was a mortification of being caught mid touch especially the day of his union. His greed would sicken her and the council alike. 

Mitsuki surveyed him with a pointed boredom. “You know, there’s no use bathing yourself if you’re to be washed by priests five times in the next day,” she said, wandering over toward one of the carved stone benches that lined the chamber. “The oils alone could suffocate a lesser man.”

“I like the baths better when I can be alone,” Katsuki muttered. “That is, of course, until you showed up.”

She snorted as she perched on a bench, folding her arms and crossing her legs. “If privacy is what you wanted, you shouldn’t have been born glowing with Solhar’s blessing.”

“I wasn’t glowing,” he scowled.

“You were glowing then just as you are glowing now,” Mitsuki said, nodding at his submerged torso. “And you’ll glow even more after the ritual if the dragon does his job.”

Heat flooded Katsuki’s cheeks. “Mother.”

“What?” Mitsuki laughed. “I’ve seen those sigils since the day you were born.”

“That doesn’t mean you get to talk about—”

“About you fulfilling a sacred rite centuries old? Spare me,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You think I didn’t have my own expectations placed on me before I wed your father? You’re lucky to have your dragon. Our people are lucky, my son. After everything they’ve gone through because of one choice I made that I will never regret. But our people need this.”

Katsuki’s jaw tightened. He already knew where this was going. “It’s not as if the Dominion will crumble, mother,” he said, defensive now as his shoulders tightened. “Deku’s wed to the northerner. Our alliances are strong, we don't need luck on our side. We don’t need—”

“Don’t speak as if you don’t want this,” Mitsuki cut in. “My son, you love your dragon as he loves you. Do you know how small of a chance that is? To marry for love? I had it. The Runek before me and the others before me did not. For, it is written—”

“Gods!” Katsuki snapped, glaring at her. “I know what is written. I’ve had those damn texts shoved into my skull since I could read the High tongue. I know I’m lucky. I know I love him. I also know that even if no one says it, they want something born out of this union. Whether it be a continued partnership between us and the dragons, or a little halfling they can groom into another king! I know what I must do.”

“Exactly,” she cut him off. “So do it.”

“We are barbarians,” Katsuki pressed. “We have only had rulers for four centuries. We have only had order for four damn centuries so don’t speak to me as if this has always been the way.”

Mitsuki’s mouth thinned. “Always the dramatist,” she said. “But four centuries is not a blink, Katsuki. Four centuries is the Dominion’s spine. It’s how long Solhar has trusted us to keep the ember alive. You think that is nothing? You think those rites can be cast aside because your shoulders ache under the weight?”

“I think the Dominion survived before the rites and would survive after them.”

“Survived,” Mitsuki echoed. “We didn’t thrive. We were scattered clans with no law. No unity. No covenant with the sky. It was the fyrhal that changed us. It was the Thren’kai that tied dragon and ruler. Fate and flesh. Without it, we’d still be wandering highland brutes biting at the sun we couldn’t touch.”

“We’re still biting at it,” Katsuki muttered. “Only now we pretend it bites back.”

Her eyes snapped to him. “You forget yourself, Katsuki.”

“No.” Heat rose under his skin. “I remember myself too well. I remember what I am expected to be. What you expect me to be. Every sunrise I could stand on my own feet has been another reminder. Eat for the Dominion. Train for the Dominion. Learn the old tongue for the Dominion. Bind yourself to the Dominion. Always the Dominion, mother. Never me.”

“You speak as if you’re being marched to slaughter,” she couldn’t help but laugh. A biting thing at the back of her throat. “As if you were not chosen in a way others would kill for.”

“That is exactly why they all look at me. Because he chose me before I had life enough to choose anything back. The entire Dominion held its breath since that day, waiting for me to fulfil a destiny I never even asked for!”

“But you love hi—”

“I know!”

As he said the words he felt something buckle inside his ribs. Yes, he loved him. Loved him with a heat that predated language.But his was a love that wasn’t born of myth, but of the quiet hours. Shared time in the rookery, the weight of a scaled head pressed against his sternum, the way he shifted into human form just to cup Katsuki’s jaw like he was something sacred. But admitting that aloud made it feel like the Dominion could hear it too. As if by naming it, he’d placed that love on an altar for the priests to catalog and measure.

He hated that loving his dragon, his flame, his other half, could be twisted into expectation. That something private and so fiercely his had already been turned into spectacle the moment the dragon’s shadow fell across his cradle.

“Of course I love him,” he whispered, almost to himself. His voice was thick and shaky with his fury. “But that does not mean we exist for their harvest or their hope. I chose him and he chose me. He is my dragon. Mine. The Dominion does not get to have us.”

Mitsuki rose from her seat. “Destiny is not a request, Katsuki. It is a summons. And you answer it because the fate of nations depends on whether you do.”

He shot her a look of disbelief. “Mother, do you honestly think the land will shrivel if I don’t bed my dragon at the right hour under the right stars? Do you think crops will wither if I falter? Our people have survived droughts, civil wars, volcanic winters. They survived even when the dragons left us for three generations. They survived your reign, didn’t they?”

Her jaw worked and a muscle flickered near her temple. Good, he thought. Let her feel it.

“Katsuki,” she warned, her voice quiet now. “You are speaking like someone who does not understand what he carries. The fyrhal is not just flesh. It's a covenant. Your ability to bear fireborn life is not a burden. It is a blessing Solhar placed in your bloodline. It is why your ancestors could stand before dragons and be recognized as kin. It is why the Dominion stands at all.”

“And what if I don’t want to be a vessel for a myth?” he demanded. “What if I don’t want every elder whispering about my capacity and my duty? What if I don’t want anyone tallying how often I glow or the council measuring my worth in heat and lineage. What if I want—” He stopped himself, voice catching in his throat.

“What?” Mitsuki pressed. “Say it.”

“I do not have to explain myself to you,” he said, voice cracking just once. “Only one of us had priests whispering about his womb since infancy.”

“Katsuki—”

“You didn’t have to do this. You wed father. You didn’t have to perform this stupid ritual.”

Mitsuki’s mouth twitched. “We lost a quarter of the Dominion,” she said, voice stunningly level. “Because I did not do what tradition required of me.”

The chamber seemed to constrict around her words. He understood that the kingdom fractured, that alliances were broken. Entire clans still whispered that the droughts of his childhood were punishment for her defiance. That the storms that swallowed two coastal provinces were Solhar’s reprimand. That Runek Mitsuki Bakugou had starved them due to her choosing love over law and her dragonless reign.

And some small viscous part of him had always feared that the Dominion was merely waiting to pin the same sins on him.

Mitsuki studied him with a strange guarded expression. “You may not want this,” she said softly. “But Solmark needs it. The people are excited. Hopeful. And the dragon—”

Her gaze flicked to his belly. He curled his hand over it instinctively. 

“And Eijirou is very excited.”

Katsuki’s throat clenched. He closed his eyes and let the heat rise around him again. The ritual felt too close. Like standing in the heart of a firestorm. “Yeah,” he murmured. “I know.”

Silence settled between them. Mitsuki’s expression softened by a fraction, but before he could decide whether she was about to comfort him or scold him more, another voice drifted in through the doorway.

“Is everything alright in here?”

Masaru stepped into the bathhouse with the careful politeness of a man entering a temple. His hands were clasped behind his back, his hair tied low. He wore a tunic too simple for a consort of twenty-five years. Katsuki’s shoulders released the moment he saw him.

“Really?” he muttered anyway. “Both of you?”

Masaru blinked, a little startled. “We were worried,” he said gently. “You missed your lesson with Izuku.”

Katsuki groaned into his hand. “Why in all twelve hells do I have to keep having lessons with my younger brother?”

“Diplomacy,” Mitsuki said, folding her arms. “He teaches you the Northland’s customs, you know this.” 

“I know he is wed to Shouto,” Katsuki started, “I don’t see why he’s the master of all things North, now. Although I don’t think we need them to be stronger. They needed us.”

“Good thing this is barely about them right now, brat,” Mitsuki countered as Masaru sighed from beside her. “It’s not about their marriage. It’s about presence. About public unity before your coronation.”

“I do not have time for presence, My priority is becoming Runek,” Katsuki bit back sharply. “And being bred like a prized dog, apparently.”

Masaru’s face began to pink as he bit his bottom lip. “Highlanders are always so crass.”

“You should be used to it by now,” Mitsuki countered. Masaru looked back with something that might be a glare, but his features had always been too soft to convey it. A man of the southern isles was always too soft. Katsuki wouldn’t have been surprised if it was him who put the gift, if he could call it a gift, of the fyrhal on him rather than his mother. Softness breeds softness.

He slouched deeper into the bath. He felt exposed in ways nakedness could not convey. Vulnerable in his expectations. “I am doing this,” he said finally. “I know what is required and that the people expect it. I am not trying to run from it, but I have larger priorities than practicing handshakes.”

Masaru opened his mouth on a breath to say something in turn, but Mitsuki was already speaking. An accusing finger pointed in Katsuki’s direction. “That is where you are wrong,” she said. “Runek does not choose his priorities. The Dominion chooses for him.”

Her voice held its usual iron, but Katsuki could tell by the strain in her voice that she was running out of steam. How odd, he decided, to witness the slow saunter downward rather than the fall of a Runek.

“You did not have to do this ritual,” he reminded her. “And look how fine you turned out.”

There is nothing but breath and the sloshing of water against Katsuki’s body before Mitsuki spoke once more. “I am done arguing with you. When you remember your duty, find me.”

She swept from the chamber without waiting for either of them to follow. Katsuki knew his duty, it sat on the tip of his tongue. He thought as such as the door swung shut.

Masaru watched her leave, worry etched into his features. For a moment, Katsuki thought he might go after her. Ever the pliant consort. But Masaru stayed, turning instead toward the clay bowls and vials at the edge of the bath. He lifted one with the care of a man holding a sacred text before kneeling at the water’s rim. “This may help your tempers.”

“Father—”

“Let me help you, my son,” he uncorked a small vial of dragon’s blood resin and poured a thin line into the bowl. The liquid shimmered a deep carmine, then he set a taper to it until the liquid caught flame. The scent released into the room was rich and metallic, edged with a powdery sweetness. Ancient. Katsuki felt it settle along his shoulders and smooth the tightness there.

“Thank you,” he mumbled before he could stop himself.

Masaru’s smile was a small and warm thing. “Of course.” He placed the burning bowl on a carved edge of the bath and let the smoke curl up in ribbons. After a moment, he spoke again. “You know, you do not have to go through with this.”

Katsuki blinked. “Father.”

“I mean it,” he said gently. “Your mother is stubborn. Your council more so. And your people are like oxen. But none of them live with your body. If this ritual feels wrong to you in any way, you may refuse it. Just as your mother did. Just as Runeks before you have. The Dominion will stand.”

Katsuki can’t help the smile that began to crack through his facade. “I said something similar,” he said. “And it is not that…. That I don’t love him. I do. This dragon is mine, just as I am his. I am not afraid of the ritual. I know their ideals of wishing for a fireborn before my reign has even begun is archaic, but I'm at peace with that. And, I’m almost comfortable with being made a spectacle if that is what the Dominion needs.”

Masaru lifted a brow. “Then what troubles you?”

Katsuki looked down at the shifting waters and the faint scarred sigils along his skin beneath the surface. “Everything else.”

Masaru’s gaze softened as he reached out and touched Katsuki’s shoulder. “Love is sovereign. The crown only follows.”

The words did little to soothe him, but they did strike something. He thought of his dragon murmuring in a language more ancient than the Dominion. Not an oath to the throne or a vow to the people, but just to him. Those are the bonds that come first. Before the crown and ritual. He could feel the sigil beneath the water again, pulsing in answer, but this time it didn’t feel like prophecy. It was a choice. Dangerous in its simplicity. If he leaned toward the bonds that mattered, the Dominion would follow.

Or it would burn.

“Leave me, please,” Katsuki said.

Masaru nodded, only the soft curve of sympathy shaped his mouth. He leaned forward and pressed his forehead to Katsuki’s, a gesture he’d offered him since childhood. Long before the Dominion had demanded reverence from either of them.

“We are with you,” he whispered before rising from his spot and slipping out of the bathhouse as quietly as he’d entered. The door shut behind him with a muted thud.

Katsuki let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He felt ridiculous, like a petulant child sulking after being scolded. But beneath that thin, embarrassing layer was something far more honest.

He felt… tired. Haggard, even. He had fought in two wars. He had led armies into the northern passes, negotiated ceasefires with tribes who still carved runes into their faces, watched too many men bleed on frozen stone. He knew how to kill, how to command, how to carve victory from nothing but stubborn will. Yet, here he was avoiding a ritual with a dragon he’d already bedded. A dragon he loved. A dragon who had been his since birth. 

Pathetic.

He pushed the thought away and stood, water sliding off his skin in shimmering lines. He stepped onto the cool stone, and picked up his cloak, letting his furs cling to him as he dried. He pulled his underclothes from the nearest bench. His fingers lingering on the soft woven linen.

He drew his underclothes up then crossed to the polished bronze mirror mounted on the wall. The surface was slightly warped, but it was enough to catch his own reflection. He looked… much older than he felt. Sharper around the eyes. There was a set to his mouth he didn’t recognize anymore. Something halfway to defiance. His sigils lay quiet now beneath the linen, but he can’t help but bring a hand to them. To imagine himself swelling with life once the Thren’Kai was complete. 

If they completed it the way the ancients of the priesthood wanted at least. 

“Runek,” he whispered to his reflection, as if naming it would make him stronger. He rolled his shoulders back and forced himself to breathe deeper. He had duties today. Blessings. Preparations, the like. He’d have to face the priesthood and the council and—

And Eijirou. Who was meant to be here already.

Katsuki swallowed hard as he let his hand drop from himself. He closed his eyes for a single heartbeat. Just one moment to pretend he was something other than a vessel for the entire Dominion to watch him fill and grow.

But then footsteps echoed down the corridor. And of course, voices followed.

“Runekar!” A bright voice followed. “Are you decent?”

“Please say no,” another added. “We brought your robes. I want to witness the kingly fluster.”

“Gods above,” Katsuki groaned. “Not now, idiots.”

The bathhouse door cracked open once more and Denki stuck his head through. Blond hair tousled, earrings caught the light. “Oh good, you’re clothed,” Denki said. “Barely. But it counts.”

Hanta stepped in behind him carrying two bundles of white fabric embroidered with shimmering red sigils. “We come bearing gifts,” he announced. “And directives. And at least seven sternly worded notes from the priesthood. Possibly eight. They kept handing us papers about the temperance of flesh.”

Katsuki blinked at them, shock wearing off into something mean. “Why is it you two who bring this?”

“The palace runners fear you, Runekar,” Denki said cheerfully, letting the door close and lock behind him. 

