In the Shadow of Ecstasy (PG-17)

Writers: Iluva, Sia
Date Posted: 1st April 2026

Characters: A'garyn, K'valas
Description: Distance is hard to bear and a gold rising makes it impossible to forget
Location: Dragonsfall Weyr
Date: month 13, day 16 of Turn 12
Notes: Cursing
Rating: PG-17

A'garyn

K'valas

The work was dull.

Candidate lessons were often more interesting, but craft time could be mind-numbing.

The journeyman who came to check on him wore a thin veil of scorn that never quite broke through into words -- those were always calm, measured, the way Aegaryn remembered the harpers of his youth. Occasionally, depending on the person, one of the journeymen even brought back klah for him, too, slightly cool though not enough to seem a complete afterthought. He glanced at the empty mug, wondering what time it was.

Didn't matter. Little happened in the windowless room he was in, and he’d had a headache all day.

Time dragged slowly in here. Its heels were planted in scrolls and hides and pages so yellow they were almost crumbling to touch. A short break to stretch, tracing the lines of a room he’d memorized in the first few days of being shown a seat and watched like a misbehaving apprentice, their eyes skeptical of any penmanship and skill. He’d learned to tune that out easily enough, and the harpers were satisfied enough with him to say little, if anything.

His tutors would have been proud that even Turns of harshness and hostility weren’t enough to cull their hard work -- the letters curled with haughty precision on the page, if with less care and finesse than he’d been painstakingly taught as a youth. Once in a while he paused and stared at a word, or read a few pages of what were, invariably, someone else's mistakes.

This particular journeyman didn’t hover anymore, though they drifted back and forth between the main room and the small veritable work closet Aegaryn was stationed in, collecting sheafs and depositing more.

He was mostly left to his own devices in those candlemarks. His work got checked at the end of the candlemark, but there weren't many mistakes to correct and nothing he did was of great importance. Like many of the others, he had simply been absorbed into Dragonsfall's workforce -- another man with education and some passable skillset, useful enough to keep. Usefulness had a place here. And it kept his hands busy, even when his mind was elsewhere.

The work was menial, largely unstimulating, with the vague chafe of something designed for mouthy apprentices as punishment. Scribing shorthand notes, reproducing fading lines from thin delicate hides into crisp new volumes. But Aegaryn could appreciate that there was some purpose to it -- that things of value to someone would last a little longer for his being here.

On occasion he still got assigned to a store room as he had prior to his Standing, and that generally had closer scrutiny and curiosity in a way simple scribing did not. Both were easy, sometimes too easy, and his mind sometimes took to wandering like a cold wind had woven its way in through stone and found him, pulling him away even when his hand dragged over a page, the grey settling back in behind his eyes.

He tried not to think about him. But trying never had anything to do with it. It came, breaking through the dull monotony, drifting into his senses. Aegaryn thought about him in those quiet moments, endlessly some days. In the Weyrbowl, with Sazikoth, caring for Sazikoth, sitting in his own lessons and learning about strap maintenance and wing formations, whatever the fuck else dragonriders learned -- thanks to Sazikoth.

But that shifted around mealtimes. The grey lifted. They found each other in the dining hall. For a while they spoke and Aegaryn caught a glimpse of what sort of life Kav had been pulled into while he masked the discontent long enough to tell him what he’d been doing, as well. There was some glint of familiarity to the day that stretched back to when it had been only them.

Zolta was always eager to see K’valas, too. She did not understand the forced separation, and she was spared from having to question it. Her eyes lit with excitement at the mere mention of his name, just the sight of him -- an extension of all that Aegaryn felt.

For all that had changed the last few months, at least he still had her.

She was just as comfortable to sit in silence, often returning a skeptical journeyman’s look of scorn when it lingered too long. Aegaryn just smirked. Companion and self-appointed sentry, she was largely content to curl on his shoulder and doze while he worked. He could reach up and cradle her head, feel the inviting warmth of her hide and prickly ridges of her neck, no part of her resisting, nothing opposed. At his gentlest touch she preened, pressing close, stretching, tail swishing, and as he moved from one shelf or room to another she perched on the chairback and watched, patient but no less eager for his praise when he was finished. Most days she was his queen and his sentry both. That morning, she was absent. Aegaryn felt both absences keenly.

He let himself get lost in dullness, but the silence was not a still one. Her lustre had been almost blinding before breakfast was done, and he’d known then that it would be today.

His skin crawled with that aching understanding.

He pushed it away, like an itch unable to be scratched. Then more forcefully. He was not a man who struggled this much with his own mind -- had never much needed to be in recent Turns. That particular skill, the neat suppression of wanting, had ebbed from disuse. K'valas had made it unnecessary. Now, it came back clumsy and graceless, and the black-eyed rage it stirred belonged somewhere far older and farther away than these walls entirely.

