Page 5

M elissa

I’ve been fucked quite literally out of my mind.

Last thing I knew I was making love on a table that was probably more expensive than the house I grew up in, risking my job in favor of being seduced by a hot older man.

I can still feel the ache from his big cock having ravaged me, a tenderness between my thighs and a swelling that makes every movement feel filthy good.

He picked me up as if I weighed nothing, as if my thick thighs and my juicy ass and my…

I’m not the smallest girl, but it does not matter to him at all.

I have the memory of curling up into his arms and being held as the world shimmered around me and changed in ways I did not think it could change without a heroic dose of some kind of psychedelic.

When I open my eyes, I find myself lying on a soft bed that is four times larger than any bed I have ever been in before.

Four posts hold a canopy up above me, each of them carved with ornate runes I don’t recognize.

That’s not the weirdest thing. That’s actually far from the weirdest thing.

Rich people like fancy weird shit. It makes them feel alive.

What really freaks me the hell out is when I turn my head to the side and see that I am not alone in bed. Mr. Ornix, my boss, is lying next to me, naked to the waist. He is wearing a pair of gold pants and a white robe that is open, baring his chest. His broad, scaled chest.

Scaled. Chest.

I stare, and blink and stare again in the effort to clear my eyes because I can’t possibly see what I think I am seeing.

It’s not possible.

He has actual scales laid over his skin, where most men would have hair; he is quite obviously made like a… lizard feels like the wrong word. He is bigger, bolder, hotter than that.

“What…” I try to form a question, but I almost feel rude asking what’s going on with his body. It could be some kind of mutation, a genetic sort of… maybe it’s a…

His eyes open. He smiles at me. It’s a warm smile that I bet is supposed to be soothing, but unfortunately is anything but because I’m not looking at him in the hazy reflection of a mirror in a relatively dark room right now. I’m seeing him in the broad light of day.

His pupils aren’t round. They’re slitted.

Like the animal I don’t want to think about.

His entire face has become more coldblooded.

More angular. His brow line is harder and more prominent.

I can see more scales around his hairline; they run around from his temples and form something of a diamond design on his forehead.

His hair seems thicker, and instead of having a little gray at the temples, I see golden strands emerging from his scalp and flying back through his mane.

He is the same as he was, but it is as though scales have fallen from my eyes and allowed me to see him as he truly is.

I always wondered what that expression means, and now I know.

“Who are you?”

It’s the stupidest question, because he is clearly a monster of some kind, a terrible beast of…

Or wait. Maybe I have taken something and I just don’t know it. Maybe this is this like the time someone gave me a little piece of paper at the club and I put it in my mouth and it dissolved like cotton candy and then all the lights went very fractal.

I look around, not seeing any obvious signs of repeating patterns or the eternal hum from the ultimate creator.

Not acid then; something else, maybe? Did Tempest give me something?

Did she think it was funny to get me a job hookup and then get me high in front of my new boss?

That would be very on brand for Tempest.

“I’m sorry, I think I should go home. I don’t feel well,” I say. I don’t actually have a home right now because we left the dorms this morning and I don’t have an apartment yet, but I can’t freak out in front of him.

We might have just had sex, but fucking your boss the first day you meet him, and crashing out in a drug-fueled haze on the first day you meet him are two different things.

“I seem to not be feeling well,” I repeat, my voice sounding very tense.

At least I can still talk properly. Okay, maybe this is like the time in statistics that Tempest gave us all new water bottles that definitely didn’t contain water.

Slurring the coefficient of the variable does not go down well with TAs who are tired of rich kids not taking their class seriously, or the poor kids who somehow get taken under the rich kids’ wings.

Mr. Ornix reaches for me, takes me by the hand, and draws me closer to his incredibly strange, but still undeniably attractive body.

“Breathe,” he says, his voice deep and soothing, his hand running down my back in a comforting motion. “Everything is okay. You are safe. You are taken care of. No harm will befall you.”

“I think so much harm… I think… my eyes aren’t working?”

“What you see is real,” he says reassuringly. “You have been liberated from your world, and brought to a realm that contains wonders you are yet to imagine.”

