After me and Aegle where told what being partners (or bonded as they say) entailed, we went up to her room, passing massive portraits and grandiose pottery, chandeliers and massive archways.

Me and Aegle were going to be officially bonded in a day, and then do some sort of rite of passage, which has been watered down every generation until it just became sleeping in the woods. I slept in the woods often. I slept there everyday I couldn’t find a tall grass field or stay up any longer. Aegle told me this is called ‘camping’.

To bond, which will be happening in the morning, you need to tremendously harden the skin, almost to the point of callousing in one point, and then, I need to bite that point, with ‘magic’ infused in my bite, to kind of fuse our blood. Which sounds awful but according to Aegle, the skin hardening feels like nothing ever happened.

We got to Aegle’s room, with took much longer than it should have. We walked in, the door was lined in gold and twice Aegles size. Despite that, she opened it with ease and held it open for me.

‘You first.’

I bowed my head slightly and trotted in, and leaped to her MASSIVE ‘bed’. Well, everything here is massive so I asked Aegle is anything is massive at all, she shrugged and said simply, you get used to it. She flopped on her bed and closed her eyes, and I followed suite, not adding another word.

I woke up in unison with Aegle when a woman with shoulder cut hair and a fluffy black dress with a small white covering burst in and yelled something, very distressed. She looked at me and pointed, yelling something else, she now looked like she was going to faint. Then, Aegle pounced up and started explaining to her ‘personal maid’ she told me why me, a dragon was on her ‘bed’, god was this temporary bond (soon to be permanent dw) convenient.

She got up and picked me up, carrying me like the caregiver to the bath. She plopped me in, and then plopped in herself, she noted mentally something about ‘never thinking she would be in a bath with a dragon’, we finished the bath easily, as all baths should be. She put something called ‘shampoo’ ontop of my scales, and failed to rub it into them though, which makes the bath slightly worse.

She got dressed in a dress befitting of this ‘house’, if it even constituted for one at this size, which I don’t think it really does. The girl told me of the ceremony, the convoluted one, the ‘camping’. She said after I bite her, we’ll do that. Which Aegle looked excited about, so I’m sure it’s gonna be fine.

The ceremony was quick, a large echoy hall with lots of lined wooden benches, an altar, but no tree men and women. I bite her rock hard skin, on her shoulder, and a mark of ‘Kleos’ which Aegle told me her parents said the ‘elders would go wild’.

And so, with that anticlimactic ceremony, we set off for the even more watered down one. I asked Aegles how they knew what the mark was, and Aegles again shrugged, saying they said something about a scripture or poem or something. Again, leaving me with an unclear, but at least answered answer.

We went back to Aegles room and ‘began preparing’ with included: me sleeping, them making lots of noise moving stuff in the background, and when I say lots, I mean LOTS. There were so many people, moving things in and out, lots of crinkling noises, and other general impossible to ignore disturbances.

But eventually, I fell fast asleep, as I always do eventually, in the middle of chaos, in quiet, or in anguish and pain.