He stared down at the words without reading them.

When he sat back in the hard-backed chair, his forehead finally met his palm. It wasn't her, not exactly.

It was the way the memories sulked at the edges of him, heavy with everything they used to mean.

“How are we doing here?” The journeyman paused in the doorway and gave him a look when he didn’t answer. This time Aegaryn returned the stare, hard and unflinching, until they either decided it best to check back later, or perhaps not at all. He picked up the stylus, his hand cramping and protesting on the page, the minutes feeling like hours.

Then -- it stilled, a quick slick burst along the edges of their link, limning it like lightning as she took to the air.

It would be _now_, when the pressure behind his eyes finally gave.

Aegaryn didn't need to, but he took a break. The chair skittered back as he rose. There were whispers of warmth under his skin, and, beneath that, the growing urge to put his fist through something. The thoughts came anyway -- the ones he sometimes wished he could forget, and then the others, deeper and quieter, the places he still longed to return to. Both of them K'valas. All of it Kav.

---flashback to Galgaith’s flight M10 D12---

Thunder tore through the early morning air.

Hot bleeding thunder streaked across the cold ground like wildfire, bursting through the ceiling like it might tear it away, rolling along the stone walls of the lower caverns. It split the stillness wide open, tore sleep from its hiding place.

Aegaryn felt fire in his chest first -- then, deeper. Something inside him tearing open, loose, alive, and suddenly aching. A rush of want surged through his veins, urgent and electric. The primal, greedy, unceasing instinct to _have_.

His heart pounded with each echo and before he opened his eyes, he knew: a gold was rising. Glancing up entirely out of instinct, his head rolled back further to find Zolta. She stirred on her perch over the bed, wings unfurling a little as if she too might join the fever - but this was thicker, denser, more powerful than anything she could conjure. She trilled softly to him, a sweet sound of greeting, knowing this wasn’t her heat: this was vast, expansive, beyond her doing. Then her little head turned, focusing on something across the room.

Aegaryn followed her gaze. Near the worn partition that barely granted privacy, the outline of wild hair yet to be tamed out of sleep, the broad bare shoulders catching the dim light behind him. Kavalas.

A violent shriek reverberated from somewhere overhead. Distant snarling and roaring of her many suitors burning through air like an auditory afterimage. Dragons in chase.

“Kav,” He said, his voice low, rough from the long rest, swinging his legs out of the bed where they’d shared warmth in the cold night.

Kavalas was still tugging at the ties of his pants when the thunder roared overhead. The sound was close enough to make him glance up reflexively, jaw tightening. He lowered the lid on the glowbasket as he turned back into the sleeping area, carefully picking his way back to his cot in the relative darkness. He came around the partition to see Aegaryn stirring, his features lit only by the half-open green eyes of his firelizard.

A man like Aegaryn, learned and in possession of a gold of his own, would recognize the telltale feeling of Galgaith's mating flight beginning overhead. Kavalas only understood the impulsive feeling of _want_ as Aegaryn groaned his name. He sank down to the bed quickly and pulled him into a searing kiss.

Aegaryn felt the furs fall away as he pulled him closer, skin meeting skin, heat meeting heat. He brushed tangled hair away from Kavalas’ face, then down the line of his neck, his thumb tracing along his jawline. His hand lingered, absorbing the heat there. A pulse as frantic and alive it perfectly mirrored his own.

“You’re burning up.” He whispered, not with concern, but with intrigue.

Still, he hesitated. For a moment it felt like they weren’t in the security of the Weyr but dangerously exposed, somewhere still unfamiliar and out in the open. Then, in the same low voice, he clarified, “There’s a gold rising,” trying to ascertain how much Kav _understood_. But even so that didn’t explain the way Aegaryn gripped him, possessive, tight, needing him closer still.

Kavalas glanced over at Zolta at that, looking for any telltale signs she was about to rise. It took him too long to realize Aegaryn meant a _dragon_, not the firelizard. He tilted his head slightly into the touch, though he still watched the other man, trying to understand what it was he wanted. Unlike a dragon's, Zolta's mating flights could be brushed off (though they often didn't). This was no worse, if it could even be compared; encouraging the need that always coiled beneath his skin.

"Can hardly tell," He whispered, "I always want you."

Kavalas leaning into his touch was both question and answer. A whole story in itself. One of his favorites. “Me too.” Aegaryn murmured, his smile one that lived only in the dark and only between them. If Kavalas couldn’t see it, then he could certainly _feel_ it -- feel the wild and exultant rhythm of Aegaryn’s heart as he pressed in closer.