Truthfully, it made sense that it would be them. His right and left hands. The last remnants of a life he’d had before the palace swallowed him whole. Hanta, whose family once worked the palace kitchen had grown from a lanky boy sneaking stolen honeycakes into a knight with a bowstring’s patience and a tongue sharp enough to make priests flinch. Then of course there’s Denki, once a dancer for the royal household, knew the rhythms of the courtly walls better than any noble born. He was quick on his feet and even quicker with a blade and joke.

The four of them, of course his dragon followed along, had marched campaigns together. Bled beside one another. Slept in the same barracks cots through winters so cold their breaths frosted. They had carried Katsuki before he carried a crown. Yet, ascension had a way of drawing borders. The moment the preparations for ascension began, even they had been pushed a step back to this. 

“Your tone is disingenuous,” Katsuki mumbled as Hanta laid out the first layer of a ritual robe across the bench. It unfolded in a fall of white and sun-red embroidery. The cloth light enough to breathe despite it being the dark side of the year. “Both of you. Do not call me Runekar if you don’t believe it.”

Hanta sighed, a hand full of rings balled and pressed against his hip. “What have you got left, Runekar? One moon? Famously?”

Katsuki rolled his eyes. “Fuck off. Barbarians have no need for jesters. You want to be funny? Go to the northernlands.”

Denki smiled wide enough for the both of them. “Not being funny, Runekar—”

“Would you stop?”

“—It’s an honest question,” Denki continued, “The high priests nearly throttled each other over your bath schedule this morning. Half of them think the auspices are perfect for conception. The other half think your glow is a sign of Solhar’s… uh…. Investment.”

“Stop citing the deep magic,” Katsuki bit back. “There is no glow. There is no investment.”

Hanta scoffed. “Careful, A king shouldn’t question his gods.”

“I’m not questioning my gods, I’m questioning the priests' involvement in my sex.”

“Not just the priests,” Hanta said. “The High Astrologer swore by the sun’s eighth arc in the month’s cycle that you’ll be primed for a blessing. Said the omens were clear. “When the Runek glows before dawn, the fyrhal opens to the dragon’s flame,” he recited. 

Katsuki paused. “They said what?”

“Wrote. In such kind language. There was also something about your hips catching the fires of spring. I guess everything aligned with the dark end of the year except that part.” Hanta laid out another line of cloth. “We read some of the letters. You know, to protect your honor. If they are to speak behind your back, we should know it first. To share.”

Denki wheezed, nearly dropping the papers. “And don’t forget the charting of your cycles! I swear, they’ve been counting down to the Thren’Kai like it’s Solstice Eve. One moon to the coronation. One moon until the Dominion knows whether its beloved Runek is swelling with sacred life.”

Katsuki scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’ll kill you both. I’ll ‘sic my dragon on you.”

“It’s religion, Runekar,” Denki counters, a smile upon his features. “Solhar shines. Dragons descend. And children are born. It’s not us who created the myths.”

“And we’re the last people to uphold them,” Hanta added, folding a final layer into place. “But when the priests lose their minds over your fertility, we are contractually obligated as your sworn knights to ridicule you with love.”

“It is the sacred duty of friendship,” Denki said with a nod.

Katsuki flared at both of them. “I hope Solhar strikes you down right now. I would not weep.”

“Mm,” Hanta hummed. “But if Solhar struck you now, the Dominion would riot. And we’d lose our best odds for an heir born under the Dragon’s Arc. Terrible timing, really.”

“Terrible,” Denki nodded. “Espescially since Eijirou’s been circling the palace spires, looking for you like a lovesick phoenix.”

Katsuki felt his face go scarlet with heat as he crossed the bathhouse to approach the window. “That damn lizard better not be—”

“Well, that’s where he was earlier,” Denki said. “If dragons could pace, he’d have worn a valley in the sky.”

Katsuki looked over his shoulder. “Speak one more word of this I will shove you inside of each other.”

“Was that… almost a joke?” Denki gasped. “Look at that, Hanta. He’s loosening up. This is good. The ritual’s already working.”

Hanta laughed along once the clothes were laid out in order. He picked up the first layer of the robes, a thin leather under vest embroidered with gold. “Arms up.”

Katsuki rolled his eyes skyward as they prepared him. Despite that, he didn’t pull away. Their hands were competent and careful. He’d forgotten how it felt to be tended to by friends rather than attendants who bowed and apologized every time they touched him.

Hanta slipped the undervest over Katsuki’s head, the gold thread caught the morning light. Denki gathered the next layer and shook the robe of pale linen embroidered with draconic script out. It was the most a barbarian was to wear in life. Covered nearly head to toe in fabrics. He already missed his furs and bare chest and he couldn’t look at himself straight in the mirror without seeing a man who was to be made into something he simply was not.

“Arms, Runekar,” Hanta said again, and this time Katsuki followed. Begrudgingly raising them above his head as the linen fell over his shoulders.

“These damned things,” Katsuki growled, glancing down at himself. “I only wear them to be dunked in more water or fanned through smoke or to be sat in a circle while priests chant at me. They won’t even let me break fast. Or sit comfortably. Or scratch my ass.”

Denki caught himself from laughing. “Tragic. History books will record your sufferings.”

“We’ll have the cantor write a ballad. The Itchy Ass of the Living Ember of Solhar’s Will.”  Hanta cinched the side clasps. “All they do is talk about your empty fyrhal all day, I’m sure the priesthood has time for a song and dance. Lift.”

Katsuki did reluctantly, and the mantle settled over him with an inevitable weight. He caught his outline in the bronzed mirror and inhaled sharply despite himself. He… didn’t look like himself.

Hanta looked back and appraised him with a low whistle. “Look at that. You look like you’re about to ascend, finally.”

“Or to be sacrificed like a dressed hog,” Denki added,  tilting his head.

Katsuki threw a glare back at Denki, but said nothing. He was right. The heavy gowns were embroidered with reactive dye that caught the heat and warped under it. Turning the white cloth to reds and oranges where too much heat welled up in the body. Under his arms, behind his knees, his lower stomach. Denki reached forward and brushed imaginary lint from his shoulder as Hanta smoothed the mantle once more. They were shifting back into their rolls as his hands and he hated it.

“What?” Katsuki teased. “Nothing else to taunt me with?”

“Truth be told,” Denki said. “I think your dragon will taunt you enough. Like I said, he’s been looping the palace like a drunken hawk since dawn. He’s only just come down. I’m assuming to make himself presentable in front of the council.”

“That doesn’t sound like him.”

“It doesn’t sound like you either, Kats—” Hanta stopped himself.

“Do not correct yourself now, it’ll just make you sound stupid,” Katsuki admittedly laughed. “It is still my name.”

“And if someone heard me calling you by it they’d think I’m trying to cuck my best friend or get my head cut off for disrespecting you.”

“Most likely by the dragon,” Denki added in, his grin softening against the odds. “He was there at your birth, he’s laid a claim on you.”

“Tales,” Katsuki countered, but a heat had begun to rise beneath his sternum. “We met in the rookery.”

“Well, obviously you do not remember your own birth. So you wouldn’t know for certain, would you?”

“Scary damn thing,” Hanta said with a laugh. “Before he could shift, all the wyrmling wanted was you. I remember seeing him curl around you like you were a hatchling worth guarding anytime us three would play.”

“And when he did shift, he walked toward you didn’t he? On his two human feet and then fell to a crawl just to shove his forehead against your chest like he did in his other form. Like he needed to feel your heartbeat.”

Katsuki looked away, jaw tight. “And what is your point?”

“My point, if I have one, is that he was enamored.” Another straightening of a fold. “Still is.”

Hanta nodded towards the arched doorway. “I personally think the lizard was counting down to your Thren’Kai since he knew what numbers were. S’probably why he’s been circling spires. He’s growing impatient.”

Katsuki scoffed, but the sound was thin. Impatient. Yes. That sounded like Eijirou.

But they spoke of his affections so casually and the thought alone lodged under Katsuki’s ribs. They weren’t wrong, obviously. Dragons didn’t pace the sky for ritual. They moved only for instinct, bond, and blood. Yet his dragon—his Eijirou—had always moved for him.

The Thren’Kai was only a handful of heartbeats away. A joining older than kingship. And, gods, he wanted it, but the wanting made him feel laid bare to a world already eager to take pieces of him. The priests wanted a prophecy fulfilled while the council and clans knew it would provide stability. But Eijirou just wanted him.

Only him.

But there was no room for tenderness now. The longing would need to wait. He pushed a breath through his nose, stealing the heat. “Enough,” he muttered. “We’ll be late.”

Denki and Hanta exchanged a quick understanding look as Katsuki stepped toward the doorway, his cloak whispering along the tiled stone. “Walk behind me,” he said, voice shifting into the tone used for command. “We go to the council as Runek and sworn hands, not friends.”

Denki and Hanta bowed their heads, fists crossing to press over their hearts.

The chamber door swung open with a sigh and the three of them stepped out into the torch lined corridor. At once the atmosphere changed into something denser as if the stone itself remembered every ruler who’d passed through on the morning of their Thren’Kai. The walls were carved with volcanic rock, veined with streaks of crimson quartz and ruby that caught the flame light and shimmered like cooling magma. Torch braziers stood every ten paces, each one a dragon’s maw cast out of iron as fire spilled from their fanged mouths.

There were carvings across the wall, spirals of suns and soaring dragons beside stylized depictions of the first Runek walking from the volcano holding the hatchling in her arms. Katsuki remembered tracing those carvings with grubby fingers as a child, pretending the ancient born were stories rather than burdens. 

Hanta and Denki’s footfalls were soft from behind him, but their presence steadied him more than he would ever admit. This hall had always felt too heavy with expectation. Even as a boy walking beside his mother he had felt swallowed by the sheer scale. The vaulted ceilings that disappeared into darkness. The banners of sun-red and yellow cascading like rivers from unseen rafters. The smell of iron and ash woven permanently into the air.

Today, it felt worse.

His cloak dragged at his shoulders as if only to remind him. The reactive sigils shimmered faintly, attuned to the heat beneath his skin.

They rounded a turn, entering the long approach of the Great Hall. Here, the torches burned blue white. The root of a dragon’s fire harvested from the nesting caverns and bound to pyre stone sconces by the priesthood.  The air crackled faintly, leaving Katsuki’s hair to lift at the ends. It smelled sharper than mortal flame, like a forge on the brink of being overworked.

The floor beneath them shifted from polished basalt to wooden tiles engraved with runic text. Each step landed on names of rulers long dead. Their reigns etched into wood in a language Katsuki had been forced to memorize before he was old enough to understand half of what they represented. Some scripts were so worn by centuries of footsteps they were little more than grooves.

The doors to the Great Hall were two slabs of obsidian carved with twin dragons coiled in symmetrical arcs. Their eyes were inset with garnet, glowing faintly as the torches fluttered with their approach. Katsuki felt an old instinct twist in his chest like everything in the palace was watching.

He flexed his hands at his sides, feeling the mantle shift around him. 

“Last chance to run?” Denki murmured behind him, too low for anyone else to hear.

Katsuki didn’t turn. “Embarrass me and I’ll drag you back by the ear.”

“Then let us enter, Runek.”

Katsuki pushed the doors to the Great Hall open. It breathed around them, vast and sunbright despite the mountain’s shadow. Columns of dark stone soared upward, carved with the lineage of the fireborn in crawling script. Above that banners in the Solmark Dominion’s colors hung in long heavy swaths. Torches ringed the perimeter, each flame steady as if the air itself had been trained.

Twenty councilors rose as one. Robes brushed the stone. The representatives of each clan stood recessed behind the inner circle. Metalworkers of the Forge Valley. River Keepers of the Southern Reach. Beyond them, ten core councilors held their places closest to the dais, heads of provinces and masters of law. Stewards of treasury and leaders of faith and more. All of them gathered beneath the single great sun sigil carved above their seats.

But only three stepped forward.

Toshinori Yagi, a High Priest of Solhar. Shouta Aizawa, Chief Strategist. And Chancellor Tsunagu Hakamada.  The three of them bowed  before the Runek and with a fist to their hearts, Katsuki commanded them to rise.

Yagi’s voice was quiet, but resonant. “Runek of the Solmark Dominion. The sun marks this as the first day of your ascension rites. The purification. The anointing. The blessing of the fyrhal. The casting of the sigils. And finally—”

“Where’s the dragon?” Aizawa’s gaze cut sideways. Silence pressed downward amongst the Great Hall. He stepped closer, eyes narrowing. “He was expected before dawn. The preparations required of him are not optional. His absence is unusual.”

Katsuki can’t help but think of Eijirou circling spires at daybreak. The dragon had been here at some point. That was proof enough. If he was still doing so, Katsuki would see him now through the Great Hall’s towering windows. The morning sun blazed across peaks and clouds. Any flash of red wings would be unmistakable. But the sky beyond the glass was still empty.

Katsuki breathed in, forcing a steadiness to his voice. “He was seen not too long ago. He likely went to prepare himself… elsewhere.”

A ripple of whispers broke through the hall like brittle weeds snapping. Dragons do not lose their way. Not on the morning of the Thren’Kai. An ill sign perhaps? Has the bond weakened—

The murmuring swelled to a constant mosquito buzz. Twenty councilors, clan heads, scribes and stewarts, all whispering in low urgent threads. Some voices held concern. Others judgement. A few, Katsuki realized with a spark of fury, held curiosity. As if a faltering dragon bond was nothing but petty gossip.

“Quiet!” Katsuki’s voice bellowed over the council. Silence spread through the Great Hall like a thunder clap. “Do not speak of what you do not know. The bond remains unbroken. The Thren’Kai will continue as foretold.” The words felt leaden on his tongue. Heavy with duty. But his command worked as the murmurs faded back into nothing.

“Runekar,” Aizawa, said, his tone warning. “A dragon does not disappear without reason.”

“He has not disappeared he’s just—”

“He is bound to you,” Aizawa continued. “Bound to this rite. His absence is potentially dangerous whether you saw him earlier or not. What matters is he isn’t here now.”

Katsuki felt heat crawl under his collar, the sigils along his fyrhal prickling. “He would not abandon this, nor me.”

“Then where is he?” Aizawa asked, unblinking.

A hollow thud echoed against Katsuki’s ribs. He lifted his gaze towards the windows again, half expecting to see a flash of crimson scales, or breath of fire shooting out from puckered lips. But there was still nothing, not even the flicker of a disturbed wind current.

Come on you damn lizard. Do not embarrass me here.

“He’s here,” Katsuki said, setting his jaw tight. “Somewhere in the palace.”

Hakamada’s voice floated in. “Then he is hiding?”

“He’s not—” Katsuki nearly exploded before forcing his voice level. “He is not hiding.” 

Yagi’s expression was sympathetic. “A young drake on the threshold of such a sacred journey may feel overwhelmed. The bond is ancient. The rites are intimate. Fear does not shame him.”

“There’s nothing to fear,” Katsuki snapped, although the words did not land for himself.

Aizawa’s arms folded over his chest. “Regardless of motive, the fact remains that he is absent. And his absence disrupts the rites. We cannot proceed without—”

“Runekar!” 

