“That isn’t an answer, dragon.”
“It’s not an answer fromyou, either,” Levi pointed out. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and he could feel the growing pressure in the air, heralding the potential for something powerful.
“I won’t bind you, regardless of what I want,” Iason said, a familiar stubborn tilt to his chin, dominance heavy in his voice.
“You won’t bind me, regardless of anything,” Levi said. “A companion bond isn’t a chain, Iason.”
Iason gave an exasperated huff. “Levi.Leviathan. Just answer me.”
“I wouldn’t mind spending eternity with you, wizard,” Levi said. “At least you keep things interesting.”
Iason snorted. Then, he laughed—loudly. It was nothing like his restrained laughter the night Levi fucked him with both of his cocks. He kept laughing until he was wheezing, laughing so hard that he rolled over and fell right off Levi—and out of the hammock. He was on all fours on their newly built deck, laughing so hard he was crying. “That’s one way to put it,” he gasped, once he had breath enough to speak. He stood up, wiping his eyes, shoulders still shaking.
“I can’t tell if this is you being helplessly amused or just helpless.”
“Neither can I.” Iason held out his hand. “Will you come with me? There’s something I need to see before I can tell you my answer.”
“Sure.” Levi let Iason pull him up, keeping hold of his hand as Iason led him not inside, but around the house and down toward the shoreline. He was surprised when Iason dropped his hand and started to pull off his clothes. “You need to fuck me in the surf again?”
Iason paused, fingers at the waistband of his trousers. “Later I might, yes. But right now, I need you to swim us out far enough that I can’t see the land.”
“Why?” Levi asked, tossing his sarong off his waist. “You’re not going to try and do anything with magic, are you?”
“No. I need you to show me what it’s like.”
“Whatwhat’slike?”
“Eternity,” Iason said. “Eternity with nothing but you, the sea, and the sky. I don’t think I can answer you until I know what it’s going to be like. Because this isn’t like your siblings, is it? I won’t be able to… rest. I’ve left the killer behind. I’m making a new life here. Choosing you means losing people—everyone I might love. I’ll have to watch them die. Even Sophie, someday. And unlike your siblings who have ties to mortals, I won’t see them again. Goodbye really will be forever, as far as you know. Because you’re the first, and you’re the last. Right?”
Something sparked up Levi’s spine as the water rushed around his feet, beckoning him, calling him home. “Yes. That’s right.”
“I spent a long time shutting myself off from people. That’s what it is, being an assassin. The first death we cause, it’s our own. And it makes everyone else’s so much easier. But I’m not that man anymore. The last time I loved someone and lost them, well, that’s what made me bare my throat for the Archmage’s proverbial knife. And I don’t think this would make me an assassin again. But maybe I don’t want to find out. Maybe I don’t want to feel that again. Maybe I want to have the normal human life that was taken from me.”
“Then you should say no,” Levi said softly.And I will have to leave you, and Sophie, and I will have to be a dragon for—centuries, maybe.This was what the siren had warned him about, so long ago. If Iason refused him, Levi’s heart would break. Iason would always keep some part of Levi’s godhood, but Levi would never keephim. “Because I won’t bind you, either.”
The sky rumbled with thunder again, and lightning flashed deep in Iason’s eyes. “I know you wouldn’t. I’d never even think about saying yes if you would. And I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t love you if I believed you’d evenwantto do that. But I can’t choose eternity without some idea of what it means.”
Levi held a hand out, the sea at his back, eternity a promise in the storm brewing on the horizon. “Then come with me,” he said, in a voice that shook like thunder. “And let me show you. Because I love you, too, my wizard… and I think eternity wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without you.”
* * *
Even at the distant, secret heart of the world, there was no silence.
Iason wasn’t sure what he’d expected. An endless, quiet stretch of blue, perhaps, fading into the sky. Or towering swells and trenches of water. Storms on the horizon. What he found, when Levi brought him out beyond the borders of Iperios, was wind. Wind stirred the surface of the ocean around them and sighed as it ruffled Iason’s hair. Another current lay below, shaping the ocean beneath Iason’s feet as he trod water. And perhaps there was another one in the dark beyond the stars, though Iason wasn’t sure even Levi knew what waited there.
When he touched Levi’s shoulders, he could feel the scales pushing up under his skin. “So this is what it’s like for you, when you’re alone.”
“Yes and no.” Levi’s teeth were longer than they’d been on the shore, and his nails were strange and clawlike, his tongue slightly forked. But he wasn’t monstrous to Iason. He was just Levi—changeable and egotistical, gentle and destructive, always more than he seemed at first glance.
“Let me see, then,” Iason said, and sank into Levi’s power, reaching for the bond between them.
He opened his eyes—but he had no eyes to open. He was simply aware, in a way he couldn’t have explained, that he was in the heart of a storm. The storm was raging above the endless ocean, kicking the waves into enormous swells with nothing to destroy, but it was also moving ever so gradually lower, toward the sea. It was like watching a tornado form in reverse—as though the sea were pulling the storm, twisting it, giving it shape. The clouds shifted and darkened and sparked with heat lightning, and the thunder that shook the air sounded more like a roar of delight as, for the first time, a god took shape.
Leviathan dove out of the storm in a swirling chaos of wind and rain, his pearly, blue-green scales glimmering. There was no language for what he felt, because he hadn’t invented it yet—he simply knew he was happy, and as he sank beneath the waves in a froth of bubbles, Iason laughed in sheer surprise.
“I was still mostly a storm at the time,” Levi said in Iason’s mind, as the dragon he’d been barreled through the water. Heat burst from the depths as the earth cracked and pushed together, mountains forming, volcanoes turning the sky black with smoke. Iperios formed in the wake of Levi’s wordless joy in merelybeing.
“You made the world because you were happy?”
