Kai Drakon's Arc

Chapter 14 of 30

A month became a season. Kai swung a pick against the back wall of the cavern until the thin stone cracked and gave. Kael came some days and hauled buckets of rubble to the mouth of the burrow, where the entrance sat ringed in old pots and stray bits of gemstone from the digging. Azure brought water and bread and stood in the new dust with her tail curled tight so it wouldn't knock the lantern over. By the end she was sanding the walls smooth with her own hands. The night they finished, they stood inside the empty room. It smelled of stone and pine. Kai had hung a single lamp from a hook in the ceiling. Azure walked a slow circle, one hand on the wall. "It's a room," she said. "It's a room." "For a small person." "Yes." She turned to face him. The lamp lit half her horns blue. She did not say what she was thinking, but he read it anyway. He had gotten better at that over the year. She was not afraid he would leave now. She was afraid of the next thing. "We said we'd live with it empty a while," Kai said. "I know." "How long a while." She stepped closer. She put her palm flat on his chest. "Long enough," she said. He laughed once, low. She did not smile, but her tail tapped his boot. She caught the front of his jacket and pulled him down and kissed him. Not the quick kiss of a wife greeting a husband at the door. A slower one. Her hand slid up under his jaw. Her horns brushed his forehead. She kissed him again, and then again, walking him backward out of the empty nursery, through the storage tunnel, into their own room. His jacket came off somewhere along the wall. His face was hot. His pulse was in his ears. He set his hands on her waist and felt the shift of scales at the small of her back where skin met tail. "Azure," he said. "I know." "You're sure." "I'm sure." She kissed him quiet. He stopped asking. After, she lay against his shoulder with her horns cool on his collarbone and her breath slow. He watched the dark ceiling he had watched a year ago, the night she first said the word child. It did not look the same. There was a room behind the wall now. There was a plan that had stopped being a plan. "We tried," she said into his skin. "We tried." "We keep trying." "Yes." She was asleep before he was. He kept one hand flat on her stomach for a long time and did not move it. Whatever came next was already coming.