Questionable Affection {Kestrel + Azh}

Unath lay on her side, a spotted, muddy rise on the lakeshore. Her tail and wings twitched in intermittent pleasure as her rider applied his beltknife to the base of her shortest talon. He sawed at the dull, flaking surface till the old growth husk broke loose, then peeled it free- Unath squirming -before tossing it aside. The tan tucked her head down to examine the shiny, cherry-dark claw Q'sis' work had exposed, and she flexed it just to show him how the sunlight traced red reflections down the length of it. It was the last talon husk to be cleared, so she felt justified in pulling Q'sis in against her chest with her paws, snuggling him till he gasped for air.

She let him go, but still wriggled her front and back ends as he stumbled back to his feet. Her new claws snapped out at the rocky shore and she popped upright, opening her mouth to the sky and bellowing. A cloud of fog slid out with the sound, steaming between Unath's fangs as she clipped her jaws back together. Q'sis followed the trajectory of her thick, powerful neck, then his eyes fell along the rest of her, all the way to the tips of her tail. She looked back at him from on-high, ribcage puffing, but he said nothing. He only bent to collect the knife he'd lost at her grab.

Unath was answered. The dark twin's blunt snout angled at her lighter sister, eyes wide and of a descending blue. But at the rub, membranous lids rolled up over their charges and she growled, then flopped her legs out to all sides and fell on her tummy. That was what happened when a dragon nipped your neck. You got dead. Q'sis was just getting up after jumping out of the way of the dramatic interpretation when that huge cream-colored face swung toward him.

He had time to take in Mith's eyes, and the pink parasite fastened between her knobs, before he lashed Unath's reflexes toward the provision of a barricade. Unath's paw caught the oncoming nose of Mith, and then she settled her chin on the ground between her twin and her rider. Q'sis rested his palm on his woman's safe cheek, putting an arm over the top of her so he could peer past at the unlikely assailant.

Foiled in her attempt to lavish her particular brand of affection on Q’sis by the timely intervention oh her sister’s paw and face, Mith planted her jaw on the ground, her whirling blue gaze locked on the man leaning over the darker reflection of her snout. She rooted forward a little, pushing up dirt, but ultimately coming up against Unath’s jaw. No good.

A few seconds later she tried again, with much the same result. She licked her sister’s cheek then, thoughtfully. Tasty.

Across the bowl, digging around the stuck Meili, Valha looked up at the sudden odd sensation, not realizing that Mith has still been so in her head while she was off gallivanting with Unath and…yes, and Q’sis. Scraping her tongue with her teeth idly, she looked through Mith’s eyes, briefly, and offered a solution to the “getting-to-Q’sis” problem before turning her focus back to her digging.

Mith popped her head up, lightning quick, and moved in for the nibble on Q’sis, but was abruptly distracted by the Candidate who had appeared, to her seemingly from nowhere. She watched him, eyes whirling a pale blue, thoughts slowly percolating – the end of her tongue protruding from her mouth since she’d forgotten to pull it back in after her assault on Q’sis was stymied.

She chirped faintly as she tracked the Candidate.

Skadi squeaked a warning as Mith’s impulse rippled through the pink’s mind on it’s way to completion, but the sound came too late.

Mith darted her head forward, towards Viyeri, and inhaled, sucking him straight into her cavernous mouth and closed her jaws gently around him, moving him around with her tongue to avoid catching him on her teeth.

Across the Weyr, Valha jerked up again, disbelieving of what she thought was happening.

Nope. It was happening. There was someone in her dragon’s mouth. She could taste them.

Her order was instinctively out loud and mental as she shouted, “Drop that now!”

Viyeri didn’t really like the way Q’sis was looking at him, and for a moment he even questioned whether perhaps he’d mistaken the man for someone else. But what other man would be as likely to be standing by two tans, and tans he was fairly sure he recognized as the twins he’d heard about, at that? But Q’sis—if he was Q’sis—took the slate, so Viyeri supposed he could consider his job finished, unless the tanrider decided he had another errand for him.

In the brief moment he had to ponder this before his impending doom, he shifted his focus to the tans, noting that one seemed to be watching him. She let out a little chirping noise, too, which Viyeri thought was cute, and a smile tweaked at his lips. He liked tans. They seemed like such sweet dragons, so different from the reds with which they shared their size class. Of the hatchings he’d attended, Demeth had been a much less terrifying host than Waroth, that was certain.

No, tans wouldn’t hurt a trundlebug. Not intentionally, at least, and Viyeri was not a trundlebug. It happened so fast, and so unexpectedly, that Viyeri spent a long moment lost in a confused stupor. Why was it so dark? Worse, why was it so wet? Had he suddenly passed out and started dreaming? It didn’t feel like a dream, though, and if it was, it was rather soon for him to have realized he was dreaming. He was pretty sure that wasn’t it…

Oh shards. He was dead. That was the only answer—that crackdusted male tanrider had been reaching for his beltknife, Viyeri knew he had, and he must have stabbed him when Viyeri looked away to admire the cute tan. Why would he do that? Was the slate really so terrible? Worse, was Viyeri going to have to spend his entire death wondering why in Faranth’s name that rider had killed him? He had to say, death was a lot squishier than he’d expected. He wasn’t really enjoying it so far. But at least it was over with, he supposed, and it wasn’t like it had hurt. He wondered if he could cancel his contract with optimism now.

