Yearning
When you live for thousands of years as a dragon, there inevitably comes a moment when everything grows unbearably tedious.
Especially for a dragon like me—hailed as the strongest a mere five hundred years after hatching—those moments arrive more often and stretch far longer. Everything I ever desired fell into my grasp, and the more it did, the deeper the emptiness and boredom carved themselves into me.
Of course, it hadn’t always been that way. In the beginning it was pure delight: roaming free, breathing fire, and watching whatever I wanted simply appear. I ignored the advice of the fifteen-hundred-year-old dragon from the neighboring range—“Save the good stuff; don’t gorge yourself”—and burned mountain ranges for no reason at all, half-demolished royal castles out of sheer boredom, and plundered every hoard of treasure humans had ever piled up, stacking it into mountains of my own. I was so happy I couldn’t understand why anyone would tell me to hold back!
Yet as the centuries wore on, the hollowness only swelled. Now I understand it was the inevitable result; back then I had no idea. Brushing off that same old dragon’s stuffy warning—“If you start playing around with mortals too young, you’ll be in real trouble when you grow up”—I polymorphed into human form and went out to amuse myself.
At first I wandered as a traveling mage. Draped in a black robe, I drifted from village to village; one flashy spell and the people would cheer and feed me. Nights I spent in taverns, planted among the drunks, laughing and shouting and drinking myself senseless. One night I passed out cold and woke to find a magic crystal packed with ancient spells stolen from me. It pissed me off, sure—but it was still a fresh experience. Back then even that counted as fun.
Next I lived as the boss of a back-alley gang. One sword, a pack of thugs, shaking down shops, pulling jobs—then vanishing like rats the second word came that knights were on the way. That was entertaining. And for some reason I still can’t explain, pretending to cower and tremble in front of weak little adventurers who strutted around like they owned the place… that was surprisingly enjoyable too.
My last diversion was about thirty years ago. That time I polymorphed into a hero. A hero had dared come to my lair to “subjugate” me; I swallowed him in one bite and simply became him. A hero who’d been critically wounded trying to slay a dragon and now suffered from amnesia! That was pretty fun as well.
But the truly thrilling part came later. One day while playing the hero, I was heading toward a small village in the Westburka Mountain Range when I spotted a band of orcs raiding it from afar. They had captured the women, bound their hands and feet, and were dragging them away. The women, hair wild, sobbed and thrashed, clothes tearing as they fought until finally they were beaten into surrender.
In that instant, for the first time in eight hundred thirty-three years of dragon life, I felt a full-body shiver of pure thrill.
And I understood.
What I had never experienced.
It was the complete stripping away of power.
No matter how hard I struggled, I would be unable to resist. No choices left. No matter how desperately I begged, nothing I did would change the outcome.
Handing every last scrap of myself over to someone else’s hands. An emotion I had never once tasted.
Even while I slaughtered the orcs and rescued the villagers, that thought refused to leave my mind. I want to experience it just once. I want to cry and plead for them to stop. I want to beg for my life. And then I want to be beaten for it.
But my pride as a dragon would not allow me to admit it. It simply could not. Dragons are superior to every other being that exists.
For me to desire a wretched fall like that? Unthinkable!
After I abandoned the hero act, however, I spent the next thirty years exploring that feeling—diving into rape, bondage, BDSM, everything of the sort. Tools of every kind began to fascinate me; I hunted them down in the shadows and used myself as the test subject.
Yet no matter how thoroughly I polymorphed into a human, a dragon is still a dragon. Handcuffs shattered with the slightest movement. Ropes I tied around myself snapped with nothing more than a breath, cracking like dry twigs. I tried enchanting the tools to increase their strength, but nothing could truly restrain a dragon. All the devices I’d bought from black markets and collectors ended up as nothing more than pretty decorations gathering dust in a corner of my warehouse.
Then came one particular night. The entire mountain range was smothered in black fog so thick it swallowed the sky, and the wind howled like something screaming. I didn’t even need to look outside. Only black dragons reeked of mana this filthy.
He came flapping those massive wings and landed right in front of me as I stepped out of the nest to see him. Inside the lair, a heavy thud and the clatter of everything in the warehouse toppling over. Tch. Cleaning that up was going to take forever again.
“Elion! You know who I am! I’ve come to take your head!”
“I have no idea who you are.”
Scale patterns I’d never seen, mana signature I’d never felt, a stench of power I’d never smelled. How the hell was I supposed to know him?
I snorted in pure disbelief and curled my tail over my snout. Fire lit in his eyes.
“You bastard! My mate died because of that damned magic crystal of yours!”
Ah, that thing? How did it end up with him?
Wait—mate? A dragon keeping a mate? Oh. So he was that weirdo.
“You’re that Chron or whatever—the lovesick dragon?”
“That’s right!”
Chron ground his teeth and advanced.
“Hero brats carrying a crystal filled with your magic invaded my territory!”
I gave him a deliberately vague shrug.
“Oh, really? That crystal was pretty old; the magic had degraded a lot. It shouldn’t have been that strong. Even if heroes used it… hmm…”
I lifted my head and sneered up at him.
“You’re… weak, aren’t you?”
“You…! I’ll kill you!”
I saw his eyes roll white with rage. I’d already been confident of an easy win; now that he’d lost his reason entirely, he was no match at all. The black dragon’s wings shattered trees; his breath melted stone in an instant—but the outcome was never in doubt. I had never once met a kin stronger than myself.
“Your heart… I’ll put it to good use.”
My claws sank into his chest. Hot blood—dragons are not reptiles!—surged out in thick pulses timed to his heartbeat.
Chron’s glaring eyes went wide. If you come ready to kill, you should also come ready to die. He perished without even a scream.
And as I stared at the dragon heart lying before me, something clicked into place.
Even orichalcum-adamantite cannot bind a dragon’s body.
But if the restraint itself is made from a dragon’s body… wouldn’t that be able to bind a dragon?
Without realizing it, I swallowed dryly.