Obsidian slabs slammed against the stone walls that sent a shudder up the towering columns. Wind flooded down the Hall carrying the metallic tang of dragon fire and the distant echo of wingbeats still fading from the air.

A streak of red and sweat slick skin bursted through the gaping doors. Half formed wings sprouted from a risen spine, great arcs of translucent membrane curling from shoulder blades that were slowly retracting inward. His hair was a wild flame around his face, sticking to his cheekbones in damp curls. Scales glittered along his jaw and down his ribs, catching the sun pouring through the high windows. Clawed fingertips dug into the fabric of the wrap pants he was struggling to tie, breathless with excitement.

“Eijirou.” Katsuki forced control into his tone as the dragon bounded up next to him. “You look like an overeager hound.”

Katsuki could practically hear the endearments on the tip of Eijirou’s tongue, censored only by his attention landing on the councilors and their open stares.

“Oh. Uh…” Eijirou’s hands froze mid motion, hands in a tight fist of fabric around his hip. Only now did he seem to realize he was shirtless in the face of the councilors. Which was not entirely uncommon, but on today of all days, it was. “Am I late?”

“A little.” Yagi offered him a kind smile.

Eijirou smiled back, sheepish, as he stood up straighter. The remnants of his wings pressed into his skin and flattened into nothing with a soft hiss of shifting. “Apologies. Deep apologies,”  he said with a low bow and a salute to his chest. “I uh… misjudged the currents of the wind and then there was this beautiful fire that I had to—”

“Stop. Talking.” Katsuki spit at him, more harshly than was necessary for a dragon of his countenance. But Eijirou took well too commands. He stopped immediately, eyes locking onto Katsuki as his grin crept back in small and private. Katsuki could practically hear Eijirou’s thoughts despite their bond still remaining unseen in the eyes of Solhar. Endearments in Draconian flooded his mind. Kaer’nai Vash. My mate. Rhogar Vash. My inner flame. Vashii. Mine.

Katsuki liked when he called him such things because the dragon tongue has no capability for falsehoods. Even when Eijirou spoke or thought in Common, the truth would bleed through every softened consonant. So when Eijirou said mine, he meant it. His love was his hoard and Katsuki was the lucky one to share in the wealth. He loved him. And he was loved in turn.

Yet—

Katsuki felt himself glaring up at the council. At these witnesses. They did not deserve their love. They only wish to smother it in duty. 

“Do not bother with explaining yourself, young Kirishima,” Yagi said, a hand placed to his heart as he bowed his head in turn. The two others were not so kind as to offer the dragon a bow. Spines straight like arrows as they stood centinel. More whispers filled the hall, this time voices so low that Katsuki couldn’t make word of the gossip. “You are here now. That is what matters.”

Eijirou nodded, his smile shifting. “I present myself for preparation and service.”

Yagi lifted his bowed head and reached out for his scroll. The thing was older than the Dominion’s borders. Its parchment cracked faintly as it opened. Gilded edges caught the torchlight. Sigils wound through the margins of the parchment and Katsuki recognized every stroke. He had studied them under lock and glass since childhood, but seeing the scroll open to the air sent a tremor threading through him.

“Today marks the first act of ascension,” Yagi intoned. “The Runek will undergo five baths. Two of water, one of smoke, one of resin, and one of flame. Each bath prepares the body to hold divine heat. The dragon will undergo four, for his natural fires complete the last one. After cleansing, the Runek’s sigils will be sealed and bound to the dragon, and only the dragon.  Once purification is complete, the two of you will rejoin at dusk. There you two will consume the Waters of Syrund, which will trigger a transformation in both of you. One of need. One of heat.”

Katsuki swallowed. 

“And then,” Yagi said, shifting down the scroll. “Comes the union itself. It must be consummated fully, under witness, before the bond is sealed.”

“Is Solhar not witness enough?” Katsuki mumbled under his breath, head turned toward Eijirou so that only he could hear. A laugh escaped from Eijirou’s mouth, he quickly brought a hand up to smother it.

“The dragon,” Yagi went on pointedly. “Must enter the Runek in accordance with the prescribed alignments. The first, oriented westward for fertility, southward for passion, eastward for rebirth and north—”

“I know the cardinal directions.” Katsuki said sharply.

Nevertheless, Yagi continued. “The ritual demands completion. The dragon must fill the Runek’s fyrhal at least once, but ideally three or more times. Should the sigils ignite, the bond is confirmed and a new heir may be conceived.”

The words dropped like molten rocks into Katsuki’s gut. His body thrummed with a low answering heat he had been denying since boyhood. The idea of carrying Eijirou’s clutch was something he wanted fiercely and almost shamefully. To bear the weight of Eijirou’s life inside him, to quicken with his fire. But the council has stripped it from him.

He could stomach duty, but he could not bear the Dominion claiming what belonged to him and Eijirou alone. 

Katsuki drew in a slow breath. His sigils were responsive to the thoughts of being filled, but the natural sensation only sharpened his anger. “Priest, heirs are rarely conceived on the night of the Thren’Kai,” he said evenly, letting his voice carry through the chamber. “You more than anyone should know this.  The rites are symbolic. The aligning of bodies is meant to bless the land, not guarantee a brat.”

“Aye,” Yagi said. “Rare, yes. But not impossible. And one day a fireborn will arise who carries Solhar’s will to its fullest. One whose union will save the Dominion.”

Katsuki’s jaw worked. “And what?” he asked, voice dropping into something dangerous. “You want me to fuck out a salvation? Breed on command because the damn scrolls says so? Is that it?”

“We only ask you what the prophecy requires,” Yagi insisted, his gaze not faltering.

“Prophecy,” Katsuki spat. “If you want prophecy, look at me! Look at the sigils I bare. Am I not fireborn? Even without dragon parentage? Does Solhar not mark me enough for your liking?”

“That,” Yagi said softly, not falling for Katsuki’s bait, “Is precisely why it must be you.”

Katsuki felt the council’s gaze tighten around him like a vise. He felt twenty heads tilt with quiet calculation as though he were not flesh, but a line of text being interrupted. But before he could speak, Eijirou stepped forward.

“High Priest,” the dragon said, voice steady but carrying the undercurrent of a threat. “With respect—”

Aizawa’s eyes snapped to him. “You are out of line, dragon.”

“Then the line is drawn in the wrong place.”

A handful of councilors sucked in breaths. Katsuki could hear the rumble of voices. Dragon insolence, ill-omened bond, pride will break the rite before it binds, knowing their union, he’s probably already carrying a bastard.

Katsuki’s vision blurred as he spoke. “That is enough!” he shouted loud enough to silence the room. “I will hear no more of this.”

“Runekar—” Yagi began, reaching an outstretched hand.

But he did not allow the man to finish. Katsuki strode from the dais, sandals striking the floor. The great obsidian doors parted for him as though the hall itself wished not to impede him. Every torch flashed in his wake. Eijirou followed at once.

Good, Katsuki thought. Let him follow. Let them all watch.

He did not slow as twenty sets of eyes burned into his back like brands. Only when the corridor narrowed did Katsuki stop abruptly. 

Eijirou nearly collided with him.

Before the dragon could speak, Katsuki turned and seized him by the shoulder. Shoving him back up against the wall. The impact sent a puff of dust cascading from the ancient carvings above them. But Eijirou did not resist. His breath left him in a soft rush, his wings beginning to unfurl on instinct before settling back into bone. His eyes were wide and unguarded, holding nothing but devotion. 

Katsuki stepped into him, standing close enough for heat to radiate off his skin. “Where were you?” he asked, voice low and dangerous. “Why would you embarrass me—embarrass us—today of all days with your lateness?”

Eijirou’s chin lifted in offering and his voice held no fear of his Runek. “I was in the village.”

Katsuki’s fingers tightened. “Why?”

“Because they were preparing fires,” Eijirou said simply. “Small and weak ones. But I helped. They wanted to honor you and the union and the new season. I stayed to make sure none of the embers burned out.”

“That isn’t your duty,” Katsuki snarled, though his anger was already beginning to fade. “Your duty was to be here. To stand by me. To act as if you understand what this ritual will do to us.”

“I do understand.”

Katsuki scoffed. “Clearly not. You left me to face them. They doubt our bond.”

Eijirou’s gaze softened. “But they do not doubt you, my love.”

Katsuki could never hate the gentleness in Eijirou’s tone. How it was reserved only for him. But he could hate the acid eating his own words. Because beneath every accusation lay the truth of the council turning something that was theirs into something political. He was angry that he needed Eijirou beside him and he hated that the need showed.

Katsuki pressed his hand against the wall beside Eijirou’s head, leaning in. “You made me look weak.”

Eijirou’s voice caught. “That was never my intent.”

“Perception matters more than intent,” Katsuki pressed. “They want to turn our bond into a ritual they can own.”

“Then let them want,” Eijirou said.

He always said such things with the certainty of a creature who had never once questioned his devotion. Who had been born knowing that desire could never strip from him what he claimed as his.

Dragons hoarded, after all. They did so out of conviction.

And here Eijirou was, offering that conviction to Katsuki without hesitation. As if no council, no prophecy, no elder’s eye could pry apart what belonged to them. Part of Katsuki wanted to snarl at the arrogance of it. At the simplicity with which Eijirou dismissed the claws of politics they both had felt digging into ribs since birth. But another part thrummed with a want of its own because Eijirou believed so fiercely that their bond was unstealable. And Katsuki, who had spent his entire life defending every inch of himself from being claimed by duty, felt something inside him soften dangerously at the idea of being claimed by love instead.

Katsuki dropped his hand to his side and looked up at Eijirou with wide eyes. The dragon was always so much bigger than him. Even now in this form he stood two heads taller than him. “Do not speak as though this is simple,” he whispered.

“It isn’t,” Eijirou replied. “But it is ours.” 

Katsuki let his eyes close for a fraction of a second, just long enough to feel the agony of wanting. Just long enough for the heat to simmer under his skin. When he opened his eyes again, Eijirou was watching him with a devotion that could level mountains. 

Slowly, Eijirou lifted a hand.

His palm cupped Katsuki’s jaw, warm enough to feel like burning coals. His thumb brushed his cheekbone in unhurried strokes. “Your people are my people,” Eijirou murmured. “Your god, my god. Your blood, my blood, Runekar.”

Katsuki’s heart struck his ribs like a fist. Heat pooled low in his belly, coiling tight. He swallowed hard as the last dregs of fury drained into something almost unbearable. “Do not call me that,” he said, jaw clenched. “Not yet. It is not your place.” 

“It is what you are,” Eijirou countered with a smile. “It is what I have wanted to call you for a lifetime. Let me honor you before the world does.”

A smile broke through, one that Katsuki had to bite back. “You’ll be disappointed to know that Sero and Kaminari have referred to me as such already.”

“Those bastards.” Eijirou joked, but he was already lowering himself. Actually lowering himself until one knee rested on the stone and his head bowed fully before Katsuki’s abdomen. His hands rested reverently on Katsuki’s hips and his shaggy red hair brushed the hem of the ceremonial mantle.

Katsuki’s heart lurched. “Kaer’nai,” he hissed. Draconian still slippery on his tongue despite the two decades of practice. “Shit. Not—not here. Not like this.” 

He reached down and cupped Eijirou’s face between both hands before lifting it until their eyes met. He looked up at Katsuki with the depth of devotion that made him ache. “Do not kneel to me,” Katsuki whispered. “That is not your place.”

Eijirou rose slowly. When he reached his full height, Katsuki stayed close enough that their breaths tangled between them and that the heat of his dragon’s body pressed against his chest like a second heartbeat.

Katsuki lifted a hand and let his fingertips brush along Eijirou’s jaw. The scales there were smooth along the edges, textured at the center. Eijirou leaned in to the touch as though it would have pained him to deny it. 

Then Katsuki leaned forward and captured him in a kiss.

He tilted his chin, brushed his mouth against Eijirou’s once. It was barely a pass of breath. Eijirou inhaled sharply as Katsuki kissed him again, firmer this time, lips parting just enough to feel the faint catch of dragon-sharp teeth. Eijirou held still for Katsuki, letting him guide the pace as his hand shifted from jaw to the back of Eijirou’s neck. His thumb traced a warm line along the tendon there, drawing Eijirou down until their foreheads touched. For a long moment, they breathed each other’s air.

When Katsuki kissed him a third time, this one grew headier. A seeking of mouths. Eijirou shuddered, and Katsuki felt it through every point of contact. Felt it in the hands that came to his waist. Felt it in the trembled air against his upper lip. Felt it in the low sound Eijirou made when Katsuki’s tongue brushed against his. 

 This kiss broke, but Katsuki pressed one more along the corner of Eijirou’s mouth. Then once more along the ridge of a scale that had formed near Eijirou’s cheekbone. They parted at last, but only by a breath. Their noses still brushed and their lips still hovered the same shared heat.

“Runekar,” Eijirou murmured, voice thick.

Katsuki sighed through his nose. “Stop calling me that.”

“It is what you are,” Eijirou whispered.

“Not yet. Not to you.”

“To me most of all.”

Katsuki swallowed. His hands slid down to Eijirou’s shoulders, knuckles grazing the warm skin there. Eijirou dipped his head, lips brushing Katsuki’s temple in a gesture that felt older than either of them.

“Katsuki,” Eijirou warned. “Tell me what troubles you.”

Katsuki closed his eyes as he pressed himself closer until his brow was resting against Eijirou’s sternum. His big arms folded around him instinctively, enclosing him in heat.  Eijirou’s hands slid slowly along his back, fingertips catching briefly on the embroidered cloak before finding bare skin at the nape of his neck. “Speak to me,” he urged.

Katsuki’s fingers curled into the fabric at Eijirou’s waist and said nothing.

“You have never hidden from me before,” Eijirou whispered. “No reason to start now.”

Katsuki drew in a shaky breath as Eijirou angled his head, nuzzling gently behind Katsuki’s ear. His voice was low and warm as it came. “Is it fear?”

“No,” Katsuki said at once.

His speed must make Eijirou smile, he can feel it pressed against his skin. “Is it duty, then?”

“That is constant.”

“Then what?”

Katsuki shifted, breathing in Eijirou’s bare sternum, the musk and ozone clinging to his skin. “It is all of it,” he said quietly. “It is everything. The crown. The rite. The expectations. The thought of being sanctified. The knowledge that my body is necessary.”

Eijirou’s expression softened. “Your body is sacred, Rhogar Vash.”

Katsuki scoffed. “You don’t understand.”

“I do,” Eijirou whispered. “More than you realize.”

Katsuki sighed, pulling himself back just enough that the warmth between them cooled. “No, you don’t. You speak of sacredness like it’s a blessing. But it’s something that other people decide. It’s what turns a body into a symbol. My fyrhal is not a relic for worship or a well to draw from. I refuse to be reduced to that.”

Eijirou flinched subtly, but Katsuki saw it. Heard it in the hitch of breath he tried to mask. Eijirou stepped closer anyway, his hands hovering near Katsuki’s waist but not touching unless welcomed. “You are not reduced,” he said softly. “Not to me. Never to me.”

