Homelands Pt. 06 Ch. 03

And if he'd come close to telling her everything back when he'd sat in her bathroom, talking to her while she soaked in the bath, he'd done an excellent job of hiding it.

"I'm sorry," she said, staring at her feet.

"Come here," he said, jerking his head to one side for emphasis.

That was what passed for stern with him. Most of the time, anyway. Every now and then he'd prove that he could breathe fire, but as a general rule, he took for granted that he didn't need to. And he was right.

Refusing to meet his gaze, Annie went and sat on the couch beside her father.

"You've been a bad girl," he said, voice as soothing as it could be. For a moment, she almost wasn't sure she'd heard him right. That voice conveyed about as much disappointment as a birthday card and a dozen roses would have. With one finger, he tucked her hair back, granting him a better look at the face she was trying to hide. "You know that, right?"

Annie nodded.

"And what do bad girls get?" he asked.

It all felt so surreal that she was tempted to say that she'd have to go to bed without supper. Or that he'd have to ground her. Take away her internet privileges.

But she knew what was coming.

And, in spite of herself, she was getting excited. Very excited. Her panties were damp and her nipples hard. The well that she imagined whenever she tried to picture her Libido no longer felt up to the task of containing her energy.

It wasn't anything she could control. Like that Pablov guy, or whatever his stupid name was, and his dogs. Her father spoke the words, and her body responded. Simple as that.

Her punishment wasn't any worse than usual. Indeed, not for the first time, she got the distinct sense that her father had to force himself to do those things to her. That he only did them because he knew that she got off on it.

There was something seriously wrong with that. She only got off on being treated that way because something deep inside her insisted that this was the way to please him. To make up for whatever she'd done long ago to drive him away. If he didn't enjoy it, why couldn't they just put the whole ritual behind them?

But that just wasn't how it worked. For the longest time, she'd been convinced that she deserved to be punished for whatever it was that she'd done to drive her father away. Sure, she ought to be able to move past that now, but her understanding of sexuality was just too deeply caught up in feelings of guilt and a need for atonement. Though she certainly could get off in other ways, she still couldn't change the way she responded to certain stimuli.

Afterwards, as always, her father held her in her arms the way he would a small child. She didn't cry though. Hardly ever did anymore. Just tried to make sense of the fact that she'd just allowed her father to do all manner of hurtful and humiliating things to her, and they'd brought her to the most intense climax. Much more gratifying than the one her brother had guided her through back on the beach with that magical tongue of his.

"You okay?" her father asked, after a particularly long stretch of silence.

"Yeah," she said.

"Wasn't too much when I made you-"

"No, no," she said, preferring not to make him say it. "Was fine. Everything was...fine." With a wan smile, she ran her fingers through his dark hair and said, "Works better if you don't apologize afterwards though."

He smiled back at her before kissing her on the nose.

Annie laid her head against her father's chest and lost herself in the sound of his breathing.

"I want to show you something," he said after a while.

She looked up at him. As was so often the case, she felt like she was seeing his striking green eyes for the first time. They were only glowing faintly, but against a backdrop of the night sky, that was enough to hypnotize her.

Without another word, he picked her up and set her down on the couch beside him. Then he stood, stretched, and slowly transformed into a dragon.

He grew and grew and grew. If he hadn't leapt off the rooftop into the air, he'd likely have crushed the palace into rubble. By the time he stopped changing, she could only see a third of him. It seemed like he went on for miles. His underside was smooth and silvery, the rest of him covered in glittering emerald scales that looked suitable for cutting glass. The starry sky disappeared from view behind his vast wings.

Annie nearly forgot to breathe.

It was the first time she'd ever seen her father take on that form. She knew that he'd done so the day he slew the former king. That many of his subjects had seen him as the mythical beast at one time or another. But never before had he shared his true inner self with her, his daughter and lover.

She'd taken a certain pride in that, until now. Terrible as the things he did to her when she needed to be punished were, he never turned into a monster. Only the outside world ever saw that fearsome side of her father.

In that moment, though, she didn't fear her father or think him monstrous. She found him beautiful, awe-inspiring, and majestic.

Her father climbed ever higher in the sky before cutting a broad arc and swooping back down towards her. Annie's heart raced as the dragon's face came into full view. His eyes were larger than she was, his teeth like oak trees, and the silver spines that ran from his forehead down his back were like a miniature mountain range.

He stopped in midair, with his snout nearly touching the palace. His enormous wings had ceased flapping. From head to tail, he was still as a statue. Yet he didn't fall. Gravity itself dared not issue this man any commands.

"Climb on," he said, his voice causing the ground to rumble.

After a moment of hesitation, Annie did as he instructed.

She couldn't believe what was happening. It was like that scene from The Neverending Story. Only her dragon looked a good deal less like a dog, and couldn't have begun to fit in an alleyway to chase after some middle school bullies.

They were only in the air for a few minutes. How far they went in that time, she couldn't have said. Her father was so large that she couldn't see anything below him. When he took them back down, though, asking her to climb off again, she found herself in the midst of a chain of broken islands, surrounded by an endless expanse of dark water.

And broken was indeed the word.

It looked like someone had taken a hammer the size of her father and smashed it into the center of one of one of the smaller islands of Summer.

Her father shrank back into his usual form then came up beside her. Putting a hand to the small of her back, he asked, "What do you think happened here?"

"You destroyed it?" she asked.

In the back of her mind, she'd long suspected that her father had been keeping some dark secret from her. To the best of her knowledge, there hadn't been a single challenge to his rule yet. Not one. That didn't make any sense, though, given how brutal he was always telling her the Homelands were. Surely he'd made an example of some poor family. A minor house, perhaps. Why else would the others be so afraid of him?

"Not me," he said.

"Then who?"

"One of the oldest powers in the Shadowed Glade of the Moon."

"Why?" Annie asked, pressing up against her father's side.

"Because the people who once lived here did what you and I are going to do," he said. "What your Aunt Nina and I have already done."

Her heart raced. She should have been interested in hearing why that would be of any concern to anyone, least of all a great and powerful demon. But she was too distracted by the implication that her father was finally going to ask her to have his children.

Perhaps she was every bit as important to him as his sister was after all.

"We'll be spitting in the eyes of gods, you understand," he said, holding her close. "And if we're not careful, this is the fate that will await us." He swept his other arm out, taking in the partially submerged ruins surrounding them.

"That's why you can't tell me things?"

"Exactly," he said. "I'm sorry, princess, but it's a dangerous path we're heading down. We have to tread softly, and take care not to make too much noise."

"Okay," Annie said.

Her words sounded distant to her. And when her father explained that the alliance with the Eternal Garden was meant to protect them, that there'd be things they'd have to do that none of them would like yet were unfortunately necessary, that too seemed to come from far away. She heard his words, but their meaning didn't really register.

There was one Annie, mature and responsible and stoic, who listened dutifully as her father spoke. Yet there was also another. And that Annie couldn't look past the joyous news that her father was going to make a proper woman out of her.

She was going to be the mother of his children. Of her own siblings. It was so deliciously perverse. And, most importantly, it proved that he was not disappointed in her after all.