They fall through the air together, entwined in a tangle of scales and claws and wings. From the outside, it must look like a fight: Flemeth never placed much stock in the outside perspective. One must get involved, she feels- feel the fire on your skin, the wind in your face.

He smells like smoke and blood and burning bone. Flemeth catches the scent as it rushes past in the air, feels the scorching heat of his body against hers, and they’re flying, darting together and apart. 

Oh yes, of all the many privileges one has as a dragon, the dancing is the best.

Here is a secret: there is one thing, just one thing, that leaves Flemeth’s skin crawling, her toes hooked with discomfort as she regards it. 

The wardens they saved from the tower are a strange pair. An elf, female, all the proud and stubborn anger of her kind evident in the line and set of her face. Even asleep, she looks defiant, as if long use has grained the expression into her face.

And the other. The man. Flemeth traces the line of his jaw, talon- no, fingernail- itching to score the skin.

This one carries the song of lyrium in his blood. This one is a killer of her kind. It’s all she can do not to kill him then and there.

Flemeth’s never met a dwarf quite like this one before.

“Alright, I get that we’re on a precipice.” he looks up at her, utterly unafraid. “But I don’t see why that’s anything I should be afraid of.”

“Change is sometimes frightful.” Flemeth says, quite amused by complete and total arrogance. The dwarf considers this.

“Only if you fight it. Change is the future, after all. Me? If I found myself on a precipice?”

He looks at the scorched ground around them, then back at Flemeth, at her dragon eyes and steely smirk.

“I’d find out how to fly. And then I’d jump.”

(My google-fu failed me on Broth, so I am afraid this version of her is pulled straight from my butt)

She is the last: she sleeps and eats and lives in this fact, a pressing air of finality that hangs over her and leeches the world of savour. What is the point, she wonders, of stealing babies when they are the last that will ever be stolen? What is there to be scared of, when she knows she is simply an old woman in a hut, who will be dead soon, and that will be an end of all her terror?

“Petulant.” the voice mocks her from outside the hut, but Broth can’t bring herself to stir from her fire. “Pathetic.”

“Leave me be.” Broth turns to see eyes yellow and fierce as fire, and hair that blazes like lightning, and all of a sudden the knows that she is not the last: and rather wishes that she was.

“Oh no.” the stranger grabs her chin with cold, hard talons, forces Broth’s gaze on her. “You’re never going to be alone again, my dear.”

They meet halfway. It’s the only way, perhaps, that they could meet at all. In the borderlands of Par Vollen, the Ashkaari looks up from the desert where he has seated himself to see a human woman.

“Well, what have we here?” her voice is mocking, twisting in his ears like smoke. Though she speaks the language of the kossith, it sounds entirely different. Corrupted, somehow. “So dour, so grey.”

“I am searching.” The Ashkaari’s lips are dry and cracked. The woman raises an eyebrow.

“You will find nothing but your death under that rock, young man.”

“I have been to every land I can. I have seen the misery and disorder of the world, and now I wait for a sign.”

The haze of the desert shimmers- the woman’s mouth forms a sneer.

“And you expect the answer to just drop into that big horned head.”

“It is as good a plan as any.” The Ashkaari retorts mildly.

“The world is made in action. ” The woman shakes her head, the sunlight dazzling from her white hair. “You will not find anything worthwhile if you simply sit and wait. You must question.’

“So you believe.”

The Ashkaari is pretty sure that this annoying woman is just another mirage, so he closes his eyes. When he opens them, she has gone.

The next day, the locusts come, and the Ashkaari’s eyes are opened.

I love it when prompts point me to more of the DA world :D