365 Days to Bond With the Cursed Beast King

The chamber door burst inward before the flesh had even finished giving way to the beast.

"Majesty!"

A wall of a man barreled through first, armor half-clasped, steel drawn and gleaming in the dim light. 

Behind him surged another; broader, older, hauling a length of iron chain heavy enough to anchor a warship. "Get back from him..."

"Torin, wait!" Mirelle's plea was shoved aside at the threshold, her voice swallowed by the bone-rattling roar building in Vyrn's throat.

I didn't step back.

I couldn't have explained why, not through the terror, only that every instinct honed over a lifetime of reading deadly rooms was screaming something entirely different than the men with weapons.

Vyrn's body split and reformed in front of me in a display of violent, breathtaking ruin. 

Gold light cracked wide through his skin like molten veins; wings tore free from his shoulders in a spray of magic. Yet none of it; not a single claw, not the wild arc of his tail, was aimed at me.

"Don't," I rasped, taking a single, deliberate step forward.

"Move!" Torin closed the gap, his sword raised to strike. "You have no idea what that thing does to people!"

"He isn't a thing." The certainty hit me like a physical force. "Look at him. He isn't attacking."

"He won't have a choice once the beast takes the reins!" The older guard uncoiled the massive chain. "Thayer's right behind me; get clear before you're the first bloody thing he tears apart!"

Then the last shuddering thread of Vyrn's human shape folded in on itself, and debate surrendered to sheer mass.

A dragon filled the space where a king had been kneeling.

He eclipsed the vaulted chamber, black scales shot through with threads of living gold, as a smothered furnace reignited from within. 

Wings folded tight against a frame built to crush stone, and a head the size of my chest swung round. His eyes, twin pools of molten gold, locked onto the steel and iron advancing toward him.

He snarled, a low, rhythmic vibration that shook the flagstones beneath my boots.

"NOW!" Torin barked.

I acted on pure muscle memory. Throwing my hands out; one toward the advancing steel, the other toward eleven feet of unbridled power, I planted myself directly in the chasm between them.

"Stop," I breathed into the suffocating heat. "Just... everyone stop."

The dragon's massive head swung toward me.

Every nerve in my body shrieked to run. Logic insisted this creature could erase me in a heartbeat without ever noticing the loss. 

Yet I held my ground.

The beast lowered his head slowly, an impossibly delicate movement for something designed for slaughter. 

Those golden eyes leveled with mine, close enough that the heat rolling off him scalded my skin. 

Behind me, Mirelle gasped, a harsh catch of breath in the quiet room.

"Gods," Torin whispered, the command draining from his voice. "He's... he isn't..."

The dragon huffed, a deep rumble vibrating out from his chest, and gently nudged the back of my hand with the hot, flat of his snout. 

"He knows her," Thayer murmured, the words weighed down by a decade of lived terror. "In ten years, I've never seen him recognize a soul mid-transformation. Not his guard. Not his own blood."

I lifted my hand, slow and deliberate, and pressed my palm flat against the ridge of scales along his jaw. 

The heat rolling into my skin smoothed from frantic to steady, as if a frantic rhythm in his chest had finally found its pace.

"It's all right," I whispered to a monster in a room full of men who had come to slay it. "I'm right here."

The gold in his eyes softened, dimming to embers. 

Then the crushing weight of the beast began to collapse back on itself; scales retracting, wings dissolving into shadows, until the terror that could have leveled the castle shrank into a man kneeling on the stones, bare-chested and shivering, catching his weight against my shoulders instead of the cold floor.

Vyrn's arms locked around me on pure, desperate instinct, his hot breath shuddering against my neck as if he'd spent hours fighting his way back from the dark. 

For one long moment, I held him back, my pulse hammering against his ribs as the adrenaline slowly drained away.

Then he pulled back.

I saw his face clearly in the dim light, stripped of the king, stripped of the dragon. He didn't look at me with gratitude, nor with the quiet relief of a saved man.

Vyrn looked at me the way you look at the one force in the world capable of undoing you completely. And for one unguarded second, stripped of every wall he had ever built to rule a kingdom, Vyrn looked terrified.

Not of the monster inside him.

Of me.