"I guess we really did vanquish our enemies with the power of love," Vespera joked.
"Silly," I said reflexively.
Zery hummed. "She is silly, but she is OUR silly."
"Aww," I cooed. "That's cute."
"Thank you," the dragon said, preening. "She needs to be reminded from time to time."
While her tone was all high and mighty, almost dismissive, she was also blushing. Her blush was interesting, very normal, for lack of a better word. I'd have expected her, with her aquamarine skin and her blue scales, her golden slitted eyes and black forearms and hands, to have a strange-colored blush. But no. There was pink and hints of red that colored her features, mixing with her extravagant palette, making her dashingly beautiful.
"I am…" Elyra began, as if worried she was interrupting something, but barely able to contain herself. "…curious about the skill upgrade. We really never used it after freeing Zery, did we?"
I hummed. She was right.
"Feels like a missed opportunity," Vespera, now recovered from all the teasing, said. "But how come you want to be the one testing it?"
Elyra shrugged. "Am I the only one who feels like it is a skill we can all use? Do you not recall its description?"
"Sure, but it's for the one who has the skill," Vespera argued. "Namely, Sol. It mentioned stuff about being able to manifest aspects of… wait."
"Each other! It said each other," I exclaimed. "Alright, my little angel. You earned your right to go first. Come on!"
She blinked, suddenly overwhelmed, her eyes roaming, jumping from me to Vespera, to Zery, to Calla. Her mind was a whirlwind. What was she going to try first? How would the others react, both to being picked and to not being picked?
Then her eyes settled onto me. I realized it at the same time as her. I was… human. Completely and totally human. Whatever might she gain from manifesting aspects of me?
"Maybe she will grow a dick!" Vespera joked.
Elyra turned beet red. "I am… not sure I want that?" she said shyly.
"Shieeet," the demon said. "She IS considering it now."
She began to purr naughty things into her ear, forcing Elyra to close her eyes and shake her head furiously, her blush totally out of control. She began to activate the skill, her mind thinking not the dick, not the dick, not the dick!!!! Mostly because she wanted to deny Vespera the pleasure of derailing everything, but also because she felt like it was… not wrong, but… too strange right now. Perhaps in the bedroom, if Sol wanted?
Sol—namely I—didn't know? How could I be expected to know? Thus, we decided to very maturely not think about it at all.
Fortunately, the spell ran its course, and all our attention was diverted when a very, very human Elyra squirmed under our gaze. No halo, no wings, nothing. Just a normal, everyday girl. A very cute, shy little girl.
"You look so fucking tasty I could jump you right now."
I was surprised to learn that it wasn't Vespera who uttered those words. It was me.
"D-do you really… like me?" the human girl asked timidly. She looked even smaller and shyer than normal, right now looking smaller than even Calla, despite the dryad being a good fifteen centimeters shorter than her.
The subtext, hidden beneath the innocent question, hit me all at once. In moments, Elyra was at the center of a group hug that had her squished in a heap of bodies.
"We all love you, little angel," Zery said.
"Did you really think it was your angelic features that had Sol head over heels for you?" Vespera asked her. "Let me show you."
A snap of her fingers, and she was human too. Her horns were gone. Her eyes no longer red on black, but simply… well, they remained reddish but they looked much more in line with a strange human and not a fantasy girl. The black sclera was gone. Her tail was gone.
I ruffled her hair, still littered with stones and dirt from her earlier tickling joust with Elyra. "Yep, still very cute."
"Not cute!" she argued back. "I'm hot, not cute."
"Not if you say it while pouting like that, cutie," I said, and it was final because now Calla wanted her turn.
What we got was a green-haired girl who was somehow even shyer than Elyra. Our Calla, our little sapling. Right now, she looked like she could have been painting the stars from her loft apartment in the higher reaches of Tinianis II—the tree-world—in an age when man-made art was rare, and prized.
"Was there really a world of just trees?" she asked, eyes sparkling with wonder.
"There was," I said. "It was beautiful, artificial. Like everything about my civilization, really. The whole planet had been engineered, pushing the limits of technology, but it was not self-sufficient. It was being kept alive by machines and human intervention, just out of sight to give the illusion of nature. Nature for the billionaires, by the way. That's where the little fantasy runs short. The only way a green-haired girl could paint stars above the trees, back in my time, was either there or on Earth and in both cases, she'd have been the daughter of some super-rich fuck or something. And you…"
It was like snapping out of a fantasy, looking into her eyes and realizing that I was cupping her face, our noses almost touching. Her eyes were dazzling green, beautiful like all the others in human form, just as they were beautiful in her natural form. Her skin was soft, smooth.
I leaned in. "You aren't the daughter of some rich fucks, Calla. Those assholes are responsible for the end of the world while you… you are building my world, with each beat of your heart, with each breath."
I wiped away the tears rolling down her cheeks, and kissed her.
After we broke apart, I looked at Zery expectantly. She only shook her head, a mess of emotions in her mind, and none of us uttered a single word. We thanked each other without words in turn, and I changed the subject to let her work out her stuff by herself. We were there should she desire us, but right now she was asking us to be given some space.
"Let's test the weapons thing," I said.
