Content Warning: This story contains depictions of body horror, loss of bodily autonomy, psychological invasion, suicidal ideation, self-harm, dissociation, blood, and predator/prey violence.
The protagonist experiences non-consensual mental bonding that results in inability to distinguish her own thoughts and sensations from another being's. Please read with care.
If this is triggering for you at this moment, stay safe, and click away.
‘Flight’
The scales behind Kira's neck pulsed with a rhythm that belonged to no human heart.
She lay still in the vast bed—another gift, like everything in these quarters, sized for bonded pairs who needed room to accommodate transformations that came with joy rather than revulsion and panic.
The storm-crystals embedded in the walls hummed their eternal harmony, a frequency that was supposed to soothe new bonds into seamless integration. Instead, the sound crawled through her bones like a myriad of legs, each vibration a reminder of what lived beneath her skin now, watching through eyes that were still - technically - hers.
Two days. Fifty-something hours since her hair had turned from brown to this liquid silver that caught light like water, and moved with its own weight when she turned her head.
Elder Hana had clasped her hands with tears in her eyes, proclaiming it the fastest transformation she'd witnessed in sixty years of overseeing ceremonies. A blessing, she'd called it. Proof of perfect compatibility.
Perfect.
Kira pressed her face deeper into the pillow, but the silk—why was everything silk now, as if rough textures might disturb the delicate neural pathways being rewritten, carved through her consciousness—the silk of the bed’s linens only amplified the sensation of being observed from within.
Sliding, whispering. Her fingers crept toward the nape of her neck then clenched away, as they always did, just before contact.
She'd done this ninety-three times since the ceremony. She'd counted.
The presence that had taken residence in her mind laid like meat spoiling in summer heat, warm and wrong.
Sylas. Even his name in her thoughts brought the taste of crackling thunder and the dry rasp of high altitude wind, flavors that had no business on a human tongue.
He wasn't speaking yet—dragons didn't speak in words anyway, she'd learned, only in impressions that bypassed language entirely—but his existence weighted against the boundaries of her consciousness with the relentless certainty of iced water cracking stone.
She sat up. The motion sent her stomach lurching sideways.
Last night's celebration feast like wet cement in her belly—every swallow a silent acceptance of all the changes she'd never truly agreed to. Even water tasted different now, filtered through perceptions that expected minerals from mountain springs she'd never visited, at altitudes her human lungs couldn't yet process.
Yet.
Her bare feet found the floor. Cold mountain granite, but wrong. The texture her soles expected—rougher, with grip for talons—wasn't there. Would never be there. Her toes spread anyway, trying to grasp stone like a bird on a branch.
The door of her temporary quarters opened on silent hinges. She'd tested it earlier—it only opened from inside. Another kindness. Privacy for the newly bonded.
Prison bars made of courtesy.
The corridor beyond stretched into breathing darkness.
No one else moved in these hours—the successful bonds were sleeping off their celebrations, dreaming shared dreams that strengthened their connections. The failures consoled themselves, back to sleep in the family quarters, looking forward to the next Convergence, the next opportunity to Bond.
She wasn't a failure. She was the opposite of failure, the perfect success story that would inspire generations of potential riders. The compatibility scores that exceeded all predictions. A transformation so rapid it defied precedent, a bond so seamless that even now, even in her revulsion, she could so very distinctly feel Sylas's confusion at her resistance like wet cloth against her brain.
Why do you fight this?
Not words. The impression arrived as a full-body sensation—feathers stroked backward, scales rubbed wrong, the discomfort of a creature encountering something that defied any rational expectation.
She pressed her palm against the corridor wall.
Dry, rough, cold. Tool marks caught under her fingers—chisel strikes in granite. Real. Physical. Human hands had shaped this. Her index finger found a particularly deep gouge. Middle finger traced a smooth patch where the mason had corrected an error. Ring finger caught on something sharp enough to draw blood.
Good.
It smeared, leaving part of her - of them- indelibly behind.
Even as she sucked the small wound, she became aware of heat patterns in the stone. The walls glowing yellow-green-blue, showing what warmth they retained in gradients her eyes shouldn't perceive, but did. Predator vision. Hunter sight.
Not hers.
Miles away, something stirred in the valleys between peaks.
Their knowledge was immediate. Sylas had roused from his post-feast torpor, driven by hungers that human celebrations couldn't satisfy. He moved now through moonlit snow with the purpose of evolution perfected, and she could taste the spoiled wine of his anticipation on her tongue.
She walked faster, her hand still on the closest wall. The corridors branched and curved according to logic that assumed paired navigation. Too vast for human sight in the dark. She turned left, then right, then left again.
Then right.
Then—
She was lost.
Sound behaved strangely here. Her breathing too loud, but getting no further than a foot from her, her footsteps gone entirely.
