Loren woke with a start, naked and sweaty in a tiny, circular room that felt like a human-sized oven. The room couldn’t have been more than a few meters across; the floor was stone and the roof was cloth, but the walls were all thick red scales that glowed faintly in the darkness. Loren had been hunting the dragon, she remembered, and she’d almost killed it when… she didn’t know. She’d been stripped in her sleep and propped against a wall of scales, and they pulsed against her naked skin like warm metal, soothing the decades-old scars on her back. She felt her eyes drifting shut, soothed by the low, pleased hum all around her. It was so damn hot in here, moist and choking like a sauna, and Loren was always so tired these days…

The scales pulsed again, approving, and Loren felt a spike of panic and slapped the dragon’s side. It was coiling her for some fucking reason. “Out,” she gasped, hoarse, “let me–”

The oven-like space unfolded all at once; the hot, damp air cleared slightly as the dragon’s flank stretched out into a twenty-meter wall of red adamantine scales. Loren stayed nestled against its side, kept in place as the dragon moved. and she breathed in the cold winter air and shivered. The dragon rumbled again as she pressed herself instinctively back against the hot scales of its flank, keeping herself warm and woozy despite the cold. Looking out past the dragon, she saw the winter sky and the grey stone of a plateau and Loren’s own home in the distance, a small, isolated cottage she’d built half a decade ago, back when she’d tried to give up on hero work for good. But if that was Loren’s home, they were almost half a continent away from the cave where Loren had confronted the dragon, which was the last thing she remembered…

She looked back to the dragon’s flank and froze. While she’d been staring out at the grey plateau, hazy and tired, the dragon had craned its neck back around to stare at her directly. Its neck was ten meters of corded muscle, as thick as a hundred-year-old tree, and the dragon’s head, resting against the grey stone floor, was taller than she was. It stared at her with its dinner-plate eyes, and Loren choked the instinctive fear that crept up through her. When she’d been tasked with killing the marauding dragon, she’d poisoned its food to force it to shapechange into something smaller, something she could fight and kill with her own magic. Like this, in its true form, it was almost invincible. Even at her strongest Loren would have died if she’d been seen by the beast, and now, woozy and aching from her bruises and the heat, she stood no chance at all. But it wasn’t trying to kill her, and so Loren croaked out a question. “…how long have I been asleep?” And, Loren thought with a spike of anxiety, if she’d failed to kill the dragon… “Is the kingdom–”

The dragon snorted, breathing out a wave of thick, hot air that sent Loren swooning back against its flank, and then it moved forward until the flexible, warm scales of its nose pushed up against Loren’s stomach and chest, easily pinning her in place. It would be so easy to sleep like this, but Loren’s nerves wouldn’t settle, now. She was the only person on the continent that could stop a dragon, and she’d failed. “Did you–”

The dragon’s eyes narrowed, and then it chuffed and opened its jaws and perched Loren cleanly in the lip of its mouth, inching Loren in until her naked feet brushed against the dragon’s arm-length ivory teeth. It kept her there for a long second, just barely in its mouth and leaning back against its scorching-hot flank, and then it started to choke deeper down in its throat, sending waves of heat up against Loren’s chest as it tried to dislodge something down there. The dragon was convulsing, forcing something up like it was choking on food, and the vibrations grew until a blood-slick woman squirmed out of the dragon’s throat and onto Loren’s chest.

She was stark naked, and her skin was the same red adamantine scales that covered every other form of the dragon Tyraxia, but thinner and more pleasantly shaped. The dragon’s human form was frankly a bit ostentatious, platinum blonde hair and sharp noblewoman’s cheekbones and piercing red eyes, all with a low, lilting voice that had tricked every town and city that had thought they could negotiate with the beast. It had used this body to talk cities open and burn them down, to crush the kingdom under months of heavy tribute, and Loren knew this body was just as dangerous as the rest of its forms. Even after she’d poisoned the dragon and forced it into human shape, it had nearly beaten her to death with its bare hands. Its muscles were pinched away and hidden but still there, strong as an ox, and just like every other one of the dragon’s forms its skin was invincible red adamantine. But the gap in her scales, the chink in her armor Loren had seen from below as Tyraxia had flown over a burned city months ago, was larger on a human. Even so, it took up barely three fingerbreadths of her neck, naked pink skin against the red flexile metal all around it. Just large enough for Loren to stab a sword through and end the beast, she’d thought, but she’d clearly failed: the poison had worked, she’d remembered, and she’d dueled the screeching beast in human form and forced it back against the wall of the cave, but it had struck the sword from her hand and so she’d wrestled it down and… bitten it? Like a fucking animal?

