Page 23 of Davoren (Dragon Master Daddies #1)
They studded tunnel walls like frozen stars, raw and uncut but impossibly beautiful.
Rubies the size of my fist glowed with inner fire when our light touched them.
Sapphires deeper than midnight seemed to pulse with their own rhythm.
Diamonds caught our illumination and shattered it into rainbows that existed in spectrums I couldn't have seen with human eyes.
They weren't decorations—they were part of the mountain itself, grown over millennia in conditions no jeweler could replicate.
"Dragon's hoard," Davoren said, noting my wonder.
"Not gathered but grown. The mountain makes these for us, payment for our guardianship.
" His hand traced one particular cluster of emeralds, and they flared brighter at his touch.
"Every dragon path is different, unique to its creator.
This one is mine, has been since I first claimed this mountain. "
The intimacy of that—of being in a space that was essentially inside him, part of his essence made physical—sent fresh heat pooling between my thighs.
I was walking through his secret self, the passages he'd created when he was young—or younger, at least. When he'd been alone for so long that he'd made the mountain itself into a companion.
The scent grew stronger as we descended—sulfur and earth, yes, but underneath that something that made my mark pulse with recognition.
Dragon musk, maybe, or just the concentrated essence of what Davoren was when he wasn't wearing human shape.
It filled my lungs with each breath, coated my throat, sank into my skin until I could taste him on the air.
The enclosed space amplified everything—his body heat radiating against my back, the whisper of his breathing that seemed to match mine, the way his presence filled the tunnel until there was no room for anything else.
"You're trembling," he observed, his thumb tracing small circles on my lower back through the silk dress.
I was. Fine tremors ran through me, part arousal, part anticipation. The tunnel was changing around us, widening gradually, and I could taste something new on the air—heat that wasn't just warmth but presence, power that made my transformed body sing with recognition.
"We're close," he said, and his voice carried satisfaction and promise in equal measure. "Almost there, little one. Almost to the place where you'll learn what it truly means to belong to a dragon."
The words sent flame straight to my core, and I stumbled slightly, would have fallen if not for his steadying hand.
He caught me easily, pulled me back against his chest for just a moment—long enough to feel him hard against my lower back, long enough to know his control was fraying too.
The contact lasted only seconds before he set me back on my feet, but it was enough to make us both breathing harder.
"Just a little farther," he promised, his voice rough with want. "Then I'll give you everything your body has been screaming for. Everything and more."
The tunnel opened without warning, stone giving way to vastness so absolute my mind couldn't immediately process it.
One moment we walked through enclosed darkness, the next we stood on a precipice that jutted out over impossible space.
My legs locked, every instinct screaming danger even as my transformed body recognized this place as home in ways I couldn't articulate.
We stood at the rim of a hidden caldera, a perfect bowl carved into Mount Kerynthos's peak that shouldn't exist according to any map I'd studied.
Below us—far below, though the distance was hard to judge in the strange light—a lake of lava sprawled like liquid gold poured into a god's drinking cup.
Not the violent, spitting lava I'd expected, but something almost peaceful.
The surface rose and fell with gentle breathes, occasionally sending up bubbles that popped with sounds like distant thunder.
The heat that rose from it should have been unbearable, should have cooked us where we stood, but instead it felt like the warmest bath, like being held.
The lava was contained by a perfect circle of obsidian that formed the caldera's floor, black glass so pure it looked like frozen night.
The contrast was stunning—that golden, living light against absolute black, creation and void existing in perfect balance.
The obsidian had been worn mirror-smooth, and in its surface I could see the lava's light reflected and multiplied, creating patterns that shifted with each bubble, each breath of the molten lake.
But it was what lay above that stole my breath entirely.
Looking up, I could see straight through to the night sky.
The volcano's mouth opened in a perfect circle high above us, and through it the stars burned with intensity I'd never witnessed.
No clouds, no atmospheric interference, just pure starlight pouring down into this hidden sanctum.
The opening was wide enough that I could see constellations I recognized—the Dragon, the Lovers, the Chalice—but they seemed different here, closer, as if this place existed partially outside the normal world.
"The mountain's true peak," Davoren murmured beside me, his voice carrying the kind of reverence people usually saved for temples. "Hidden above the false summit that humans see. This is where the mountain touches the sky, where earth and heaven meet."
My eyes had adjusted enough to see more details now, and what I saw defied explanation.
The caldera wasn't empty—formations of crystallized lava rose from the obsidian floor like frozen waterfalls, each one catching and refracting the light in ways that created smaller auroras of gold and amber.
Steam vents released perfect spirals of glowing mist that danced up toward the stars before dissipating.
And there, in the absolute center where the obsidian floor was most perfect, was something that made my mark pulse with recognition.
A depression in the stone, circular and shallow, perhaps twenty feet across.
It looked like a nest, if nests could be made from geological features.
But it wasn't empty. The depression was filled with something that glowed with its own soft light, neither liquid nor solid but something between.
It looked like spun gold had been crossed with cloudstuff, then given its own inner fire to make it luminous.
"Solidified dragon flame," Davoren said, following my gaze.
His hand found mine, fingers interlacing with the certainty of possession.
"The rarest substance in existence. When a dragon's fire meets perfect conditions—the right stone, the right temperature, the right intention—it doesn't burn. It becomes."
The reverence in his voice made me look at him, really look at him.
In this light, with the lava's glow painting his skin gold and the starlight catching in his white hair, he looked like something from the old stories.
Not the sanitized fairy tales humans told, but the older ones, the ones where dragons were forces of nature given consciousness, where they could create or destroy with equal ease.
"This is where I was born," he said quietly.
"Not born as humans understand it, but where I became.
Where I first took form from the mountain's fire and the sky's breath.
" His ember eyes found mine, and in them I saw millennia of memory.
"This is the only place sacred enough for what we're about to do. "
A natural staircase descended from our precipice, carved by centuries of lava flow before cooling into perfect steps. The stone was smooth under my feet, warm but not burning, each step taking us closer to that impossible nest of crystallized flame.
The obsidian floor, when we reached it, was even more perfect than it had looked from above.
My reflection stared back at me from its surface, but changed—not distorted but enhanced, showing not just what I was but what I was becoming.
In that black mirror, my golden marks looked like veins of precious metal, my collar like a crown, my eyes holding flecks of fire I hadn't noticed before.
Davoren led me between the crystalline formations, each one singing a different note as we passed, as if our presence activated something dormant in their structure.
The heat grew more intense as we approached the center, but never uncomfortable.
It was the heat of transformation, of metal being forged, of new things being born from flame and will.
The nest, when we finally stood at its edge, was even more impossible up close.
The solidified dragon flame moved despite being solid, shifting and reshaping itself constantly while maintaining its basic form.
It looked soft as silk, warm as summer, inviting as a lover's bed.
The light it gave off wasn't harsh but gentle, like candleflame filtered through honey.
"Every dragon has such a place," Davoren said, his voice dropping to something intimate. "A sanctuary where we're most ourselves, most powerful, most vulnerable. This is mine. And now, it's yours."
The weight of that—of being brought to his most sacred space, of being included in something so private that no other being had seen it—made my throat tight with emotion I couldn't name.
This wasn't just about sex or dominance or even the bond.
This was about trust, about showing me the deepest part of himself and inviting me to share it.
"Are you ready, little one?" he asked, turning to face me fully. The lava's light turned his eyes to molten gold, and his marks blazed with anticipation that echoed through our bond. "Ready to be claimed in the place where I first drew breath? Ready to shatter where the mountain meets the sky?"