Andarin: The Mountains: wyvern ;

astarte;

She feels it kindling within her – not sparked, not yet, but glowing with friction and potential: she feels it, as she feels the earth and feels the gentle touch of Wyvern’s mind, against hers and tasting like a snake’s tender tongue, but never breached.

He touches her, and it doesn’t matter except that it is different; he has never touched her except in the context of Him, and it feels like his tentative mind against hers – skin against skin, hairs too shy yet to weave together, flesh too hesitant to coalesce. They had never needed to, before now, and yet something is different.

She remembers, and smiles – perhaps blushed, perhaps wicked, perhaps both – creases upon her face, becomingly; his krait weaves between them, and she closes her eyes to the strange texture of her scales, iridescent beneath the indeterminate half-light, as she moves (sinuous and sensuous both) to curl about her neck, and over the curve of her withers, and finally to Ixtab’s head where it rested against her flank. Ixtab takes the weight easily, marveled herself at the body of bones and muscles and strength; she bears them away into the shadows, deep and dark and quiet, amongst whispered crescendos of hisses and coughs and growls.

“Wyvern,” she says, to nothing in particular; merely to hear his name, and cement it in her mind. She knows what he has come to her for, even if he does not know it himself, and possibilities glitter before her like starlight.

“Come to me,” she says, and beckons; and if she tries, just a little, to bend his mind to her will, she does not realize it in the cascade of their mingled breaths.