Underneath the silence, she could hear - feel - the vibration of massive wings displacing air. The click of talons on stone hundreds of miles away and right inside her skull.
An alcove opened in the wall. She backed into it, pressing her spine against stone until each vertebra found its own ridge. Spread her arms to touch all three walls. Six feet wide. Four deep. Human-sized. Dragon-proof.
Safe.
Her vision flickered again.
The darkness bloomed with heat—walls pulsing red-orange, her own body a white-hot smear. It lasted only seconds before human sight returned, but the knowledge remained. The realization. She was beginning to see as he saw, the bond rewriting her brain one pathway at a time.
"Kira." She said her name aloud. "Daughter of Merel and Johan."
Her voice sounded wrong. Lower, rough, as if her throat was reshaping itself for different sounds.
"I paint. Painted. Watercolors." The words came out cracked. "Twenty years old. Brown hair—"
No. Not truly, not anymore.
"Brown and silver hair. Human. Still human. Still—"
Sky. Flight. Prey.
Hunt.
She felt it like hooks in her sternum. Sylas springing from stillness to purpose, muscles bunching under their - his - scales, wings spreading to catch an updraft. Her shoulders rolled in sympathy, clumsily mirroring movements meant for wings she did not posses.
Yet?
The cocoon of the alcove had become a trap. She stumbled back into the corridor, stumbling forward, one hand scraping along stone until her palm burned. Pain helped. Pain was hers, still.
Still.
Stairs crashed against her feet without warning. Her hand suddenly without purchase, her shin cracking against stone—bright, immediate hurt that made her eyes water. She dropped to her knees, pressing any part of her she could into the stone below and around, knowing it would bruise purple by morning.
If she made it to morning.
She climbed the stairs on all fours, needing the contact. But her body kept betraying her—reaching for steps that weren't there, misjudging distances as if her limbs had grown or shrunk. On the seventh step, her hand met air, and suddenly her chin was down against something wet.
Water? Blood?
Not hers.
She jerked back, nearly tumbling down the stairs. Had someone else fled this way? Fallen, bled and kept climbing? How many others had made this midnight pilgrimage? How many had found what they were seeking?
The stairs ended at a door hanging half open to the night. Wind hit her face like a slap—cold and sharp and real. She crawled through onto a maintenance platform that jutted from the mountainside like a broken tooth.
The platform was small. Ten feet by ten feet. No railings. Stone worn smooth except for one corner where someone had carved words. She couldn't read them in the dark, but her fingers traced the letters:
STILL ME
And below that, in different script:
NOT ANYMORE
She pressed her back against the wall, knees drawn up like wings folded tight. The wind carried scents that made her nostrils flare—snow and pine and underneath that, the musk of animals bedded down for the night. Warm bodies full of hot blood. Hearts beating with rhythms that registered as—
"No." She bit her tongue. Hard. Blood flooded her mouth—copper and salt and hers.
But even as she savored the self-inflicted pain, she felt Sylas's hunting excitement spike. He tasted her blood across the miles, and it pleased him. Made him hunger for more.
The strike.
One moment she was pressed against stone. The next—
Heat. Dragon-fire painting the night in colors that hurt. Impact that jarred her teeth. Talons finding their mark, hide parting like wet paper. Something screaming—high and terrible and cut short as its throat gave way beneath claws.
The satisfaction hit worse than the violence.
Pure contentment flooded through her. Successful hunt. Full belly soon. The simple pleasure of being exactly what evolution had designed—
Not her. Him. This was him.
But her body made no distinction. Heat pooled between her thighs. Her mouth watered for meat she couldn't chew. Her hands clenched and unclenched, missing the weight of prey.
She crawled to the platform's edge and vomited. Nothing came up but bile and blood from her bitten tongue. She spat, wiped her mouth, spat again. The taste remained.
Back inside. She needed—what? Water. Something to wash away the phantom blood. Her feet found a different corridor, narrower. A spac just for humans. Her shoulders brushed both walls.
Better.
Her fingers found a door—wood so old it had started to rot. Light leaked through gaps between planks. She pushed.
A communal washroom materialized out of the gloom. Gaslights hissing in their fixtures. Basins carved from stone. Mirrors of polished metal green with verdigris.
She stumbled to the nearest basin and worked the pump. Her hands trembled—more now than before. On the third try, the pump gave, water splashing over blood-slick skin, ice-cold and mineral-sharp. She cupped it to her mouth, rinsed, spat pink.
Again. Scrubbing at her tongue with her fingers. Gagging on nothing. The phantom blood taste persisted, layered under her own blood, indistinguishable now.
She looked up. Met her own eyes in the speckled metal sheet.
Brown eyes. Same as always. But the thing looking out through them—
Her fist moved without thought. The impact rang like a bell. Metal buckled, warping her reflection into a shapeless, borderless thing.