All the transformations were undone, and we were all back to being ourselves. I went first, this time, pulling from Vespera just for old times' sake. However, the skill reacted unexpectedly.
"Hmm, I can't only get the weapon. I get more stuff the more I pull. Let's see."
Horns appeared on top of my head. All her inner turmoil momentarily forgotten, Zery gasped and cooed and even Calla asked to touch them. They were sensitive, and the girls knew that. As a punishment, I broadcast all the sensations into the bond, and they quickly dialed back their teasing lest we end up wasting all day playing with each other's erogenous spots.
Horns meant I could summon the sword now. It was like before: a massive thing made of scales with a guard made of dark wings.
But, the skill told me in no half-measures that I could do more. It literally shook with unspent potential, almost rebelling against being forced to lie there unused all this time. So I did. I pulled more.
Now I had a tail. And with the tail came another weapon. Claws of darkness, but not like Vespera's. More like Wolverine's, that superhero from centuries-old comics and movies that even in my time people still tried to reboot into relevance.
"Try me now!" Elyra demanded, tugging at my shirt.
The horns and tail went up in smoke, as did the sword and claws. Now I had a halo and wings, and a shield and a… whip? Magical whip made of plasma! Neat! I tried it out and it cut through a rock like it was made of butter, slicing it cleanly in half, the affected sections red with heat, hissing strange smoke.
I could go even deeper, I felt. Really dig deep into the nature of both myself and Elyra. Just like the girls could have gone deeper with me, instead of just… becoming human. I could also do angel and demon both at once, and perhaps more. But we stopped there.
"We played enough," Zery announced. "Let's do the job we are here to do."
And that was final, at least for now. Her mind was a mess, and seeing the skill in action only spurred it into dark circles that dragged her down instead of up.
I looked up at the pile of rubble. It would be so easy. The last remaining core was there, supposedly, behind where Vespera had been held hostage for fifteen millennia.
It would be too easy. But the bond? The ability to trust each other? Did it really not mean anything when real push came to shove?
"Zery," I said instead. My voice was soft, but I couldn't manage to keep the worry out of it. It didn't matter. She could feel my emotions through the bond anyway. "I hate seeing you like this. Something bothered you when Elyra used the skill to make herself human, but you are hiding it from the bond. What is it?"
"It's nothing," she said hastily. "We are wasting time."
I tried to take her hand but she evaded my touch. "Fuck the System and the broken battery. I don't give a shit about it, Zery. I care about you."
She smiled wryly. "It's stupid."
"Didn't we agree to share everything?" I said.
"I said. It's nothing important," Zery repeated. "It's just me being a mess, okay?"
The others huddled close, offering their warmth but saying nothing, letting me lead and using the bond to share their love, warmth and care for the dragon. Their worry too. Their deep desire to see her happy, not all sad and brooding. Most importantly, they lent power to the words I spoke.
"So what, Zery?" I asked, somewhat forcefully. It startled her when I grabbed her hand and leveled my face with hers. I was pulling from Elyra, unconsciously, using wings behind my back to hover so that I could look at my favorite dragon in the whole universe in the face.
"Am I really? Your favorite dragon?" she asked, reading my thoughts.
"You are," I said.
"What if there was another dragon in the bond?"
"Then you'd both be my favorite dragon in the whole universe. Is that what you are worried about?"
She looked away.
No. It was related but it wasn't it.
"Look through our memories," I said. "Back in the woods near Perseverance's End. We had killed a bunch of slimes and Elyra was worried our level-ups were making her into a kind of a jerk towards Vespera. What about after the fight with the tree, when Vespera almost broke down thinking I hated her for being… herself. What about Calla, when she was still Calyx and didn't really understand who she was, who she wanted to be."
"Why are you making me live through all this?" she asked, tears flowing unabated as her mind lived through our memories.
"Because I want you to understand. Had any of them said it was nothing important, that it was stupid. Had they kept it for themselves, would the bond be what it is now?"
"What about you, Sol?" her pleading eyes were molten gold. "You're perfect. You never broke down. You never faltered. You are like a star, radiant, with no weaknesses."
"And yet." I projected the image of the sun as seen through the not-glass windows of my hauler.
Only once in my life had I gotten close enough to see what I was showing her without magnification. That one time, they slapped me with a hefty fine for veering off course, but who cares? It was worth it. The metamaterials of my hauler's window turned the magnificent sundisk into something my mind could comprehend without burning up.
They dialed down the light of god and showed me the imperfections beneath the veneer. The sunspots. The boiling plasma. All the mess of magnetic fields disturbing the apparent perfection. For even stars have blemishes.
"And don't I show my weakness all the time?" I asked her as she gaped in wonder, not even realizing that she was holding me tight to her, her body wet with perspiration from the emotional turmoil within, seeking the heat of my skin.
"How? When?" she asked in a small voice, although she already knew.
"Through the bond," Elyra said.
"Don't you see?" Vespera asked. "He is always wide open. So that we may feel everything."
"Every thought," Calla said. "Is ours to experience. The good and the bad. I see now. That is why he does it!"
And so did Zery see too. She hugged me tight, and we shared what was perhaps the first real kiss between us. A dragon and her human. A human and her dragon.
And then, she activated the skill, wishing to experience what it was like to be human like me.