He felt whatever force was under him flop him over into more squishy wet-ness, and instinctively moved an arm out seeking something to grab onto—but his hand only slapped against something rather hard that seemed to be poking up out of a squishy thing. It seemed pretty long and kind of pointy, kind of like a big tooth, actually. Like a dragon’s tooth. Wasn’t that funny. Actually, he remembered seeing some teeth...just for a moment before he was sucked into this dark, churning, sticky world when that tan had—

Oh. Sweet. Faranth. The moment of shock finally wore off, stripping away his comfy sense of calm and replacing it with mortal terror of the highest degree. He started wailing from inside the tan’s mouth, struggling to get his feet under him when that tongue kept moving around, vainly attempting to reach the roof of the tan’s mouth as if he could somehow push it back open. “LET ME OUUUUT!” He rammed a fist against the side of a tooth like it was a door someone could simply open for him if they only had mercy. He almost got one foot under himself, but slipped as that tongue moved again. Viyeri was now terrified of that tongue. The dragon was going to eat him! She was trying to push him back down into her throat, he was sure of it. Oh Faranth. Viyeri had never made a list of preferred deaths, per se, but even so he could say with certainty that this was not how he wanted to die.

A heavy hand closed on Valha's shoulder, then tore her away from her concerns.

"You get out," Q'sis snapped, then turned to Mith. "Back off!" he snarled, just as loud, for Mith at the moment was only an avatar of the girl he had already dealt with. He seized Viyeri's leg and yanked him down the pale blue slide of Mith's tongue, laying him out on the cold stone of the Bowl. Unath was allowed to remain nearby. She had done exactly nothing, not commandeered and not stirred to special reaction by this sequence of events. She shimmied her lower jaw side-to-side against her upper as Q'sis reached for Viyeri's throat, but soon fell still again.

Q'sis felt the bones at the back of the Candidate's neck, then patted his face. Patted, because a slap from his arm could send heads astray even from completely sturdy necks. "Speak!" he demanded. Unath moaned an attempt at human language beside him. If "nnnnurrrolzurrk!" had ever been a human word, it could have been a first. Q'sis ignored her, staring down at the goo-coated face of the interloper. "Why did she attack him? Why doesn't she like him?" he barked over at Valha, hardly waiting for Viyeri's first word after being reborn.

The tanrider knew very well that neither twin was really capable of what he suggested. They could not sustain enough concepts to manufacture dislike. Plant Loto's killer in front of them, and they would visit their sloppy affections on him, or more likely do nothing at all. That was the way it had always been. But experience pressured him to ask, against all present logic. Qosk had never bitten anyone that didn't deserve it, him included.

Valha growled at Q’sis as he moved her away from the slobbery Candidate, but went, backing Mith up as well – not obeying the other tanrider, but rather her train of thought – get Mith clear, away from the victim – echoing his demands. And she let him tend to the candidate as well – she wasn’t, after all, the one who spend so much time around Healers. She backed Mith up to the water’s edge and had rinsed the taste of candidate out of her dragon’s, and therefore her, mouth.

Guh.

She snarled at Q’sis’s question, though – he knew as well as she did that Mith wasn’t capable of maliciously attacking a human, not for any reason – though the accusations that Viyeri started flinging around seriously derailed her thoughts before she could reply.

How…did they go from Mith eating him to Q’sis stabbing him? She cast a glance over the boy, not seeing blood or a knife’s hilt anywhere sticking out of him – Q’sis still had his, too. What in the world was going on?

Mith, released partially from the control her rider had over her, moaned lowly at the upset flowing around. It was worse than the time with the table.

Had she broken another table, at long last? She’d thought that the person was a person, because he hadn’t looked like a table, but…they were tricky. She moaned again, shoving her snout under the tip of Unath’s tail – she’d broken a table. Now it was a person. All she’d wanted was love, and now there was a table-people that she’d broken.

Bizarre as it was, it was a remarkably steady train of thought for Mith, and Valha went ahead and let her go where she would with it. She spread her hands in a non-threatening gesture and approached the candidate, “Here now – no one id dead, and no one was stabbed. Q’sis isn’t the ideal example of humanity, but even he wouldn’t stab you without some sort of reason. My dragon, Mith, picked you up with her mouth in order to be affectionate. She was not going to eat you.”

Except by accident was left unspoken.

Still staying as unthreatening as possible, she continued to speak in a low soothing voice, “It’s alright, though. She thinks you’re a table now and won’t come near you again.”