The cave was dark, but the King's warmth kept it from growing cold.
In the light that radiated from the central fire, Ciara could make out the shapes of the arches and supports that were throughout the cavern. For his part, the King dozed, as he did for hours at a time. It seemed that in the last few weeks, as the leaves had turned red and yellow and then fallen off, her King had started sleeping even more.
The firelight cast a dancing pattern over the golden bed they curled on. When she had first come to the King's lair, she'd found that coins made a poor mattress for her, although her King could abide no other. Fortunately he did not mind having Ciara curl up atop his back or along his underside. Nowadays there was so much less light and warmth to the day and frost upon the ground in the mornings; she often slept curled just under her King's neck, where he was at his warmest, with the fire only a short distance from her.
Ciara sighed. Of late, her lover slept in far later than she did, leaving her with time to fill with her books. Gingerly, Ciara climbed out from her lover's embrace and slipped into the shadows beyond the fire's light. She walked on the balls of her feet, not to keep quiet (for her lover could already hear her, she was certain; his senses missed very little) but to minimize her contact with the frigid stones.
Hastily, she crossed the cavern to her makeshift bookshelf. Her King had helped her make it, carving the niches to store the books on into the walls of the cave, even though he had pouted while she re-arranged his hoard of valuables so that she could put all of the tomes in one place. The shelves and the fire pit were her only alterations to his cave, and she knew that her King had found it difficult to allow them. This effort on his part made the shelves all the more precious to Ciara.
Thick tome in hand, she quickly scampered back into bed, feeling a shiver of cold pass up and down her spine. She paused for a moment to appreciate her lover; he was immense in form, and scaled; he possessed terrible claws and long, ferocious fangs, with two great, leathery wings, and a long tail. His eyes, closed right now, were as large as dinner plates. But he was also snoring, making a delightful half-grumble as he exhaled. He was savage, and feral, and she had seen him kill beasts, but he was kind with her, sharing his meals freely, praising her cooking, touching her softly, and pleasing her as a lover.
He was the King of the Forest, a dragon. And she was his Queen and lover.
Carefully, she repositioned herself alongside her king, snuggling into the softer scales of his underside, right along his neck. She leaned her book on his neck, and began to read.
Short minutes stretched into long hours as she read. She mouthed the words she was unfamiliar with, following along with her finger in the book. It seemed an exhaustive reference on the properties of flowering plants, and their uses in magical brews, but contained no new information on the question she most needed answers to:
do magical brews lose effectiveness with repeat use?
Honey, a daub of wine, some blood, and Love-In-Idleness, alongside a few other herbs, combined to make her potion. When first she had drank it, some four months ago before the harvest season, it had allowed her body to please her lover; under the effects of the potion, the King of the Forest had found her irresistible, and they had mated, time and again, over hours. But over the last few weeks, the potion's effectiveness had begun to wane. A single use of the brew used to allow them congress for just over a day; now, it's effectiveness was waning to the point that a single dose might only be effective for a few hours, and once it passed, their coitus still left her aching and weak. Last time, when she had finished the potion and invited her King upon herself, she'd felt her stomach churn and barely had time to get out from under him before emptying her stomach's contents most unpleasantly, as her King's tail stroked at her back.
The latest book was not instructive on the topic. Several of its recipes were themselves unclear or incomplete, or contained cautions that a user may only consume them once each rising of the moon or at high summer; others cautioned that repeated exposure might render a brew toxic or dangerous. Diminished effectiveness, however, was not mentioned.
Ciara sighed in frustration. She was neither an alchemist nor a wizard. She was a farm girl who had found a brew with specific properties, and thought to use it to spare her community some pain (and to give life to a foolish girl's night-time fantasies). She absentmindedly stroked her King's neck as she became lost in thought. While she no longer needed the potion to convince her King to desire her, he was simply too ...
immense
for her to fully satisfy without magical aid. She sighed and reminded herself that, of all the problems in the world, finding a way to share a bed with the King of the Forest was one of the better ones to have.
"No solution presents itself." The King's voice was a roiling baritone. He barely moved his mouth to speak. He
could
; if he was inclined to do so, he could speak quite animatedly, moving his lips, showing tooth and tongue like any other speaker. But he was also capable of speaking through his closed mouth. Whatever it was that granted the King of the Forest the power of speech, it lay in his throat, not his mouth. Ciara patted his scales, and a grand rumbling began to emanate from his chest.
"No. There's nothing. I'm almost out of books." She said, sighing and pressing her lips to his scales.
"There are magicians. Sorcerers, in more distant lands. We could ... ", he began, before pausing. Ciara traced at his scales with her fingers. Of course, they
couldn't
. Dragons, even her King, were ferocious creatures. His appetite knew no limits, and his craving for treasure could never be satiated. It was no more sensible than a mortal man suggesting he could give Ciara the moon - but no less romantic, either.
Ciara shook her head. "No, no. You and I both know they would hunt you. I wouldn't subject you to that. Nor would I subject
them
to that", she added, with a smile. "There might be a resolution in one of the other books. And it hasn't yet
stopped
working, after all. It just ... passes. Too quickly."
As Ciara spoke, the King raised and slowly lowered his wings to fan the fire. He shifted a claw to drop some fresh wood into the blaze. "You should bundle up.", he intoned. His wonderful baritone had a way of filling the chamber; sometimes, when the spoke at length, Ciara would lie on one of the large stones by the basin, just so she could feel it tremble slightly as the King spoke. "It will be cold outside, and still colder higher up."
Ciara sighed and rolled to her feet, sorry to see the morning over so soon, but smirking in anticipation as well. With her King's help, she had prepared herself a suit for cold weather; bearskin for warmth, deerskin on the inside to be comfortable, with fox-fur trim, because she was a Queen and her King indulged her. She took the few steps to the area she had designated as her closet, and searched out her boots. "Why
is
that?" Ciara asked, always curious. "I thought hot air rose. And it would be closer to the sun, wouldn't it?"
The King's eyes narrowed, and he considered. "I ... I'm not sure. Mountains are colder, though. Perhaps it is the further you move from the surface? The wind up there is often terrible; perhaps that plays a part. Maybe", he chuckled, "when we seek out a book on herbs and potions, we should get one about the weather. Always asking. Ever curious."
Ciara smirked at him. He was clever and wise, and knew many things - far more than Ciara did. But it seemed sometimes that her King rarely troubled himself with the
why
of things, finding it enough to know the
what
. "Perhaps.", she said. "And a book on
dragons