He says that as if it is supposed to make me feel better. It does not make me feel better. It makes me feel weirder.

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

“The first journey is the hardest for humans,” Ornix says, stroking my hair. “Don’t worry, you’ll feel exhausted for a few hours, and then your energy will return. Soon you will feel better than you ever have before. This is a much healthier, happier place than the one you came from.”

I stare at him. “How is this even possible? We were just having dinner. Where’s my transcript?”

“Where you are, you have no need of a transcript,” he drawls.

I look around once again, and see that the room we are in is vast. It feels like the size of a normal house, but all open and in one place.

I don’t mean it’s like an open plan home, I mean it is a massive bedroom filled with cabinets and drawers and couches and little tables all made in the same style as the bed.

All incredibly impressive and ornate and covered in statues, jewels, ornaments.

A trove of treasure surrounds us, more riches than I could ever imagine.

There are also very large floor-to-ceiling windows set in solid stone. What I can see outside is a landscape comprised of rolling green hills. I pull away from Mr. Ornix, get up out of bed, and pad over to see more.

There’s a large field all around us, which rises into those hills, which then turn into mountains, and in one particular location, what seems to be a very large and quite active volcano in the distance.

When I look in the other direction, I see walls of what seem to be ice, and as I go from that window to another one, I see an ocean, dazzling and broad, dashing against cliffs that range around in a big semi-circle that looks like a bite that’s been taken out of a cookie.

Another direction reveals a massive forest bending in a wind that blows almost constantly judging by the way the tops flow back and forth the way long grass does.

We are very clearly not in California anymore. I should have no idea where we are. Except it seems to me that the terrain is somehow familiar. It pulls at my mind for a long second or two. Where have I seen this before? A book, maybe? Or a…

Overhead, the wings of a very large flying creature extend in a great shadow with sharp points all over and a long tail that coils with the wind. It emits a cry that is sonorous and deep, rumbling through my body.

Suddenly, memory snaps into place.

“Dragon Fire Eternity,” I whisper under my breath. “What the hell?”

“What was that you said?”

I turn around to look at my boss, Mr. Ornix, who is now standing up behind me, his height very much imposing, not to mention the breadth of his shoulders.

His eyes seem entirely gold now, and they regard me with a particular intensity that makes me quiver.

He’s not human. He was never human. He’s a fucking dragon, and I have lost my mind.

“Dragon Fire Eternity,” I say. “It’s a video game. Looks just like this. I’m sorry, but I’ve obviously gone insane. I think you’re wearing golden pants, and obviously that’s impossible.”

My fragile grip on reality is coming unmoored.

I’ve always had a good imagination, but this is pushing it too far.

I don’t know if it’s drugs or something else, but I don’t believe it.

I can’t. I wasn’t having dinner or fucking my boss one moment, and inside one of the most popular games of the year the next; that’s not possible.

I come to the conclusion that this is nothing but a fever dream of some kind.

I don’t have to take any of this seriously because it’s not real.

Ornix lifts a brow at me. “All you behold, and you don’t believe the golden pants? That is the part that most concerns you?”

“Concerning is a good description,” I say. “They’re so gold.”

He frowns at me. “Yes. They are. My kind enjoys gold, and jewels of all kinds. It is our weakness, and our strength. You will be similarly adorned when we are wed.”

“Oh, we’re getting married in my delusional dream? I suppose that suits me.”

He steps closer, extends a hand that now quite obviously has scales on it, and claws where his nails could be.

I look into those eyes that are no longer human, but obviously dragon.

How did I not clock that right away? Oh, right, because I was sane at first, as opposed to now, entirely insane all the way to the membrane, as the scriptures say.

Even though I know this isn’t real, it feels real. My senses are intact, and the closer he gets with that powerful clawed hand, the more I draw away from him in some measure of fear. He’s so strong and so large. And he is a monster of some kind. My mind is addled, and I am deeply confused.

“What is happening? Did you slip me something?”

“Melissa, there are worlds that most people do not know anything about. This is one of them. It lives adjacent to your own, and it is a realm.”