*
Kaelan woke up with a gasp that felt like it had been held in his lungs for a century. He was in his own bed in apartment 304. The morning light was pale and clinical, filtering through the blinds he had once draped with useless garlic.
For a long minute, he simply stared at the ceiling. His body felt heavy, anchored by an unexplainable sickness, a lingering, deep, seated warmth in his gut that made him feel perpetually on the verge of either a fever or a sob. There was a vague sense of loss, a hollow space in his chest that felt like a missing tooth, but as he rubbed his eyes, the fog began to thin.
Then, the memory hit him like a physical blow.
"The gala... the Oubliette... that ash faced South Lord..." Kaelan sat up, his black panther ears snapping into existence, twitching with a furious energy.
He remembered the "Partner's Gala." He remembered the sensation of being dragged into the dark. He remembered the mocking illusions of his parents and the cold, terrifying weight of the God Eater's prison. He even remembered Ignis, that narcissistic, over sized lizard , tearing through the sky like a falling star to get to him.
"Those bastards," Kaelan hissed, his slit pupils sharpening. "The Gods... they tried to seal it. They tried to wipe him out of my head."
He remembered Ignis being dragged away in chains of light. He remembered the Arbiter's cold voice. But then, there was a gap. A thick, impenetrable wall of white mist stood between the moment Ignis rescued him from the dungeon and the moment he woke up here.
He didn't remember the grove. He didn't remember the twelve hours of desperate, soul sealing union. He didn't remember the weight of Ignis's body or the way his own voice had broken as he moaned the King's name.
To Kaelan, it felt like he had been rescued, and then snap he was back in his bed.
"Why do I feel like I've been hit by a truck?" Kaelan muttered, clutching his stomach. The sickness was strange; it wasn't the "Dragon Flu" anymore. It was a dormant, pulsing heat, as if he were carrying a small, golden sun inside his bones.
A frantic knocking at the door interrupted his thoughts. Tamsin and Marcus burst in, looking like they hadn't slept in a week.
"Kaelan! You're awake!" Tamsin cried, her fox tail nearly hitting the doorframe. "You vanished from the gala! The 'Guest Auditor' said you had a medical emergency and took you away, and then... and then he just never came back!"
"I'm okay," Kaelan said, his voice a bit bitter but steady. He forced a jaded smile. "The 'emergency' involved some very high level kidnapping and a lot of celestial drama. But the scaly freak got himself arrested by the divine police. He's gone."
"Gone?" Marcus blinked. "But the University just sent out an email. Professor Ignis Aethelgard has been 'reassigned to an overseas post' indefinitely. We have a new auditor starting Monday some guy named Dr. Aris who smells like old paper."
Kaelan felt a sharp, localized pang in his chest at the word gone. He pushed it down with a deadly resolve. "Good. Maybe now I can pass Microeconomics without someone trying to audit my soul."
Over the next few days, Kaelan practiced a new level of control. He found that if he focused his furious willpower, he could make his panther ears and tail invisible. It took an immense amount of energy, but it made him feel more human, more "normal." He went back to his studies, burying himself in notes and library books, trying to ignore the shame of having been the campus "celebrity consort" for a week.
He felt fine. Mostly. Except for the dreams he couldn't remember and the way he would occasionally catch himself touching the dragon earring , which was now just a silent, cold piece of gold.
Far beneath the crust of the world, in the Deep Wells, the atmosphere was very different.
Ignis was seated on a slab of frozen stone, his limbs bound by heavy, soul draining manacles. The prison was designed to break the spirit of gods, to turn their fire into ash through isolation and pain. Every few hours, the guards ethereal constructs of the Arbiter would strike him with lightning rods to "purge" his divine ego.
But Ignis didn't scream. He didn't even frown.
He sat with his eyes closed, a smug, beautiful smirk permanently etched onto his lips. Every time the lightning hit him, he didn't feel the sting; he felt the memory of the grove. He thought about the way Kaelan's skin had felt under his touch, the way those green panther eyes had finally glazed over with a different kind of fire.
Most of all, he thought about the sound. The way Kaelan had finally, desperately moaned his name before punctuating it with a furious curse.
Ignis... you monstrous lizard...
"Keep hitting me," Ignis whispered to the dark, his voice a low, manic purr. "I have three hundred years of that sound on loop in my head. I am the happiest prisoner in the history of the Heavens."
He could feel the seed he had planted. It was a tiny, golden spark in the distance, vibrating in sync with his own heart. As long as that spark lived, Kaelan was safe. As long as it lived, Kaelan was his.
Back in the human realm, the South Lord watched from a distance, hidden in the shadows of the university's clock tower. He saw Kaelan walking across the quad, looking pale but fearless. The South Lord had seen the King's wrath firsthand; he was no fool. He would stay far away. He would not provoke the Dragon again.
But Zadkiel was not a creature of logic. She was a creature of livid, ruined pride.
She stood in a rainy alleyway, holding the hand of her small daughter the iridescent scaled girl who had first seen Kaelan in the King's bed.
"Go," Zadkiel whispered, her voice a jagged hiss of venom. "Go to the school. Find the one with the hidden ears. Tell the humans what he is. Tell them he is the King's used toy. Destroy his name until he has nothing left but the shame I felt."
The little girl, eyes wide and obedient, nodded. She adjusted her human disguise raincoat and stepped out into the quad, heading straight toward the library where Kaelan was currently trying to forget the name of the man who had stolen his heart and replaced it with a golden secret.