She looked down to the dragon’s neck, and gods, she had. The delicate skin of Tyraxia’s neck had been split like a peach by Loren’s teeth, bruised and throbbing where she’d snapped down like a rabid dog, desperate to pierce the dragon’s weakness hard enough to kill. It hadn’t worked. Tyraxia’s human form pressed against Loren’s naked chest as the dragon’s flank pulsed hot behind her, all flawless except for the bite mark on its neck. The poison was gone; the dragon was invincible once again, and Loren shivered as it pressed firmly against her, warm skin hard and flexible like leather, naked breasts still slick with its own blood and saliva. Loren looked it in the eyes, struck still with fear and anticipation, and it let out a pleased growl and wrapped one delicate, burning hand around the curve of Loren’s neck. “Mmm. Good mate. Your hoard is safe, yes.”

Loren blinked. “The kingdom–”

The dragon chuffed again, irritated. “Your hoard is safe with me. What kind of mate would I be to neglect it? Now,” it said businesslike, “I did run you through with a spear the other day, so I will ask you not to move.”

Loren looked down and saw a half-healed pockmark wound just above her stomach. Right. The dragon had stabbed her in the lung, sometime around when she'd lost her sword. “Mate?” she rasped.

Tyraxia laughed, then bared her throat, exposing Loren’s purpling bite on the gap in her scales. “Mm-m-m. You claimed me, Ser Knight. And quite well for such a soft thing!” She worked her other hand up to Loren’s bicep, groping the muscle there appreciatively. When Loren shifted in her grip, the dragon tightened her hold on Loren’s neck and pressed further in until the hot, throbbing pressure of Tyraxia’s inner flame surrounded her on all sides, massive scaled plates behind her and delicate adamantine finger-length scales in front, all thrumming in unison as they held her in place.

Loren gasped, then gasped again at nothing, squirming against the dragon’s grip. She had to talk with the king. The wound on her stomach was half healed, so it had been… a week? Longer? Even if the dragon wasn’t a threat, even if it was whatever it said it was, there would be something she needed to do–

The dragon hissed softly. “Stop thinking, you lumpy little thing. I stabbed you well. Poked you mostly to death with a stick. You’re too churned up now to be clever. Aren’t you tired?”

“I–” Loren started, then trailed off as the dragon pulsed against her again, sharp twice as if to cut her off. It slowed to a steady pulse, almost like a heartbeat, and with each thump Loren felt a pulse of heat against her skin. It felt like a sauna, like a warm bed at the end of a long winter day, and against her naked chest the dragon’s skin felt soft and silky despite its strength. Loren croaked weakly. “I don’t…”

“You do and you are, Ser Knight. I will not suffer your neurotic hoarding instincts while you bleed inside and out from my admittedly excellent stabbing. You will sleep and lick your wounds and rest.” Both the dragon’s bodies, the human form against Loren’s front and the dragon form behind her, pulsed heat to punctuate the command, and Loren let out a pathetic moan in response. She was getting wet, and from the way the dragon’s nostrils widened, it was well aware. “Yes. Good mate. Again.” Tyraxia’s inner flame pulsed a second time, and Loren clenched around nothing, head hazy and sluggish from the heat against her skin and throbbing in her cunt. “Again,” the dragon hissed against her neck, eyes slit with satisfaction, heat throbbing against Loren’s skin and through her whole body, and she pulled Loren into a heavy rhythm that dragged her own arousal along until the dragon mouthed across her neck and placed a searing kiss on the underside of her jaw, hot and sticky like boiling metal – and Loren came with a choked whimper, tired and bruised and burned by the dragon’s attention. She was spent, uncontrolled except by the dragon’s throbbing scales all around her, and as the orgasm faded she lost the last of her focus and finally fell asleep.