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“I love you too, Rurik.”

The regret that had been subtly gnawing on Rurik eased, and he drew Amalia closer. He would never allow harm to come to her again.

She is mine, and she will be with me always.

Epilogue

60 years later

Rurik lay in the main room of his lair facing a handful of the tapestries.

Amalia wasn’t with him. She was laying in his main treasure room reading or doing something... he wasn’t sure this day. He’d transferred everything from her original alcove into it decades ago – after carving to make it bigger to accommodate her furniture, of course.

He hadn’t wanted to be without his riches when he wanted to sleep as a Dragon, but he also hadn’t wanted to be without his mate.

The soft female had made no complaint since he had carved the room to account for everything inside it, ensuring she could walk around the pile with ease. Rurik often found entertainment in finding coins that rolled away under furniture to be thrown back onto the pile.

It took a few years, but they discovered that they couldn’t extend her life any other way than for her to eat the heart of a Dragon and to do the incantation required.

They were still trying to find other ways, but Rurik had made the request to an old Dragon, who had been surprisingly charmed by his Witch when meeting her, if they may take her heart for such use when she was to pass.

After getting her approval and then presenting this to the Elders, who were made up of four now with Fionnlagh long dead, they had allowed it.

With the way her kind aged, she didn’t look a day over a human’s twenty-eight years with the heart she’d taken and unhappily consumed. While Rurik himself didn’t look much older, perhaps only a few years.

It hadn’t changed her, just as he knew it wouldn’t. Her pure heart was still uncorrupted. He thought that might be because it hadn’t been taken viciously, but rather gifted.

That was nearly thirty years ago, and he knew that they had a hundred years from that day before she would begin to age. They would wait for her to catch up to him and then he would obtain another if no other solution had been found.

It was always on his mind, as Amalia often was.

If only there was a spell in which I could entangle her lifespan to mine.It would be convenient if it were possible. He often spoke with those of his kind who were more adept with their magic to research if there was a possibility.

In the meantime, Rurik kept himself busy.

He often left to hunt Witches and had added to his collection of skulls quite nicely. Now that Strolguil was no longer a plague upon the world, he was being more careful in who he was hunting. He made sure the Witch he came across was truly evil before he took its life.

If there were other white wielders like his woman, then he didn’t see the need to eradicate them. And there were, he had found a very small handful of them.

He no longer killed indiscriminately, but indeed remained apprehensive and hateful of them.

Then, when he was in his lair, he often chased his woman around his home, still obsessed with the pretty female he had in his keeping. That would never fade – as it often didn’t for his kind. Even when she was old and wrinkled with bland blonde hair, she would be aged the same as him, and he would still want her.

He also had one other thing that often took his time.

It irritated him, aggravated him. A noisy, terrible little gremlin that often got on his nerves and fried his already small patience.

Currently, he was speaking to it. He was telling it of the tales of his kind by retelling the stories of the tapestries in front of them while it was climbing his back. It was making guttural noises, holding onto his spikes so that it didn’t fall.

When it made a noise of struggle, desperately holding onto a spike and kicking against his back to get purchase, Rurik turned his head to face it.

“If you fall from me, your mother will be mad,” Rurik told his son, who just answered him with a grin while he hung from the highest point of his back.

Haelan was his name, and a lot about him was a mystery to both of his parents. They often estimated his age because he didn’t age the same as either one of them.

He’d been born forty years ago, but he wasn’t the equivalent of a four-year-old boy like his kind would be at this length of life. He also wasn’t in his twenties like he would have been if he were of Amalia’s kind.

No, he appeared to be eight or nine.