“You say that now,” Katsuki murmured. “But all your life you’ve been taught the same things. The same verses. The same stories of dragons spilling seed into their kings so the land stays alive and that our nation continues to grow. That’s what you were raised to do.”

“Yes, but I was not shaped to fit your body, Katsuki,” Eijirou swallowed. “I chose you. I choose you. Time and time again.”

Katsuki choked on the brittle laughter that escaped. “You chose me? Before you ever met me, our elders carved runes predicting which heir you’d bond with. They knew from the start.”

“They knew a Runek,” Eijirou corrected. “They did not know you. They did not know your mouth, or your temper, or the way you fight the world as if it tried to swallow you whole. I met you, and I wanted you. Not the throne. Not the rite. And sure as all hells, not your fyrhal. And as for the ritual… you fear being used. But I have never—I have never taken that from you. I have never even finished inside of you. Not once. Not even when you pulled me closer or even when you begged me to stay deep—”

“Eijirou,” Katsuki warned.

But the warning went ignored. “Even then, I held back. Not because I didn’t want it, but because I would not risk making you a symbol before you chose to be one.”

“In that case, I would not have been made a symbol. You would have simply made us fathers of a bastard,” Katsuki corrected. 

Eijirou pouted at the word before grabbing the edges of Katsuki’s mantle and using it to pull him in closer. “I was actually hoping for a girl.”

Katsuki barked with laughter. “Well,” he started, trying to stop himself. “Well, we’ve only had sex with you in this shifted form, haven’t we? We don’t know what the Waters of Syrund will do once the heat takes you.”

“I can only hope it lets me take you over and over and over again.”

“Aye,” Katsuki agreed with a raise of his brow. “That’s the exact shit I’m worried for, lizard”

That pout reappeared on Eijirou’s face, paired with a subtle bristling across his shoulders. “Are you saying I cannot control myself? If this is about a child then—”

“Moreso about a clutch,” Katsuki tilted his head, looking up at Eijirou. He stopped trying to bite back the nasty thing Eijirou would have called a smile. “You and your sex are eager things.”

Eijirou’s eyes widened with recognition. “Oh.”

“Oh,” Katsuki repeated, sarcasm in the tone.

“Well, I have no control on how many but…” Eijirou looked away, sheepish, as hot blood filled his cheeks. “Katsuki… I have wanted to give myself to you in every way a dragon can since the day we laid eyes on each other. You are the man I love, I would sooner carve out my own heart than to use you for a clutch.”

“You say that now, dragon, but what will you beg of me to carry when the sun sets?”

“Probably multiple,” Eijirou’s voice was bright with sincerity as he brought his hands up to Katsuki’s shoulders, then he cupped each side of his face with both hands. “In my defense, I thought you knew. Dragons assume too much. Perhaps that is my fault. But tell me this, Katsuki, if there were no council, no audience, no rites… would you want me to finish inside of you?”

Katsuki felt himself freeze. Muscles taut and heartbeat slamming like a wardrum against his sternum. Eijirou stood absolutely still, his eyes locked in on Katsuki as he waited for his answer.

“Yes.”

Eijirou’s eyes darkened. “Yes?” The word seemed choked out, almost strangled out of him like he was just as shocked at Katsuki’s agreement. The word was hopeful and hot. His pupils were blown wide, red irises glinting like molten gems. Something primal must have rippled through him as he rolled his shoulders and began to lower himself again.

“What did I just—” Katsuki hissed, but Eijirou did not stop.

He sank down to both knees this time, hands dropping to Katsuki’s hips. Fingers curled around the pillow there as if bracing himself, then he pressed his soft and worshipful mouth just beneath Katsuki’s naval through the mess of fabric there.

Heat arrowed down through him so sharply he almost folded. The contact would have been obscene had the cloth not protected any sense of modesty. But the intent behind it stripped him bare. A dragon laying claim. His fingers itched in the air, unsure whether to push Eijirou away or to pull him closer. 

Eijirou did not look up, he breathed against Katsuki’s waist, lips parting slightly as if tasting the faint heat radiating from the dormant fyrhal. He kissed again, then another, closer to the cradle of the sigils.

Katsuki’s knees threatened to give. Gods, he thought helplessly, he should not do this here. Dragonfire torches lined the corridor, priests could walk by, the council were mere steps behind that carved door. Anyone might see this act of prostration.

But the thought dissolved once Eijirou pressed another kiss to the place where Katsuki’s fyrhal marks pulsed faintly beneath the layers of cloth. No one had kissed him there before, no one had even dared.

Eijirou pushed out a ragged breath against him, heat washing through the silk. Katsuki felt it in his bones and the tight coil low in his belly. He reached blindly, one hand finding Eijirou’s hair. The red strands were still warm from flight, damp with sweat at the root.

“Vashii,” Eijirou’s voice came in low when he spoke Draconian. A rumble that landed in Katsuki’s chest. Mine.

“Mor’en,” he murmured against him, another kiss, his tongue flicking out to dance along the embroidered fabric. “Mor’rai’kai. Mor’Vash. Vashii. Vashii.”

“M—” Katsuki choked in his attempt to mimic the words but the syllables stumbled in his mouth. Mor’en he had heard millions of times coming from his dragon as his hand found the exact spot he was kissing now. But Mor’rai’kai and Mor’vash were unfamiliar on his tongue. The curl of the Rs and the rolling of the tongue lost on him to say correctly. In its simplest terms, the prefix Mor’ meant life. So a direct translation into Common would be Life-gift, Life-heart-fire, and Life-my. But none of that sounded right. 

He let his fingers trail from the forehead of his dragon to the crown, gripping him tight to stop just for a moment. “I do not know these words.”

Eijirou looked up, mouth still close enough to Katsuki that his breath warmed the sigils. His cheeks were flush, but Katsuki couldn’t tell if that was from desire or the restraint present to not devour him right there. “They are… intimate,” he admitted quietly.

“And grammatically incorrect,” Katsuki said with a sigh of a smile. “They mean nothing in Common. Less than nothing in the High tongue.”

“They might not have taught you,” Eijirou relented with the intention of going back to his work, awakening the sigils and a heat low between Katsuki’s legs.

Katsuki tugged him back once more, their eyes met. “Then teach me.”

He lowered his head again, pressing another kiss directly over the soft thrum of Katsuki’s fyrhal. “Mor’en, is bearer. Holder of life,” he whispered, lips brushing against the damned fabric that separates them. “Mor’rai’kai… heart of my lineage,” heat seared through the thin ceremonial cloth. His sigils pulsing faintly beneath the dragon’s mouth, responding instinctively. “Mor’vash… mine to protect.”

Eijirou then lifted his gaze slowly. Lifted as a supplicant. As a lover. “Do not mistake prophecy for chains, my love.” Eijirou murmured. “Do not mistake rite to ownership. Whatever happens tonight, whatever the Waters awaken, just know that I come to you not because the world demands it, but because my soul does.”

Katsuki pulled him up for another true kiss. This one slow and dark with promise. Eijirou’s hand slipped back to Katsuki’s abdomen, still warm from his ministrations, as he traced the place where the fyrhal will be inked anew. Katsuki pressed closer, body aligning with the breadth of Eijirou’s human form. 

That was, of course, when the footsteps came.

A hurried clatter of boots. A rustle of ceremonial fabrics. The unmistakable sound of palace runners sweeping into the corridor like a gust of cold wind.

The two tore apart just as three young attendants rounded the corner, faces flushed with urgency. “Runek,” the eldest one said breathlessly as he bowed low. “The preparatory rites must begin at once. The High Priest requests your presence in the solar baths.”

Another runner, equally pale and wide eyed, turned to Eijirou and sank into a deeper bow. The kind reserved for beings of impossible stature they were not yet permitted to acknowledge openly. “Drake Kirishima,” she said. “Your own rites await you in the south chambers. You must be separated until sundown.”

Eijirou’s gaze flicked to Katsuki, his expression warm and apologetic. “It seems the Dominion grows impatient.”

Katsuki huffed a humorless breath. “It always has.”

Eijirou stepped close again, though not touching, his voice dipped low enough that only Katsuki could hear. “We will finish this tonight,” he said, eyes burning like embers. “And whatever comes after… you will not face alone.”

Katsuki swallowed. “See that you don’t disappear into the village again.”

A grin flickered at Eijirou’s mouth. “It was for you, Kaer’nai.”

The runners shifted anxiously, reminding them of time’s pull. Katsuki rolled his eyes as he watched their shuffling before turning his attention back to his dragon. “Until sundown, then?”

“Until sundown,” Eijirou echoed, bowing his head.

Katsuki turned to his runners who stood trembling in their whites as though delivering news of war. Their eyes darted between that of the Runek and his dragon, reading the charged air but understanding none of it.

“Runek,” the eldest began, lifting his gaze only to Katsuki’s feet. “The High Priest requests haste.”

Katsuki inhaled once. He had endured the dressings, the council, the prophecy until it choked him. And now, after everything, the taste of Eijirou’s devotion is what was left behind. Lingering on his skin like heat. Heat his body had begun answering.

“Listen carefully,” Katsuki said. The runners straightened up, startled. “You will tell the High Priests that I will not be their prophecy made flesh. I will not be reduced to a prized heifer they wish to breed for heirs they wish to shape. My body is mine. My bond is mine. And if I carry a child, it will be because Eijirou and I choose it. Not because it is demanded of me.”

A soft gasp escaped the group of them. 

“But,” Katsuki continued, letting the word hang in the air. “They are fortunate… because tonight, I have chosen it.”

He did not wait for their reply before stepping forward and brushing past them.

The eldest of the runners found his voice at last. “Runek… are we to inform the council that the rite shall proceed as anticipated?”

“The rite will proceed at dusk.”

The runners bowed in frantic unison.

“Oh, and Kaer’nai.”

Eijirou turned just as fast as he heard his title. His runners were already all nerves, waiting to drag him away. There was a blissed look on his face, a reaction to hearing the endearment of mate. Dragons were such simple creatures. 

“Tonight,” Katsuki said. “You shall fuck me southward. This is my decision.”

•:•.•:•.•:•:•:•:•:•:•:•☼•:•.•:•.•:•:•:•:•:•:•:•

The scent struck him first. Rosemary for strength, honeysuckle for fertility, burdock for fortitude, and the husky scent of smoke. It carried so hotly that it felt like a hand closing over his throat.

Heat unfurled in thick ribbons across the marble pools of the solar baths. Steam and smoke curled through stained glass light that broke upon Katsuki’s skin in reds and golds. Incense spilled from copper braziers shaped like suns. The priestesses murmured under their breaths in an endless chant as Katsuki stepped into the water. 

The warmth swallowed him immediately, sinking into bone and softening the tight coil of his spine. As he bathed, the priestesses shifted into the High tongue, the same tiresome chords meant to bind the body to tradition. 

Katsuki lowered himself deeper into the waters, let the heat lap up against his chin. He did not need this. He knew the damn rites. Gods, he’d been drilled with these prayers since childhood as if knowledge could make his obedience better. But this was his choice, he must keep reminding himself. His choice. 

A servant draped a cloth around his shoulders, white linen embroidered with artwork of the early sun. Another knelt beside the pool to dip his hands in warmed oils. Purification. Sanctification. Preparation. Each layer more binding than the rest.

He caught his reflection on the rippling surface. Not yet Runek, but a body being shaped into one. A body to bear legacy. And beneath every mark they paint on his skin, a body who wanted Eijirou with a need sharp enough to frighten him.

A priestess lifted a gilded bowl. “Runek Bakugou,” she intoned, “We must begin the sealing of the fyrhal at once.”

Katsuki closed his eyes. “Of course.”

Water was drained from the bath until it was half full, leaving crumbles of roots and teas and resins clinging to his skin. He was slick with unmixing oil and water. Droplets were wiped away with a soft cloth. Then warm, thick oil flowed over his lower stomach in steady ribbons. Heavy with the scent of ashwood resin. The very same trees that dragons used to line their nesting grounds. The smell of smoke, bark, and sap hit him instantly and his breath faltered.

Another priest pressed crushed blue lotus petals along his hips and lower abdomen, leaving streaks of shimmering indigo pigment impressed into the scarred sigils along his skin.

He knew he would hate this part.

The handling. The reverence. The way the fyrhal was treated as more holy relic than as an organ he was born with and a mark scarred on him. Hands moved him gently, tilting his hips and brushing more oil along the ridges of his obliques and then over the gentle swell below his navel. The marks felt alive under the touch, but nowhere near as much as they had when Eijirou kissed him sweetly and murmured Draconian through fabric.

Then a senior priest approached, holding a rod carved from the spine of a long dead wyrm. Its tip was covered in an inky dripping darkness that would soon be scratched onto Katsuki. Heat lightning cracked through his ribs as he heard the warning. “Brace.”

The first touch was less pain and more a perilous heat. The inked rod touched the arch of his lower abdomen, just beneath the shallow rise of muscle. For a moment, his breath locked in his chest. The priest dragged the tip in a long, slow curve following the dips and intricacies of the scarred sigils, repainting them into the first layer of his skin. One day they will scar again with the faint red of his mother’s once this pass has faded. But for now, they are a deep and unforgiving blue-black.

The outer lines of the fyrhal were shaped like a woven cradle or a V shaped dipper in the vaguest sense. Intricate linework filled the inner parts in the High written language made of curvatures and angles.  The sigil pulsed as it was worked, answering to the dark ink.

Katsuki’s fingers curled tightly against his thighs as the next drag took him downward where he was most sensitive. Through a patch of blond prickling hair that ran a path down from below his navel. The marks rose in angry scratched lines. 

“Fyrhal ren,” the priest murmured, tracing another long scratching curve into his skin. “Gate of flame. Keeper of lineage. Throne of the fireborn.”

Another line was drawn, then three interlocking rings curving from one hip bone to the other. A vesica piscis, the sacred geometry of life. One representing the Runek, another his dragon, and the one at its center was the life that might come of them. Katsuki felt each circle like a hand pressed against him.

The act was an intimate thing.

He wanted his dragon.

“The fyrhal is sealed once the ink warms,” the priest said, but it was already warming. Heat gathered beneath his flesh and bloomed outward in slow waves. Katsuki felt it roll through his hips and lower stomach. The sigils tightened then softened as if breathing without him, like something was already moving beneath his skin.

Perhaps this is what the elders had warned him about. The first stirrings when preparing for a bond. He forced himself to stop his reactions, but the sealing made the impulse hard to ignore.

Oil was brushed across the markings in steady strokes. More blue lotus was smeared into the grooves, tinting the black ink a slight iridescent. The scent was dizzying in its depth.

It was just a biological chamber, Katsuki forced upon himself. Just something meant to carry what his dragon could spark. It was a mark of sovereignty. A sign of his blood’s strange gift. It was his. His organ. His strength. His choice.

But soon it would be Eijirou’s just as much as it had been his.

Mor’en. Mor’rai’kai. Mor’vash. 

The senior priest lifted the spine rod again, the ink empty from its point. “The sealing is complete.”