Somewhere above the gold was soaring higher, her lust and his need pulling Kavalas back to him. Aegaryn guided the other man’s mouth to his, not gently, but insistent, a quiet and hungry claim. His leg slid across the other man’s lap, a knee settling silently on either side of Kav’s hips, straddling him without ever breaking their kiss. Just tilting his head, just shifting to breathe him, enough to deepen it again and again.

The urgency, the _need_ to get closer still, was a gravity that only existed between them, a singular force only they could feel. His hands swept over those powerful shoulders, gripped his biceps like something might suddenly dare to tear them apart. “You can always have me.” Aegaryn breathed against his lips, the words flowing hot between them like a promise.

His hands gripped Aegaryn's hips, thumbs dragging slowly along sharp bones, anchoring him in place even as his mouth chased every inch of bare skin it could reach-- cheek, jaw, throat. Every inch he tasted just made him want more. It wasn't frantic, but _hungry_, as if he hadn't already committed to memory the way Aegaryn shuddered under his touch.

They could take their time here. They didn't need to be hurried, to chase their high as quickly as they could in case someone stumbled upon them. They only needed to be quiet.

Aegaryn’s pulse flared under Kavalas’ mouth as his hands slid up, gliding across those familiar shoulders. His head tilted back with a soft, yielding groan - the sound people made when stretching awake in the early hours before the day broke. They were already flush, the air between them humming like a live wire pulled taut, aching with its own current. A tremor seized his spine, Aegaryn baring more of his throat to him without hesitation.

But trust is what made it possible. Hard-earned, quietly forged, shaping that fragile space between them into something that was _theirs_. Aegaryn had to swallow the next sound in his throat. His fingers slid into Kavalas’ hair, tugging just enough to make him growl. Not the kind of noise meant for anyone else. Kavalas' eyes half-closed as he let his head fall back.

He pressed closer still, the cot creaking faintly beneath them as he pushed Kavalas down. Aegaryn’s hips rolled low and slow where his hands gripped him, anchored him. The heat between them rose with every kiss, deeper, hungrier, more intent than the last. Aegaryn slid a knee between Kavalas’ with precision, then the other, as his hands moved down his front, finding the ties of his pants and starting to undo them.

Kavalas exhaled hard through his nose as Aegaryn’s weight settled over him, that familiar press of thigh and palm and hunger coiling heat low in his belly. He hissed softly as Aegaryn’s fingers worked the last of his ties free, hips twitching reflexively beneath him. The scrape of Aegaryn's knuckles, the brush of his fingertips drove him wild. Kavalas' mouth found his again, swallowing a groan as overheated skin hit cool air.

Aegaryn pressed in close, kissing him through the building heat, while his fingers trailed lower with singular purpose. Not to tease -- only intent. Full of hunger. His fingers found the waistband of his pants, slipping beneath to feel his skin, and then fluidly worked them down his hips and away. His breath hitched as they disappeared into the darkness, the muscle in his jaw sliding as his tongue invaded their shared heat again.

The way Kavalas twitched beneath him was maddening, as familiar as it was exciting. Aegaryn’s hands roamed with purpose, tracing the hard lines of his abdomen like he _needed_ to relearn him -- every muscle, every swell, every scar. He pulled back just enough to haul his own shirt over his head, tossing it aside without thought or care, and kissed down Kavalas’ chest. Then, his breath hitching, he braced his hands on Kavalas’ thighs, his body caging him completely.

---end flashback---

A dreary day, the kind that drenched the ground one moment and warmed enough to start drying its crust shortly after. The grey sky was just opening up for Zolta as she soared over the cliffs of Dragonsfall.

Just outside the entrance to the lower caverns, Aegaryn watched. He tracked her path all the while breathing firestone, soil, and blood, the air thickened beyond the sweet earthy petrichor of the morning.

A little golden comet with brown and bronze scattering through its tail, she led them high, daring and dancing, darting and diving. She was power and heat, revelling and challenging and screaming in equal measure. They could not catch her, but she loved that they tried.

As she arced away from eager claws, taking them higher still, sunlight streamed through patchy cloud cover, and a fresh, slow trickle of rain glittered like tiny stars over her glow until only a few males remained.

Aegaryn felt her joy, her lust, somewhere down in the cramped workroom again, and when at last Zolta had made them earn it, and allowed herself to be brought back to earth, it was that handsome bronze hide against hers, she and Wrentley entwined like they had nowhere else to be.

Aegaryn sighed, a quiet, heavy sigh, and went back to work.

Last updated on the May 1st 2026

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In the Shadow of Ecstasy (PG-17)