Wrong. Pain bloomed across her knuckles—immediate and sharp and hers.
She hit it again. Again. Until blood dripped steady into the basin, swirling pink in the standing water.
She brought her knuckles to her mouth. Sucked the wounds. Her blood. Her pain. Her choice.
The copper flooded her tongue.
Exactly the same.
No difference between her blood and the prey's. No distinction in flavor or temperature or satisfaction. She couldn't even claim her own wounds as separate from his experiences.
"Please." The word came out broken. "Please, I can't—"
Can't what? Can't tell where she ended and he began? Can't remember what her own thoughts felt like? Can't—
Sylas was feeding.
The knowledge arrived with full sensory accompaniment. Texture of meat tearing. Hot blood flooding his mouth. The particular pleasure of fresh kill, of earned sustenance, of being perfectly, completely himself.
Her stomach cramped with shared satisfaction. Full without eating. Sated without hunting. Happy with someone else's happiness.
She fled the washroom. Back to darker, wider corridors. Back to wandering. Following walls that led up, always up, toward air and openness and edges.
Another door. Another platform.
This one vast—a proper landing stage scored with centuries of claws. She stepped onto it, and vertigo hit. The space was too big. Designed for creatures that measured distance in wingspans. She dropped to her knees, again, closer to the ground where it felt safe.
Dawn was coming. She could feel it in the changed quality of darkness, the way night sounds shifted toward morning. Soon the clan would wake. Would find her. Would see her silver hair and smile and nod.
Would never know she was drowning.
The platform stretched before her. She crawled forward without truly deciding to. Stone under her palms, smooth except where claws had gouged deep. One particularly deep score fit her hand perfectly—if she'd had talons. The mismatch made her laugh. Or sob. The sounds were identical now.
Twenty feet from the edge.
Her body moved while her mind catalogued: wind on her face (cold, real). Stone under her knees (hard, real). The taste of blood and satisfaction coating her throat (whose?).
Fifteen feet.
She tried to stop, truly. Managed to freeze for a heartbeat. Two. Then her muscles resumed their forward momentum, following instructions written in someone else's bones.
"Still me," she whispered. But the words were lies already.
Ten feet.
The ledge became visible—a clean line where stone gave into the void. Clouds hid the valley floor. The drop was absolute. Thousands of feet to rocks she couldn't see.
Sylas flew now, back to the Holding. Back to her.
Not Anymore.
The knowledge came with sensation—wind under wings, thermals rising in invisible support. Her shoulders rolled. Her back arched. Muscles preparing for flight.
Five feet.
She lowered her forehead to the stone. The cold helped for a moment. Then she felt the stone's memory—centuries of dragons launching from this exact spot. The joy of it. The freedom. The rightness of taking to the air.
But she had no wings.
"I have no wings." Out loud. True. But her body didn't care about truth anymore.
Three feet.
Close enough to see the nothing, the top of the cloud. To smell the promise of flight on the wind. Her body read it as invitation. Muscles coiling for a leap that Sylas's had performed time and time again, not hers.
One foot.
When had she—?
The edge pressed against her knees. A small chunk of stone rolling off the platform. Last stop.
Did she want to go back? The taste of Sylas’ kill still heavy in her mouth. Or let go? Find out if falling truly felt like freedom?
Joy.
Sylas had found his thermal. Spiraling up with ancient efficiency. His happiness hit her like a drug—pure, uncomplicated pleasure in being exactly what he was.
She swayed. Leaned forward. Such a small movement.
Weight, tumbling her past the point of return.
For one moment—suspended. Not falling. Not flying. Just in-between.
Then down—
Her hand shot out. Caught something. Stone. Vine. Something.
The impact tore her shoulder. Pain blinding her, but her fingers held, seizing. Stronger than human. Not strong enough to be easy.
One hand. Legs dangling over the clouds.
Pretty.
Her hold began to loosen. The inexorable pull of earth on all bodies.
Sylas felt her distress and turned away from his thermal, making for home. Love flooded the bond. Worry, obsession, a Dragon’s love. Possessive. Absolute. Alien.
Blood dripped from her mouth, her fingers, her palm, her knees. She couldn't see it fall.
Slipping another inch.
The sun crested the peaks in the East bathing the mountains and her body in crimson. Wind sang of flight.
She hung, suspended.
She could hear alarmed voices getting closer, she could feel air buffeting her wings, bloodied stone beneath her fingers, streams through her talons.
Not Anymore.
© 2025 E.M. di V. - writing as Morgan A. Drake. All rights reserved.
It's always fascinating to see another author's take on dragons. I'm loving the way this is presented (both in the alienness of the dragon and Kira's horrified response to it all).
Well done.