Katsuki forced himself to breathe normally as the final pulse rippled through the marks. It left him feeling both hollowed and strangely full. 

Hands guided him upright as the last bit of water sluiced across his legs. The priestess wiped spare oil along his thighs and hips. They were all careful not to disturb the fresh ink. Their touch was respectful, even so each graze near the refreshed sigils sent a flicker of heat through him. 

Runners brought in his robes. Brown linens embroidered with gold. The garment fastened at the hip, leaving his chest bare, stomach marked and stinging faintly. 

“The dragon must see you truly,” one priestess said as she tied the final knot. “He must see what he will claim.”

Katsuki’s breath stuttered with the sudden fierce want that bolted through him like lightning. Eijirou would see him. He would kneel where the priests had knelt. Kiss where they traced. Fill what had been sealed. And he wanted that more than he wanted the Dominion to understand him. 

It was dusk by the time the rites were complete. 

The last of the sunlight bled through the narrow clerestory windows, turning the stone corridors into that of a thing alive. Katsuki walked with a stiffness that came with the ache now settling deep into his skin and organs. His body thrummed with the echo of the sealing and that of the memory of Eijirou’s kisses on the same mark hours earlier. This too shall not last.

He was being walked to the Hall of Embers through an underground passageway. And as he approached, doors opening before him, real heat with intention rolled down the passageway like breath.

The Hall was lit only by one long central hearth igniting the whole of the room. It was a stage in the round, and above was where the priesthood would bear witness. Two long lines of stone half walls carved directly into the mountain’s ribs, one stacked stop the other. Only the top one was veiled in sheer fabric so the priests would appear as shifting silhouettes while other watchers would witness without cover. There was then a long circular awning made of stone and mud that provided some shade and secrecy to the Hall, but was mostly there to save the priests from jumping into the Hall proper if the Water’s madness somehow reached them too.

There were already patrons filling the lower bowl. Nearly fifty citizens were already training their necks to bear witness to the Thren’kai. More would come by the time the Waters were consumed. Even more would join as they pass by. The upper ring was overtaken by the priesthood, bodies moving like shadows behind their veiled haze. From below they moved like ghosts.

Hooks in the ceilings hung chains for ceremonial lanterns, though none were lit now. All illumination came from the living fire, casting the whole place fever-bright. There were four alcoves placed at the cardinal points where offerings and water basins could be presented. And at its west point, a raised stone dais where Runek and dragon would kneel. 

Katsuki’s pulse jumped once he saw Eijirou there already.

He was still… human. Or as close to human as he ever was. But his presence had shifted. His hair gleamed a deeper flame as if bathed headfirst in oil that slicked his barely there waves to his head. His pupils had not yet taken on their thin vertical slit, but it looked like it took effort to maintain those big red doe eyes that Katsuki had come to love. The scales along his cheekbones and down his arms and tracing the hard plane of his ribs shimmered faintly. The rites had marked Eijirou, as they did him, but tonight he looked as ancient as he was.

He looked like his people.

“Katsuki,” he breathed in greeting. “Look at you. You survive—” 

His words seemed to stop once his eyes landed on the scratched ink atop his womb. Katsuki couldn’t help but wrap the garment tighter around himself, hiding the marked fyrhal from view if only for another few minutes. “As did you,” he said in turn.

Eijirou laughed softly, eyes going back up to Katsuki’s face as he closed the distance in a few easy strides. “Barely. They poured ember oil over my spine until I thought I’d melt. They carved sigils into my shoulders. They burned my throat with sunroot tea so I could speak the oath while being cleaned thoroughly both inside and out. But—” His gaze swept down Katsuki, once again stopping at the fresh inked sigils like he could sense them past the gauzy material. “It was worth it for you.”

Katsuki glanced up once more. He wouldn’t entirely be surprised if council members and palace runners alike had joined either bowl, though he could not make out a familiar face amongst the crowd yet. Then he realized, he didn’t actually care whether he did or not. This was his. Not theirs.

Eijirou and Katsuki’s hands met first in a tight clasp. Then foreheads met, a soft brush of warm skin to warm skin. Katsuki inhaled deeply at the contact. Eijirou smelled of smoke and copper and the faint sweetness of the fertility oils they had bathed both of them in.

“You look…” Eijirou began, then stopped to swallow. “...like the sun marked you for itself.”

Katsuki tilted his head up, lips catching Eijirou’s in a brief stolen kiss. It was a promise just as much as it was a violation of at least two ceremonial decrees. 

Eijirou made a low, hungry sound as he kissed him back, one hand rising to cup Katsuki’s jaw. “I thought I would go mad waiting,” he whispered into his mouth.

“You have lived longer than I have. You’ve waited before, you will wait again. So impatient for no reason.” Katsuki’s hand slid down to Eijirou’s chest, feeling heat through his thin ceremonial wrap. “How did you fare in the south chambers? My time was awful.”

“Awful, really?” Eijirou said, though he shrugged. “I guess I didn’t fare much better than. I was scrubbed within an inch of my life. Then they burned me. Blessed me. Told me not to fear overwhelming you.”

“And what did you say in turn?”

“That you terrify me,” Eijirou laughed, his smile bright in the room's tepid heat. “And that they should fear you overwhelming me.”

Katsuki snorted, but the sound came out softer than he intended. 

They stood too close for the watching flames. For the eyes above. For propriety. But Katsuki did not care. His newly sealed fyrhal pulsed under his robe, a low hot ache that tightened when Eijirou’s gaze once again returned to it. 

“Does it hurt?” Eijrou asked.

“Not exactly,” Katsuki answered truthfully, dismissing him with a wave. “What else is on your mind? I can practically hear you thinking.”

“You can already.”

“I can assume.”

“Well, once the bond is complete then you will,” Eijirou bumped his forehead against Katsuki’s once more, but his smile seemed to falter. “I… uhm… The Waters of Syrund they—they say they bring a dragon to his farthest edges. They say it awakens instinct. Rage. Heat. Hunger.”

“It does that for me too,” Katsuki said simply. “What is your problem?

Eijirou looked back down between them, his breath caught somewhere in his lungs. “I could lose myself.”

“You won’t,” Katsuki insisted.

“I might.”

“You won’t,” he repeated firmly. “Eijirou, you have never lost yourself to me. Not once. Not even when I asked things of you that would have undone a lesser drake.”

Eijirou stepped in closer, hands hovering at Katsuki’s waist. “If the Waters awaken my instincts… My loudest one has always been to protect you. To take you only as you wish to be taken. And to stop the moment you say so, but… but if I don’t stop then I give you full permission to hunt me for sport.”

Katsuki choked. “You—what?”

“You heard me,” Eijirou lifted his chin as if presenting his throat. “If I forget myself, if I cross even a breath beyond what you want, hunt me. Chase me through the mountains. Bring me down by tooth or blade. Dragons love a fair duel.”

Katsuki’s pulse throbbed painfully beneath his fresh sigils. “Eijirou,” he whispered. “There is nothing you could do that I do not want, you damn lizard. You know this.”

Something bright and wild flickered in Eijirou’s eyes. “You will undo me, Kaer’nai.”

Before Katsuki could answer, a door from within the northern alcove opened with a deep resonant groan. Priests entered in a line, carrying a brass bowl etched with ancient flame sigils. Thick silver liquid glowed faintly within the bowl. The Waters of Syrund. Distilled from mountain springs and dragonfire.

The lead priest bowed. “Runek Bakugou. Drake Kirishima. The hour has come.”

Eijirou straightened, posture suddenly formal. He turned toward Katsuki one last time, the heat in his gaze was unmistakable. “Whatever happens, remember what I said,” he whispered. “I will not take what you do not offer. But gods, Katsuki… I have never wanted anyone the way I want you.”

Before the bowl could be lifted to his lips, Katsuki leaned in, barely pushing Eijirou’s mouth with his own as he spoke, “Tonight, you will not bow to prophecy. You shall only bow to me.”

The priest stepped between them, lifting the vessel with both hands. The silver liquid clung to the sides in thick rivulets and smelled like lighting trapped in a mountain’s spring. “Kneel,” the priest commanded.   

They did as they were told. Katsuki’s knees met warm stone. His body felt pulled toward the bowl as if by some magnetic thread. 

The bowl tilted toward him first.

“Katsuki Bakugou of the Solmark Dominion,” the priest intoned. “Drink.”

He wrapped one hand around the rim. The metal was hot, but almost nothing compared to the sealing of the fyrhal. Nothing compared to Eijirou’s mouth. He lifted the vessel to his lips and the first contact scorched his tongue. The second felt like swallowing fire itself. And the third…

Nothing. His senses numbed to the sensation fast, and it felt as if just drinking a thick beverage that dried more than it quenched. He drank half before a priest’s steady hand pulled the vessel from him. Katsuki’s breath came out in a hiss, steam rising from between his teeth.

The priest moved to Eijirou’s lips and he took it with both hands, throat bobbing in long hungry swallows. His pupils blew wide, he drank the Waters like he was starved for it. The bowl was then taken away.

Silence rang amongst the Hall like a struck bell. And for one terrible suspended second, nothing. Then—

Katsuki’s breath hitched. Something deep inside him fluttered, no it lurched. A tightening low in his pelvis right behind the freshly sealed fyrhal. His hand flew to his stomach, fingers splayed over the inked sigils. A quickening. A ripple beneath his skin like something curling and uncurling inside the hollow meant for the dragon’s offering. He gasped, bowing forward as heat washed over him so violently his vision blurred.

Then, the heat spread.

A molten thread dragged upward through his ribs, growing hot against his sternum. His heartbeat slammed against bone. “Fuck—” he gasped out.

“Katsuki?” Eijirou choked, hands reaching for him. 

He opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a pained groan. He was burning. No… no, burning wasn’t enough. Fire was kinder than this. This was volcanic. Primordial. A heat that belonged to no mortal body. It crawled across his skin igniting every nerve. His robes clung damply at him, suffocating his skin. He clawed at them until fabric tore. The knot at his hips came loose. The linen gaped open, baring his freshly inked stomach to the air. Coolness hit his skin and it still wasn’t enough.

Gods, he was hot.

So damned hot.

His thighs trembled. Sweat gathered along his spine like mercury. His breath turned ragged and desperate. 

Then the pain struck.

A pleasure-pain so intimately intertwined that he couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. It was rapture sharpened to a knife’s edge. A thick, heavy scalding ache blossomed deep inside his cunt so heavy and consuming that it made his knees buckle. He throbbed like an open wound, pulsed like it needed to be filled. The feeling radiated outward like lightning burning through sand, exploding behind his eyes and clawing at his lungs.

A sob escaped him. He felt hollowed out. Open. The newly inked fyrhal blazed on his skin, unbearably sensitive. His prick throbbed under the veil of sweat, slick pooled fast between his legs as his muscles spasmed wracked with the desperation to be filled. His hips jerked as need carved itself though him. 

He gasped, voice breaking. “What—what is—”

Emotion surged through him next. A burst of fury so bright that his vision was tinted red. He didn’t know where this rage came from. If it was brought on or just something that was enveloped so entirely with his true being that the Waters brought it out. Even still he tried to place it. Could it be from his own body betraying him? The priests for doing this to him? The rites? Or maybe himself for wanting this so badly.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to cry. He wanted—

“Kats—” Eijirou’s voice broke behind him and Katsuki lifted his head.

Eijirou had dropped as if the ground had been ripped from under him. His breath came in short snarling bursts. His back arched, bones shifting beneath the skin with sickening beautiful creaks as wings began to unfurl. They burst forth in a spray from his shoulder blades, ripping through the back of his ceremonial clothes. Horns split through his skin at his brow and curved upward, glistening with fresh blood.

He ripped at his ceremonial wrap with frantic hands. Cloth shredded beneath claws that hadn’t been claws only moments ago. His chest heaved as scales rippled down his torso. Nails lengthening to curved talons and pupils narrowing to slits.

He was shifting too fast.

“Kaer’nai!” Katsuki tried, a hand outstretched to calm him as he forced himself upright. “Eijirou, just—”

“Stay back!” His mouth opened wide and jagged teeth caught the firelight as he chased out a rush of guttural Draconian. Nonsense syllables, frantic and broken. Fragments of instinct that no longer obeyed control. “Get away!”

“You know I can’t,” Katsuki attempted to stagger toward him, gripping his stomach as another wave of this heat flooded him and more slick pooled from between his legs. “This is part of—”

“I could hurt you!” Eijirou snarled, wings flaring wide.

Katsuki reached for him once he was close enough, grabbing his jaw in a harsh fist and forcing Eijirou to look at him through the haze of his madness. “Bondmate,” he said the word in Common, voice rough even to himself. “You could not hurt me if you tried.”

“I feel—” Eijirou panted as he trembled violently, his whole body shuddering with force. “Katsuki, I feel everything. Rage. Heat. Want. If I touch you I don’t know if I could—”

“What? Stop?” Katsuki spat back, voice raw. “Look at me! Do I look like someone who would ever wish for you to stop?”

For a minute, Eijirou’s movements froze. His eyes seemed to clear for just a second.

Katsuki leaned in, breaths heaving, every word pulled from deep within and past his grit teeth. “I am empty, my love. Do you hear me? Empty. And gods, I need you to fix it. Now. Right now. I need—” His breath hitched as another pulse dragged through him. “I need you, Ei. Now. The rites demand it. I demand i—”

The words are lost to him again, another sob clawing its way through his throat as the Waters sang in his blood. He keened over, dropping to his knees. But before he could plummet further, face hitting the hot rock beneath his feet, a clawed hand found his cheek. 

“Runekar,” Eijirou’s voice as he spoke the High tongue was all wrong. Too far back in his throat, the syllables were almost Draconian, but Katsuki understood them like he understood the lines along his palms. He could recognize them muffled through the madness in his mind. My king. Then— “Serakar.” My beloved.

Eijirou’s wings were trembling. Skin and membrane vibrating with the strain of the heat. His chest rose in a sharp inhale, claws dipping into the flesh of Katsuki’s cheek but refusing to break the skin. “If I lose myself—”

“I will bring you back,” Katsuki’s voice was a whispered growl. “By word or by bond, I will bring you back. Now, please. Please. I feel so fucking empty, Ei.”

A sound tore from Eijirou’s throat, devotion or terror or desire or all three combining into one horrifying thing. He was losing himself to his dragon. Heat engulfed Katsuki as wings folded around him. Eijirou was looking around frantically, using the last bit of his manhood to find the right alcove. The right direction. If Katsuki was of sound mind, he would have laughed in his face. Dragons were supposed to have a natural sense for it. But Eijirou looked frightened. Unmoored. Like he wanted to do right by him. 

But right now, Katsuki didn’t care to be fucked southward. The passion was there. He was empty damnit. He needed to be filled. Needed to be drowned in it.

“West,” Katsuki said, although the word barely left his mouth before a moan overtook it. His hand dropped down to his burning fyrhal as he tried the command again. “Turn west.”

Eijirou did so, orienting the both of them before the shift inside of him deepened. Katsuki could feel it in the way Eijirou’s breath came in shorter. The way his pupils thinned out to cuts in a sea of red. Heat rolled off of him in waves, hotter than the Hall of Embers itself. His wings arched above them, casting them in a moving shade that felt more like the interior of a furnace.

“Kear’nai,” Eijriou rasped. The word came out perfect, guttural and real as all good Draconian should. His throat no longer fit that of human speech. But he tried. “I—”

His words broke off in a shudder, the hand that wasn’t on Katsuki’s face flexed against his side. “Raihal—” his words caught in his lungs as he choked on the High tongue. “Raihal ven serakar.” Devoted to you, my beloved.

Katsuki felt the words like a blow to the chest. This was not some ceremonial phrase pulled from memory. This was his dragon using the last clean edge, his last human words, to give him something the High tongue only expected to be spoken once in a lifetime.

Eijirou’s last act before the Waters took him was to love him out loud.

Something inside Katsuki gave way. His throat tightened. His hand left his burning fyrhal and rose to grab hold of Eijirou’s jaw once more, thumb tipping his face down to meet him. Eijirou’s eyes were going strange, edges rimmed with gold, but they focused on him with a desperate searing intensity.

“Kai’rai,” Katsuki whispered. He wished more than anything that Draconian wasn’t so simple and complex a language. He wished he knew the rites of love in such a way. But all he could manage was that. Heart of my flame. It felt strange and right on his tongue, like something that was waiting there all along. Eijirou’s breath stuttered and his claws spasmed against Katsuki’s hip but did not pierce.

Katsuki drew in another breath. “Vashii.”

Eijirou made a sound that did not belong to men. It tore through his chest, reverberating through the stone and the air and Katsuki’s bones. His head dipped, mouth fastening to the line of Katsuki’s throat. A claiming tongue, now just beginning to split at the tip, stroked once along the frantic pulse there. Tasting it like a sacrament.

Katsuki’s head fell back on a choked gasp, exposing more of his neck. Eijirou followed instinctively, mouth trailing lower, sharpened teeth skimming without breaking and tracing the line of throat to collarbone as he pressed Katsuki into the western rise of the dais.

“Stay,” Eijirou growled, although it could be mistaken as a plea. The word mangled through a mouth steadily losing its shape for Common. His grip tightened at Katsuki’s waist, claws curling possessively into the torn linen. “Stay. Mine.”

Katsuki’s answering sound was something like a curse. The ache in his cunt flared molten. There was a drag that made his knees slippery under him. The fyrhal burned so bright that he could feel the sigils pulsing under Eijirou’s hand like a second heartbeat. “Take me,” he rasped. “Or watch me burn empty.”

Something in Eijirou’s control snapped. His wings cocooned them fully now, blocking out the view from most of the observers above. All Katsuki could see was red and shadow and the flicker of the central fire through thin skin. Claws tore the rest of the robe from his hips with rough efficiency, sparing no energy for flare. The line of one talon skimmed his thigh, close enough to sting but never enough to cut.

Draconian began to spill from Eijirou’s mouth as his mind slipped deeper into instinct. “Kaer’nai. Vashii. Vashii.”

 Each word was punctuated by touch. Hands spanning his hips, dragging him forward onto warm stone and forcing his thighs apart. Katsuki shuddered, the cool air hitting his slick heat, every nerve alight. The ache in his belly sharpened into something pleading and obscene. 

Eijirou’s hands slid lower, claws blunted by sheer will as his palm pressed over the fyrhal. Fingers spanned the inked marks that blazed on his skin. His breath struck the exposed flesh in short desperate bursts as the Waters turned his restraint to glass thin shards.

“Kaer’nai…” he rasped again, bowing his head further. Forehead almost touching the center of Katsuki’s abdomen. 

Katsuki’s hands flew down, one hand to the base of one horn and the other to take in a fistfull of his hair to anchor him downward. “Eijirou,” he gasped, hips jerking helplessly into that touch. “Do not stop. Don’t you dare stop.”

Eijirou’s breath left him in a ragged exhale. Whatever thin line he had been balancing on vanished. His next inhale sounded like the start of a roar in the back of his throat, choked down only because Katsuki was pressed so close that his heat filled every breath between them. The dragon was slipping fast, but his hands, his mouth, his body all followed the same direction.

Down.

Eijirou bowed his head until his lips hovered over the burning cradle of the fyrhal. His breath gusted over the inked marks, hot enough that Katsuki felt it in his spine. His grip reflexively tightened on the horn, dragging Eijirou nearer, insisting without words.

Eijirou obeyed with the soft press of his mouth to the fresh ink, right over the point where Katsuki’s pulse beat frantically beneath the skin. “Mor’en… Mor’rai’kai… Mor’vash…” The words vibrated against him in a low devotional moan. Another kiss, lower now, mouth brushing the curve of the sigil where blue lotus pigment still shimmered along his hip bones. 

Eijirou’s tongue glanced the skin as if tasting him through the ink and sweat. Katsuki’s breath hitched so sharply it whited his vision out for half a heartbeat. His knees wobbled outward, thighs quivering under the weight of Eijirou’s body between them. Eijirou’s hands slid down Katsuki’s hips, claws just sharp enough to barely break the skin and raise it up in lovely red lines. His palms felt like they were close to burning handprints into his thighs as he pushed them open to keep himself spread wide. He pressed a third kiss, this one opened mouth and messy, over the center vesica piscis of the tattoo, where the ink still felt hot to the touch. “En’kai’vash.” The end of the word turned guttural, as Draconian shifted in his throat. 

Bearer-Fire-My

Bearer-My-Fire

Holder?

Carry?

Take?

Take my fire

Flame?

Take my—

“Oh,” Katsuki made a sound he didn’t recognize as the sigils throbbed under Eijirou’s ministrations. They answered instinctively, tightening his whole belly into a hot pulsing ache. His cunt flooded with heat so sudden it stole what little breath he had left. His legs trembled violently as his hips bucked up.

Take my tongue.

Eijirou’s head lowered. His lips traced the bottom arch of the fyrhal, then down along the tender path where heat pooled. He tongued along the path created in ink. Pressed another kiss at the V of his hips. Each kiss dragged something low from Eijirou’s chest as if the musky scent of Katsuki’s sex itself is what undid him. He barely had time to breathe before Eijirou’s mouth brushed the seam of his inner thigh. A groan ripped out of the dragon like he’d been struck.

Then, the first lick. It was slow. Agonizingly slow. He dragged the full heat of his forked tongue from the base of Katsuki’s slit upward. Katsuki’s knees were suddenly up by Eijirou’s ears, hooked over his shoulders as another sound escaped him. Claws hooked over the tops of his thighs as he licked another broad flat stroke. This one was sweeping, deliberate in its mapping. Eijirou licked him like he was memorizing terrain. His tongue slid through Katsuki’s slick folds and along the seam of him, gathering everything Katsuki gave and swallowing it down with a low and broken moan. Katsuki’s hips jerked forward into the heat of Eijirou’s mouth.

He began a pattern then. Long flat licks and tiny tight circles. His tongue went deeper, pressing into his hole and fucking into him just enough for Katsuki’s breath to catch on the inhale. The pressure stole the strength from his thighs and his fingers spasmed in Eijirou’s hair.

“Fuck—Ei—” 

Eijirou groaned a reply directly into him, the vibration skittered through Katsuki’s cunt like something struck. His head dipped lower, fully sealing over him. Tongue pushing deeper into slick as he lapped up in slow hungry strokes. More arousal seeped out from the sides of him, and Eijirou licked him clean with every pass. Katsuki bucked upward, helpless to the onslaught as Eijirou’s wings twitched in a violent shudder. Every breath he took blasted hot air against Katsuki’s already burning cunt. Every exhale seemed hotter than the last.

He really was losing himself. And the more lost, the more precise his mouth became.

Eijirou pulled back only far enough to taste him again. Tongue flicking lightly at the swollen bud of Katsuki’s cock. Once. Twice. Katsuki’s vision went red at the edges as a low strangled noise scraped out of him.

Then Eijirou’s mouth closed around him.

It was slow pressure at first. Testing. Re-learning. Remembering the way Katsuki’s breath stuttered when he circled gently rather than sucked. He swirled his tongue around the sensitive peak in languid movements. Painting heat in tight patterns before drawing his prick into his mouth again with a slow suck that hollowed his cheeks. Katsuki tried to pull Eijirou closer and shove him away at the same time, unable to parse desire from overwhelm. His back arched, belly trembling, fyrhal pulsing bright enough that he swore the marks had already begun to glow.

Eijirou moaned as if Katsuki’s taste hit some primal nerve. The sound vibrated all the way up Katsuki’s pelvis. Then the dragon’s claws flexed, hands sliding lower to now grab the underside of Katsuki’s thighs as he lifted and tilted him to open him wider. It was almost insulting how easily Eijirou manhandled him like this. Obscene how Katsuki’s body obeyed without thought. How the heat between them made everything feel inevitable.

Eijirou dove deeper again. His tongue thrust into Katsuki with slow, powerful strokes. Pushing past the first flutter of resistance until Katsuki’s body melted around him. The forked tip curled up and forward, teasing the inner ridge that made Katsuki’s breath rip apart on a gasp.

“Ei, fuck, slow—” Katsuki tried to command him, but the words were lost. His head thudded back lightly against the stone. Teeth bared in a gasp as more pleasure-pain jolted up his spine. This was good. But it wasn’t enough. He needed more. He needed him inside. He needed to be filled. Needed to be bred like a bitch in heat. He forced Eijirou’s head lower to roll his hips, grinding into his tongue to urge him for more.

Eijirou’s rhythm changed so gradually that Katsuki didn’t realize how desperate the pace had become until he felt more slick dripping down the curve of his ass as Eijirou devoured him. His mouth sealed over him again, sucking hard enough to pull another cry from Katsuki. One he refused to swallow back. His tongue stroked Katsuki’s entrance, teasing, pressing, sliding inside again with a heated glide that made Katsuki shudder violently.

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.

His hand tightened around Eijirou’s hair, grounding himself in the hot trembling mass of dragon astride him. Eijirou’s next moan was high and needy. Almost pained. He must feel the need too.

“Eijirou,” he gasped, voice breaking apart. “Don’t stop. Kaer’nai, please don’t stop.”

The dragon growled in response, a low pleased rumble that resonated directly overtop Katsuki’s prick as he pulled back just enough to close his mouth around it again. He sucked, tongue flicking rapidly beneath the hood, his claws dragging light across Katsuki’s hips in a rhythm that matched his mouth.

Then pressure began to build. Too fast. Pressure coiling like a heated wire pulled tighter and tighter until Katsuki’s stomach spasmed in warning. He tried to speak to warn him, but no words escaped. His orgasm tore through him with such force that he sobbed. His hole clenched violently around Eijirou’s tongue, slick flooding Eijirou’s mouth. His back arched off the stone, thighs shaking around Eijirou’s shoulders. His fingers clenched in hair and horn both, holding the dragon to him as he broke open around that mouth.

Eijirou groaned, long and hungry, swallowing everything Katsuki spilled into him like a starving creature. 

Katsuki came so hard his vision went dark. Body shaking. Breath shuddering. Fyrhal pulsing with aftershocks that felt nearly painful. But Eijirou didn’t stop. He licked him through it. Slow and gentle now, coaxing the tremors out of his body. Each lick was a hot wet ribbon dragging pleasure up Katsuki’s spine again and again until he gasped from the oversensitivity. 

“Too much,” Katsuki broke, pulling Eijirou’s head away from him. “Too much.”

Eijirou pulled back, lips red and wet and breaths unsteady. His eyes lifted to Katsuki with a look so reverent it bordered on worship. “Kaer’nai…” his voice was low and ragged. Ruined.

Katsuki’s chest heaved. His legs shook uncontrollably. His whole body felt scoured, open, waiting. He swallowed hard as he looked down at Eijirou. Clarity coming only for moments at a time. He looked like a beast barely holding himself together. His wings were trembling and his claws flexed. His breath came out in puffs of steam against the slick between Katsuki’s thighs.

“Come here,” Katsuki commanded.

Eijirou obeyed with ease. 

He rose slowly. His wings shifted upward, framing them both in a furnace-red halo. His body loomed close, heat rolling off of him in suffocating waves. Katsuki could feel each exhale like a touch. Feel the tremor in the muscles beneath scales and half shifted skin. His massive hands slid up Katsuki’s thighs. The claws were held back by will alone, tips grazing now but not cutting. He traced the trails of slick on Katsuki’s skin with a reverence that made Katsuki’s stomach clench.

“Mine,” Eijirou rasped. The Common word was almost unrecognizable. 

“Yes,” Katsuki answered without hesitation. Voice hoarse and thin. “Yours.”

Eijirou surged forward. Their mouths collided in a kiss that was nothing like the gentle ones from earlier. This was a crash of heat and teeth. Eijirou kissed him as if claiming him. As if marking Katsuki with every breath. Katsuki bit into his lower hip hard enough to taste copper and sunroot. Eijirou groaned, the sound pitched deep, and licked into Katsuki’s mouth with his hot, spent tongue.

Katsuki shuddered and Eijirou chased the gasp. Licking deep and sucking Katsuki’s bottom lip into his mouth. Heat seared where their lips dragged against one another. Katsuki cupped the back of Eijirou’s head, gripping hard at the nape of his neck and pulling him closer, closer, closer, until their bodies met chest to chest. Skin to scale. Man against beast.

Eijirou broke the kiss only long enough to drag open mouthed bites down Katsuki’s jaw and throat. Scraping sharp teeth along tendon and pulse.

“Mark me,” Katsuki breathed.

And Eijirou obeyed that too. His mouth latched onto the curve of Katsuki’s throat, sucking hard until a bruise began to blossom under the surface. He licked over the mark once, possessive, then pressed another kiss lower. Then another. Leaving a trail of bruises down Katsuki’s shoulder like ritual beads strung on skin. 

Katsuki dragged a hand down Eijirou’s chest. Over the hard planes of shifting muscle and the faint shimmer of scales growing denser by the second. Then lower until his palm cupped him. 

Eijirou jerked in shock, eyes flying wide. A deep growl rolled from his chest, his wings snapping outward with a reflexive tremor.

“Easy, lizard,” Katsuki murmured, though his hand tightened around him. 

Eijirou’s cock was hotter than a human's. The heat almost shocked Katsuki’s palm. It pulsed hard in his grip, slick already gathering and drooling from the tip. It dripped down Katsuki’s wrist. The damn thing was bigger than his hand around and just about as long as the tip of his middle finger to the middle of his forearm. The texture was different too. Veins ran along all sides, with a particularly fat beautiful one that curved along the top of his shaft that remained the same in his fully human form. But this cock had ridges along the entire shaft and a nice firm unswollen knot at the base. He wasn’t certain if it was capable of swelling in this mid shift form, but the Waters had him eager to find out.

Or maybe it was his own curiosity because his mind was clear now. But the madness is taking hold again, he can feel it. Even after coming once, he still needs more.

Katsuki let his thumb coast along the underside, ridges shifting beneath before he stroked him up and down slowly. Once he reached his cockhead once more he pressed against the slit, smudging pre along the pad of his thumb and smoothing it back onto the slit. Gods, he wanted to take him into his mouth. He wanted to see how far back his cock would hit his throat. He wanted to be unmade by choking on him. But more than that, he wanted to be fucked full and deep.

The thought returned like a hammer blow. His breath caught as the need clawed back up his spine so suddenly it left him dizzy. His whole body pulsed with this steady low ache. His cunt throbbed around that painful nothing once more. Low and primal. He was already soaked and open still from his last orgasm, primed to take him to the hilt. He was desperate with that sudden need.

He needed to be fucked full.

Or, no, not that. He needed to be claimed. Taken. Bred.

The word scorched through him like a flame along his nerve endings. His thighs clenched together then parted again helplessly. He took his hand from Eijirou’s cock without thinking and reached between his own legs. The dragon hissed his discomfort until he saw where Katsuki’s hand had disappeared to. He was palming at himself. Trying to dissuade the pulse by fucking his fingers into himself. Digits swollen by the heat there. The madness was curling back around his brainstem with a razor focus. Every cell was begging for it. For him. His womb pulsed beneath the fryhal like a bell being struck and fuck, he swore he could feel something inside him softening, ready to take, take, take.

He wanted to feel the ridges of Eijirou’s cock drag along his inner walls. Wanted that fat vein to stroke where it counted. Wanted his knot to press up hard against him, to stretch him open, to hold. He wanted to feel the snap of him when Eijirou gave in and lost control. He wanted him to come with all the force a dragon could give. He wanted to feel it flood him and spill out, thick and deep, filling every part of him meant to carry it. 

He brought his now slicked hand back to Eijirou’s aching cock. Smoothing his own arousal over the head and shaft.

“Kaer’nai—” Eijirou choked, voice dissolving into a sound far less human. “Don’t—”

“Don’t what?” Katsuki whispered as he pulled him in close, spoken against his lips as he stroked him firmer. “Touch you? Want you? Command you?”

Eijirou shuddered helplessly at each word.

His hips thrust once into Katsuki’s hand in offering. A submission older than any human ritual. Katsuki felt the ridges throb against his palm as slick smeared across both their skin.

“You feel—” Katsuki swallowed hard. “Gods, Ei, you feel like you were made for this. Made for me.”

Eijirou made a strangled noise and buried his face in Katsuki’s throat, teeth begging to bite. His cock throbbed violently in Katsuki’s grip, leaking more slick that ran hot over Katsuki's fingers. 

The heat in Katsuki’s belly flared once more as the fyrhal pulsed sharply. This time an internal squeeze so intense that made him keen and grasp at Eijirou’s shoulder with his free hand.

Eijirou seemed to scent it immediately. His head snapped down, mouth dragging across Katsuki’s chest and stomach until he reached the burning sigils again. He licked it once, tongue leaving scorching trails. Katsuki’s thighs fell open in turn as the emptiness inside him pulsed deep. Tears were beginning to spring from his eyes at this overwhelming need. He panted harshly as Eijirou pressed his forehead to Katsuki’s belly, breath streaming the skin.

Then his fingers, still shaking, slid between Katsuki’s legs next.

Katsuki nearly sobbed. Eijirou’s fingers were big and hot like this. Not warm. Scorched like stones left in the sun. They slid through the slick of Katsuki’s orgasms easily, spreading it along his folds and dipping lower to his entrance with an exploratory act he barely seemed capable of in this state. 

“Ei—” Katsuki gasped, the name breaking on his tongue.

Eijirou’s pupils thinned further. His lips parted in a look of awe and hunger as he pushed two fingers into Katsuki. His whole body bowed as pleasure rushed through him like a heated lash. Eijirou’s fingers were thick and the heat made Katsuki clench around it involuntarily. Eijirou moaned like he felt it too as he pushed deeper. His free hand bracing on Katsuki’s hips. Claws curling inward and just on the edge of piercing flesh. Katsuki rocked helplessly into the touch, the emptiness inside him narrowing around this single point of heat.

“More,” Katsuki demanded.

A third finger pressed in, no restraint. Katsuki cried out, clutching at Eijirou’s shoulders. The stretch was sharp, burning, perfect. Eijirou pumped his fingers in fast and hard, the ridges of his knuckles dragging deliciously against Katsuki’s inner walls. 

It was a bit of a reach, but Katsuki took hold of Eijirou’s cock again. He wanted him inside. He wanted the heat, the ridges, the fullness promised by the heavy weight in his hand. Eijirou snarled at the touch, fingers pulling out of Katsuki roughly and wings flaring wide. He must be sensitive too. Must be just as needy and close to the edge. 

But he took the time to examine his now soaked digits in awe like he didn't know a body could be capable of that much moisture. And in his defense, neither was Katsuki. Slick dropped down to the meat of Eijirou’s palm as he held up his three fingers and tilted it just so to watch the slick drip around him. Then he brought those three fingers to his mouth and shoved them in. His forked tongue sliding over them and cleaning them with deep and heady moans as he once again tasted Katsuki's sex like a creature starved.

Katsuki leaned back onto his elbows, letting Eijirou tower above him as he lifted his head from the fyrhal. He guided his cock between his legs, just nudging the entrance. It looked to take all of the dragon’s restraint from pushing in and claiming him that second. There was some part of the man still in there, Katsuki could tell.

But he did not want that man right now.

“I want you inside. Now.” 

Eijirou surged forward, mouth crashing hard against Katsuki’s. Biting, licking, dragging his split tongue against Katsuki’s teeth and lips. The kiss was fevered. Katsuki tasted himself on Eijirou’s tongue. He tasted like blood and slick and sunroot tea. Their moans tangled as Katsuki felt Eijirou’s cock pulse between them, pre come dripping onto the stone beneath them. He could feel the tremble in Eijirou’s thighs as he held himself back with monumental effort. 

Katsuki broke the kiss with a whispered command, his voice too raw to put sound behind it. “Do not make me wait.”

Something seemed to snap in his dragon. Eijirou’s eyes cut to pinpoints. His breath stuttered in a single shuddering inhale. His wings scraped against stone, shaking with instinct so strong it made the air vibrate.

He pushed inside with one sharp thrust. Katsuki’s mouth fell open on a sound punched out of him as Eijirous’ cock stretched him wide around impossible heat. His cock burned around the ring of him, too wide for his cunt to take him that fast despite their preparations. The ridges along the underside of his cock dragged against him in a way that made his whole body seize. The stretch was deep, burning, raw, and shockingly perfect in its pain.

Eijirou froze only when he bottomed out. Every inch buried inside Katsuki.  His breath heaved high in his chest but his eyes were wide open, jaw slack like a panting dog. 

Katsuki dragged in a ragged inhale. Fingers clawed blindly at the scales along Eijirou’s shoulders. “Fuck,” Katsuki gasped. “Fuck, Eijirou, I need—move. Move.”

The barely there control evaporated. The first of many thrusts shook the stone beneath them. Katsuki felt it spark in his bones, in the sealed fyrhal, in his dick being dragged up with the force of his dragon’s cock inside of him. His breath broke into pieces. Scattering like sparks. His thighs shook violently around Eijirou’s hips as the second thrust came harder, slamming into a place Katsuki had been aching from the moment the Waters hit him.

Eijirou’s claws slammed into the stone beside Katsuki’s head, carving lines into the dais as he thrust again. His hips snapped forward with wild, helpless force. Heat poured off him in waves. Katsuki’s body responded instinctively. Clenching, pulling him deeper as if he could drag the entire dragon inside himself.

“Mate,” Katsuki said the word in Common, too blissed to pull Draconian from his throat. The sound broke into a cry as the next thrust knocked the sound out of him. It wasn’t like Eijirou could answer anymore. He was gone now. Fully gone.

All the soft, eager, earnest man burned away by the Waters. Leaving only instinct behind. His breaths came in ragged snarls. Drool slipped from between his fangs and landed on Katsukis’ chest. His wings trembled violently as he pistoned into Katsuki. Each thrust harder and more frantic than the last.

“Kaer’nai,” he rasped, so there was some brain left in there. But it had morphed from less of a word more into a desperate sound. More the echo of their vow to each other. “Vashii. Vashii. Vashii.”

Katsuki back arched, hips grinding helplessly up to meet him. The fullness was overwhelming, stretching him open, knocking breath from his lungs and scraping every nerve into heat. Slick pooled hot beneath him, the sound of their bodies meeting loud and obscene in the echoes of the Halls of Embers.

Voices began to flood Katsuki’s ears though he could make out no individual, all of it muffling into one voice. Prayers from on high muffled by his own moans as well as shouts and jeers from the common ring like they were watching a knighted prize fight. Look at him take it like a fucking whore. Like a fucking dragon’s whore. All Runeks are dragon’s whores. He's doing it for us. He's selfish. My king. Your mother ruined us. My king, you have saved us. This is your fault just as it is hers. Look at him, mad and drooling. Why must this be a spectacle? Why must we deign to witness? My king! My Runek! You will save us! The Solmark Dominion shall rise again. This is not enough. This is more than enough.

When Eijirou’s hands left the stone, they closed around Katsuki. One clawed hand grabbed his hip hard enough to bruise instantly. The other slid beneath his lower back, lifting him off the ground in a single effortless motion. Katsuki gasped, fingers curling hard around Eijrou’s forearm as the angle shifted and then—

“Oh—” He broke. No more words could be formed in the mess of his mind sinking to the madness and pleasure alike. “Oh. Eiji. Ei—ah, ah, ah AH there. Fuck, there!” 

Ejirou pounded into him with a single minded intensity that bordered on savage. Katsuki clung to him, nails dragging across scales, back arching into a bow as pleasure burst behind his eyes. Every thrust punched a choked sound out of him, raw and involuntary. He couldn’t even cry out properly anymore. Just wrecked little gasps and whimpers, spit-slick lips forming half sounds as his cunt clenched helplessly around the searing drag of Eijirou’s cock. It was too much, too big, too deep. The ridges battered his insides with every stroke, scraping perfectly against the place inside him that made his vision blur and his legs jerk wide open to take more.

Slick coated his thighs and pooled under him, squelching loud with every brutal slap of skin against skin. The knot bumped at his entrance now, threatening with every thrust. Not yet, not yet, not yet. He wanted it, gods, he wanted it. He wanted to be tied, locked, split wide and held down and bred. The word pulsed in his skull like a fever. He needed to be filled. Needed to be fucked open until the fire settled. Until he was dripping with it, marked with it, changed by it. 

“Fuck—fuck me full,” he gasped, voice shattering around the words. “I want it. I want your come. I want your clutch. Tie me, Ei, tie—” He sobbed on the last word as Eijirou growled, the sound inhuman and viscous. He snapped his hips forward so hard that it drove Katsuki fully off the ground. His back scraped the stone as he was lifted, cock driven impossibly deeper. The stretch at his entrance so violent he thought he might tear from the pressure of the knot. But instead of pain, it detonated into something better. Heat and madness and slick.

His second orgasm built furiously, sparked by every brutal drag of Eijirou’s cock inside him. His cunt squeezed around him so tight it forced Eijirou to falter, a single broken growl of pure need rumbling through his chest. His mouth opened against Katsuki’s throat and his hips slammed forward hard as Katsuki came apart beneath him.

Pleasure ripped through him, pleasure-white and sharp. His body seized, muscles clamping down around Eijirou so hard the dragon choked on a ragged snarl, thrusting through it, losing the last shreds of himself to the heat and pull of Katsuki’s climax.

It felt as if something broke open inside of him at its peak. His body, his mind, something deep in his stomach that changed to pressure to a brutal almost uncomfortable and sudden urge. Then suddenly he was gushing. Slick sprayed in a hot helpless arc between them, spilling from between his legs and soaking his thighs, his belly, reaching Eijirou’s chest. It poured out around the knot still battering around his rim. Wetness splattered the stone beneath him in pulses that matched the frantic throb of his cunt. It was messy, loud, filthy. All Katsuki could do was feel it, hips jerking up as his whole body shook. He’d been wrung out like the Waters had boiled over from within him.

But Eijirou didn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop.

He drove into him like he was carving his name. Katsuki felt the knot battering against his cunt with bruising force now. Blunt and swollen, forcing his hole to stretch obscenely with each snap of Eijirou’s hips. The slick squelched and echoed against stone, joined now by the rhythmic chants of priests above them intoning their union. Speaking holy rites in a voice of harmony in the High tongue while Katsuki was fucked like a beast below.

“Drakar ven Runek,” the upper ring chanted. “Runek ven Solmark. Solmark ven Syrund. Syrund ven Drakar.”

Dragon to King. King to Kingdom. Kingdom to Binding. Binding to Dragon. 

“Gonna put a clutch in you,” Eijirou rasped suddenly in Common. The words were shattered and wet against Katsuki’s jaw. “Gonna fuck my seed into you until you feel it in your throat, Runekar. ‘Til your womb knows who it belongs to.”

It was too much. Too much. Too much.

Every nerve in his body was flayed open and filled. His thighs kicked uselessly against Eijirou’s hips, legs trembling as he was forced to take every inch, The knot tugged harder and harder at his cunt, catching the rim and stretching him so wide he thought he’d split. But his body worked through it and opened anyway. Hungry, molten, and slick. His breath stuttered, caught then on a broken, ragged plea.

The lower ring was overrun with simple folk. Ears pressed to vents and hands clinging to stone pillars. The halfwalls did not protect them from the hearths’s heat. As Katsuki managed to look up once more through the heat haze, he saw sweat dripping from their brows. His people. His Solmark. 

He barely had the chance to take his people in before Eijirou’s fangs sank into the curve of Katsuki’s shoulder as he slammed forward. The knot popped past the ring of him with a sound that felt seismic. Katsuk howled. His cunt spasmed around the thick swell now sealing them together, locking tight as it stretched him brutally around the base. He could feel it lodging into place, dragging his insides up and tilting his hips at a brutal angle that forced him to take every drop.

“Solmark sa Thren’kai. Solmark sa Thren’kai,” a counter chant began in the High tongue amongst the lower ring. One voice that grew into many. “Solmark sa Thren’kai. Solmark sa Thren’kai. Solmark sa Thren’kai.”

Solmark born of the Firebrand.

Solmark born of the sacred mating.

Solmark born of the king and dragon.

Solmark is born once again.

“Kaer’nai!” Eijirou barked, voice shredded in Draconian as his hips jerked once, twice. Then locked in place with a full body tremor. “Kaer’nai vash. You’re mine, Katsuki. Mine. Only mine. My mate, my love, my king, my—”

His cock jerked inside Katsuki before it began to pour.

Thick molten hot spurts of come flooded into him. Pulse after pulse, like being branded from the inside. Katsuki’s back arched off the stone, another orgasm tearing out of him as his body milked it, hole fluttering around the knot and clenching for more, more, more. He filled so fast it nearly overflowed to which Eijirou, frantic and beautiful Eiijrou, reached down to press it back in around the tight edges of his knot, stretching Katsuki out even further. No drop would be wasted. Not a drop. Slick and seed leaked out only for a few seconds before the knot pulsed tighter to fill the extra space made. He could feel Eijirou’s come pushing up against him from the inside, meeting resistance but spilling in anyway. It felt like Eijirou’s body was remaking him from the inside. Like the Waters had cracked him open and Eijirou had crawled in to build their future from the ground up.

More chanting. “Thren’kai ven Fyrhal. Solmark sa Thren’kai. Thren’kai ven Fyrhal. Solmark sa Thren’kai.” So loud now that they drowned out the priests. There had to be an obscene number of them to do such a feat. Katsuki couldn’t open his eyes long enough to take in more than one angle at a time. Northward there were bodies spilling over the halfwall. And east too. 

Firebrand to the sacred womb. Solmark born of the Firebrand. 

Eijirou kept coming. 

Each brutal pulse spilled deeper, thicker, hotter, until Katsuki could feel the heat gathering at the mouth of somewhere deep inside of him like lava pouring into a chalice. The pressure built impossibly, swelling in waves that made his cunt clench hard around the knot. He was so full his whole body shook with it, so full his mouth fell open and stayed there. No sound left, only ragged air and the obscene slick of being claimed.

His fyrhal pulsed once, then again, swelling with weight as if the sigil beneath his skin had become a vessel too. Taking on the offerings alongside him. He felt it tighten against his abdomen, faint but real. As though the mark itself had been seeded, as though the dragon’s gift demanded more than flesh. Katsuki whimpered, delirious, as his belly grew taut beneath Eijirou’s work, full in a way that no man should be.

His people were witnessing him be opened, filled, bound. And they were praying for it. Begging for it. Calling the ritual into completion with their breath and blood and belief. 

But they did not recite the full prayer. The deeper verses belonged to Runeks. To dragons. To unions like this one. 

Katsuki’s hand shook as he brought it to his swollen fyrhal, fingers trembling as they brushed the stretched inked lines. They were raised now, hot, almost glowing beneath the slick and sweat. His breath snagged, a broken and desperate sound escaped him. That very same prayer lived in him the way the Waters now lived in him, the way Eijirou was living in him.

“Thren’kai ven Fyrhal,” he gasped, voice shredded but clear enough for the westward witnesses to hear. “Fyrhal sa Raihal.”

Firebrand to the Sacred Womb. Sacred womb born of devotion. 

His head fell back against stone, bitten throat exposed, lips parted as Eijirou snarled above him and thrust again, another pulse of molten seed pushed deep. 

“Raihal ven Syr’aal…” Katsuki choked, the syllables dissolving into a moan halfway through. “Runek nar Drakar, Solmark sa—gods. Gods! Eijirou—fuck—ah AH!”

Devotion to the sacred breath. King and Dragon.

Eijirou’s growl vibrated through his sternum. A massive clawed hand slid down to cover Katsuki’s own at his fyrhal, pressing both their palms against the distended heat there. Their hands shook together now.

The dragon muttered in broken Draconian, slurring it in pleasure. Voice thick and breath fever hot against Katsuki’s neck. “Vashii… Kai’ren… take it… take all of me. Mine. Mine!”

Another burst of come spilled into him. His voice cracked, breath hitching as he felt himself swell again. An aching fullness that bordered on uncomfortable. But it was just as devastating as it was holy. His fingers flexed under Eijirou’s palm. “Serakar,” he barely got out before Eijirou braced a claw behind Katsuki’s back, pulling him up into the last few ruts he had in him. He locked him tight, breath ragged as he listened to Katsuki recite the most ancient bond in broken gasps. 

“Solamark sa… sa…”

“Mor’vash…” Eijirou babbled into his throat, mind half lost to his dragon form. “Mine. Mate. Bondmate. Mine.”

Katsuki barely heard him now. He was somewhere beyond sound. Beyond the hall. Beyond everything except the pounding pleasure in his body and the overwhelming heat filling him. The prayer slipped into nothing but breath after that. He couldn’t manage more. He couldn’t speak. Could barely hold himself upright. 

But he didn’t need to.

Because the whole hall answered for him.

“Solmark sa Thren’kai!” they chanted, fists pumping into the air as they screamed and shouted and trilled their tongues. “Solmark sa Thren’kai! Solmark sa Thren’kai!”

The sound of it echoed in his ears. Or… or it moved through him. Passing like he no longer existed in this plane.

Katsuki was… losing himself.

Breath no longer came easily as his dragon collapsed on top of him. But it wasn’t just the weight. The room seemed to grow darker as if the hearth had been guttered. His vision tunneled, the edges smearing like wet ink.

The knot still pulsed inside of him. The heat and pressure of it was the only thing grounding him now. His fyrhal throbbed, taut and heavy and swollen with what Eijirou had poured into him. 

His thoughts stuttered like half-formed things. Melting like tallow.

He blinked hard, but the world moved slow. Everything came in syrupy seconds.

The roar of the crowd.

The whispering crackle of the hearth.

The tremble in Eijirou’s arms as the dragon fought to stay conscious. 

Someone above him was screaming in joy. Another cried out. He thought he saw a priest drop to their knees behind the veil, arms lifted towards the ceiling. 

They believed the heir had taken root. 

His people—his Dominion—were seeing what they had waited generations to witness. A Runek sealed and bound. A Firebrand forged between that of himself and his dragon.

The Solmark Dominion would thrive.

Katsuki tried to wet his lips but his mouth barely obeyed. His head lolled, cheek pressed against hot stone. His stomach rose, far too full. The fyrhal glowed a faint gold beneath the stretched skin. It was warm. Too warm. A steady heat that didn’t belong to him alone.

Eijirou’s hand still covered his. Claws retracted now, fingers trembling as they held his lower belly with something approaching worship, even through the haze of the fading instinct. 

“Kaer’nai…” Eijirou slurred, voice ruined. “Katsuki… stay with me… I—”

The words broke apart, swallowed by exhaustion. His wings sagged, folding awkwardly around them both. His horns clicked lightly against the stone as his forehead fell to Katsuki’s. He was shaking with the effort of remaining upright.

Katsuki wanted to answer him. Wanted to sooth him. Wanted to say I’m here, I’m fine. You did so well, Ei—

But the only sound he managed was a broken little gasp.

His vision flickered again. Light. Dark. Light.

His people were still chanting above. Slamming their palms against the stone. Voice braised together into one living thing. And above them, the priests’ veils rippled in the rising heat as they shouted praise and prophecy, their silhouettes moving like wraiths. 

He heard a voice shout over the commotion coming from somewhere above. “The fyrhal glows! It glows! Blessed be the bond!”

Hands reached from above, desperate to touch the stone where their Runek lay joined with his dragon, despite the apron separating them. Their faith pressed against him like another weight. Just as crushing if not more than his dragon. 

Katsuki’s breath shuddered in his chest. The hearth’s glow reflected off the sheen of sweat down his ribs. His limbs were heavy, his mind slipping like sand between his fingers. Everything was floating away from him except for Eijirou’s warmth and the fullness inside him. And of course the soft tremor in the dragon’s voice as he whispered a final, hoarse, “Mor’vash.”

Katsuki blinked again.

Slow.

Slower.

He wondered if he was crying. His face felt wet. But maybe that was the sweat. Maybe that was—

His lips parted and words surfaced like air from the deep. First a breath, then a sound. Then a broken whisper shaped by instinct and rite and something older than them both. “Thren’kai ven Fyrhal.”

The crowd roared in answer. Eijirou’s hand twitched again over his lower stomach. His vision began to shimmer. Ghost. Then returned dimly. The hall was swaying now, or maybe it was just him. Hard to tell. Eijirou whispered something Draconian and worshipful that dissolved at the edges. Katsuki barely heard him.

The fyrhal pulsed once more, hot as he whimpered, “Solmark… sa… Thren’kai.”

The last word trembled out of him. Thin and frayed. Everything blurred to gold.

Then to black.

•:•.•:•.•:•:•:•:•:•:•:•☼•:•.•:•.•:•:•:•:•:•:•:•

Darkness was not the absence of light.

At least, not this time.

It was thick and warm and strangely buoyant. A darkness that held him rather than swallowed him whole. Katsuki floated in it, suspended somewhere far below his own ribs, or maybe above them. He couldn’t tell. His senses were a loose spill of ash and heat. His body a distant thing echoing with fullness. His thoughts drifting like embers caught in a slow wind.

Somewhere, distantly, someone was calling his name.

A large trembling hand brushed the edge of his jaw.

A sound flickered in his chest, small and broken. Felt rather than heard.

Then a voice, reverent in its concern, dragged him upward. “Katsuki? Kaer’nai? Stay with me.”

The world cracked open at that. 

Light bled in. Dim and blue toned as though the chamber were lit by moonwater instead of flame. Cool vapor curled around him. Stone, smooth and damp beneath his back anchored him just enough to remember his own weight. His breath stuttered as he sucked it in before his eyes opened and—

The first thing he saw was Eijirou.

Bare-chested and human shaped again but still bearing hints of his other form. Horn numbs receding into his hairline, the faint shimmer of scales at his temples. His eyes were wide and bloodshot at the edges. Not with heat anymore, but with worry.

“Ei…” Katsuki rasped. His throat felt rubbed raw from the chanting and gasps and guttural sounds he barely remembered making. “Where—”

“The cooling chambers,” Eijirou breathed. Relief broke over his features like dawn over a valley. “They brought us down here once… once you went under.”

Katsuki blinked hard until his vision steadied.

He was wrapped in soft clothes now. Linen, clean and cool against skin that still felt too warm. His hair was damp. His body smelled faintly of oils used only after rites meant to sooth fire-bitten flesh. Someone must have bathed him while he was unconscious.

The seventh bath.

Gods help him, he never wanted another bath again.

He shifted. A low ache unfurling in the cradle of his hips. His fryhal throbbed, swollen and warm beneath the band of linen covering his abdomen. It wasn’t blazing anymore but it still felt unnecessarily present. As though something pulsed beneath the sigil’s lines.

He winced. Eijirou immediately touched his shoulder. “Are you hurting?”

“No,” Katsuki said. It wasn't a lie. The ache wasn’t pain, it was… something else. Something heavy and full. How long had he been out?

His breath trembled at the realization.

Eijirou must have sensed the shift in him. His expression softened, turning unbearably tender. “You live,” he whispered.

Katsuki snorted weakly. “Barely.”

Eijirou laughed once, hoarse and shaken, then bowed his forehead to Katsuki’s. “I thought I lost you,” he admitted. “When you fell quiet. When you stopped answering. When your eyes just—”

“None of that is going to happen again,” Katsuki murmured, eyes drifting half closed. “You’re stuck with me.”

A weak sound left Eijirou that made Katsuki make one in turn. Something like a laugh or a cough in the back of his throat as their fingers threaded together. 

Silence between them settled for a breath and before—

“Katsuki?”

“Hm?”

“I am… covered in mud and ash and come. And… did you just laugh at me?” 

“Why haven’t they bathed you?”

“Answer the damned question, Runekar.”

Katsuki’s mouth curled, just barely. “I have said nothing.”

Eijirou huffed, affronted. “Your face did.”

“My face is just exhausted.”

“Yes, but you’re making fun of me with it.”

Katsuki didn’t deny it. He didn’t have the strength. Or maybe he had too much affection left in the hollow of his chest for denial.

Another voice broke the quiet. “Runekar?”

Katsuki groaned. Loudly.

Denki stood nervously at the entry arch of the cooling chamber. Golden hair damp with steam. A sheen of sweat settled on his brow as though he’d run through the whole mountain to get here. Hanta hovered behind him, eyes wide and posture a little stiff as if entering a sacred ground.

“Are we—can we—should we come in?” Denki asked.

“You’re already inside,” Katsuki huffed.

Hanta elbowed Denki. “We told the priests we were your attendants. They let us through the Hall of Embers.”

“We are his attendants,” Denki whispered back. “It wasn’t even a lie.”

Eijirou looked between them, brow knit in confusion. “You two… witnessed?”

They nodded emphatically.

Katsuki dragged a hand down his face. “Gods. Of course you did.”

Denki’s voice dropped into something honest. “It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

“There were hundreds of people, Runekar,” Hanta’s voice cracked. “Hundreds. The whole lower ring was shouting and—”

“We saw you glowing,” Denki added, eyes huge. “Your fyrhal—”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Katsuki said sharply, flushing hot.

But Eijirou, traitor that he was, looked deeply proud.

Hanta, attempting innocence, cleared his throat. “Only once in a lifetime do we get to witness a Thren’kai. It would have been insulting to the gods not to look.”

Katsuki scowled at him. “You can see your friends rut against each other any night since you two are so impatient and nosey with my baths. Just try any room in the palace. I fail to see what made this such a spectacle.”

Denki’s mouth fell open. “Was—was that a joke?”

Hanta gasped, clutching Denki’s arm. “It was! The Waters still haven’t worn off. He’s delirious.”

“I’m not delicious,” Katsuki snapped.

“You’re making jokes,” Denki countered. “Same thing.”

Katsuki would have thrown something at them if he could sit up without the room tilting. But Eijirou squeezed his hand, smiling softly. “It was a joke. And a good one.”

“I don’t need your help with these two idiots,” Katsuki muttered, but the warmth in his voice betrayed him.

The chamber door creaked and all four of them froze as Yagi entered. His robes were white as bone. His sleeves embroidered with sun thread. His expression was grave but bright in the eyes, like someone had witnessed a miracle yet carried the weight of its truth.

Denki and Hanta immediately bowed and backed against the wall. Eijirou sat up straighter despite his exhaustion, wings instinctively tucking behind him. Katsuki attempted to do the same, but Yagi lifted one hand in permission to stay where he was.

No sounds filled the chamber except for the distant dripping water and Katsuki’s uneven breath.

Yagi approached slowly, each footfall purposeful on the cool stone. His gaze moved from Katsuki—pale, trembling, marked—to Eijirou, who was still in this receding half form with a hand covering Katsuki’s abdomen. Then he looked down towards the band of linen covering the fyrhal beneath which something pulsed faintly.

The priest stopped an arms length away, then bowed his head deeply. When he lifted it again, his eyes shone with near-holy clarity. “It has taken.”

The words thrummed through the chamber walls and Katsuki’s ribs. Through the hollow stretched around Eijirou’s knot shaped ache. 

Denki choked on a gasp as Hanta clapped a hand over his own mouth. Eijirou’s fingers clenched around Katsuki as if something inside him broke open.

Katsuki forced himself to breathe. Once. Twice. But it hitched on the third. 

Of course it has, he thought. His body had been forged for this. His lineage was carved in fire. His dragon was bound to him from birth. The rite was written on his bones, his blood, his breath.

So… of course it has.

He let his eyes fall closed in a quiet, exhausted acceptance by prophecy and choice alike. Then he spoke, “Then let the Firebrand stand,” as the future of the Solmark Dominion blazed quietly to life within him.