Filia sighed as she realized that Xelloss was not feeling inclined to move. "Come on, Xelloss-san... You can't be that badly hurt!" He carefully shifted, nuzzling her.

"Filia-san," he said in a serious and strained tone, "I may not be sympathetic for those who get hurt, but that's not because I don't getto feel pain myself. Right now...I am in pain."

"But...you're not injured...?" she asked, cautiously and a bit worried.

"If you mean, 'Will you be able to get it up tonight?' the answer is," he blushed slightly, "I hope so. Can I help you look for a new bed?" It would be very embarrassing to be seen by other mazoku walking funny, he refrained from adding.

"It might be easier with you there," she admitted. "I was thinking of getting a bigger bed, a sturdier one, and maybe it could be reinforced with a few spells..." she said, shyly.

Xelloss chuckled, the sweet, honey-like taste of her shyness delightful. "One I could tie you down on, Filia-san?"

"Xelloss!" she said, shocked and blushing both at the idea and at the thrill the idea gave her. "That's dirty, perverted...!"

"No, that's what you do to me is... I just want to tie you down at night for my own protection."

"Do you mean that you don't enjoy having sex with me, Xelloss?" she said, rather too sweetly. "And don't you dare dodge that question, or tell me, 'That is a secret,'" she added while slipping a hand under his hips to curl around a certain part of his form which he had become recently personally aware of the sensitivity of, "or you will pay."

Xelloss looked up at her face, his eyes wide. "You're a wonderful, noble, kind, and gentle dragon lady, and I am very, very grateful that you permit me to lie with you," he said, sounding very earnest. "Please don't hurt me!"

Filia smiled, and let go. Thank you, Lord! Xelloss thought, and scrambled to get off her, not even trying to hide the fact that the area between his legs hurt. With a thought, he was clothed. "I'll go make tea for us while you get dressed, Filia-san," Xelloss said and teleported out before Filia could protest.

Xelloss held, carefully one end of the iron bed frame while Filia worked to get the other end in the right place. The new mattress, large enough for two, leaned against the wall. The remains of her old, wooden bed had been removed, broken up for firewood, and its mattress taken to a spare room she said she had been planning on turning into a guest room.

It seemed like the best time to ask the questions that had been bothering them ever since they had gone to the store where they found the iron bed. "Filia-san," caution firmly residing in his voice, "why did you react so strangely when the sales clerk assumed that we were getting married?" She had not reacted with anger or offense as he had expected; instead he had tasted the distinctly warm and comforting flavor of sorrow in her emotions.

Filia blushed slightly, lowering her end of the frame to the floor. "I can't get married."

Xelloss looked at her, confused. "You can't get married? But I thought that you no longer had to remain a maiden, now that you retired from being a priestess of the Fire Dragon King..."

"My people insisted that we could not get properly married unless the ceremony was performed by a priest of the Fire Dragon King," Filia replied primly, though Xelloss could taste sorrow from her again, this time with a warmly spicy touch of regret.

Xelloss couldn't help being amused by the irony, though. "Oh, dear, Filia-chan! I guess we'll just have to live in sin!" he said cheerfully as he grabbed one end of the mattress and Filia took the other and started to put it on the bed.

Filia blushed, realising the implications both of what she had said, when she had said that 'we could not get properly married,' and of what Xelloss had just said. "Yes, we will." She let go, and the mattress dropped into place, Xelloss somehow having manage to let go at the same time.

"Why don't you go take a bath, Filia-san, while I make the bed?" he said softly. "I promise to do a good job, no short-sheeting you or anything, and I won't tie you down...unless you'd like me to..."

"Xelloss..." she said, wondering why the mazoku was making such an offer to her.

He wondered himself, but he didn't want to take the offer back. "Just go ahead..." he said, tasting his own emotions. It something only done when either starving, and surviving to suffer the consequences of eating one's own emotions was unlikely, or (like now) when a mazoku was unsure of what his own feelings were. To his dislike, but not surprise as he had somewhat expected it, the distinct flavor of love for the dragon was present. Damn.

Filia, not knowing what to make of Xelloss's expressions, left quickly.

Filia returned to find the bed carefully and quite neatly made, and Xelloss already lying in it, his back to the door and her. She quietly draped her robe on the back of a chair which Xelloss must have moved into the room from the future guest room, and slipped into the bed. The sheets softly rustled as she snuggled up close to Xelloss, slipping her arms around his waist and enjoying the feeling of his bare skin against her own.

"Xelloss-san? Are you...are you up to doing anything before we go to sleep?" Filia blushed, too shy to phrase her question in less euphemistic terms and feeling daring enough simply asking. She not quite realized, before the sales clerk had asked her and Xelloss if they were getting married, that she could never get properly married. She hadn't really wanted to accept that her only options had been to either remain virtuously chaste and virginal until she died or to live in sin should she find a mate. Now, she had unexpectedly found herself taking the second option, and not knowing if she liked it or not.

Xelloss sighed, with possibly overdramatized regret. "No, Filia. I'm still recovering from having tried to mate with your floor. I don't know why, either, since...I usually recover faster than this," he said, somewhat embarrassed. "Maybe it's because that...guise was developed later than my usual one, with a little more attention to anatomic detail..."

"What do you mean, Xelloss?" Filia was curious, and not even trying to hide it.

"Well..." Xelloss thought about how to answer Filia's question. It would not hurt to be honest; it wasn't like the answer was a secret of the Mazoku, it just was something that couldn't easily be explained to beings whose form was not like theirs. "A form other than the natural form of a mazoku -- the one we were created with -- needs infrastructure so that the outside appears right. Without it, the outer surface of the secondary form would look like a low-quality golem that's been painted. I took advantage of the fact that clothing can cover for a lack of infrastructure when I created my usual guise..."

Filia looked at the back of his head thoughtfully. "You must have spent a lot of time watching how muscles move underneath the skin in humans," she observed.

Xelloss smiled. "Well...not exactly." More like I used a few very old anatomy books...

Filia yawned, and nuzzled the back of his neck. "Good night, Xelloss-san."

He faked a yawn automatically. "Good night, Filia."

Filia writhed in her sleep, Xelloss dodging her arms, legs, and tail. Every so often she would mutter something that he was too distracted to try to catch. He knew that, if he wanted to find out what she was saying, he would have to restrain her. He cursed quietly.

Xelloss knelt down beside the body of a dragon in human form. He brushed the man's yellow hair towards one side, carefully looking for something that was apparently too big to be in a pocket, but not too big not to possibly be hidden under the corpse. Xelloss's eyes, serious, regularly flickered away from his search to check his surroundings and he was clearly tense, ready to move if an opponent appeared to either attack it or defend himself.

Xelloss finally finished his search. In fact, he had finished it several times over, and whatever he was looking for was definitely not there. He touched ragged edges of the smile that had been cut in the dragon's neck, his expression thoughtful, before teleporting away.

Xelloss lunged for Filia's wrists, and finally managed to catch them. He forced them together and above her head, using what weight he had to get the rest of her to hold still.

Her dream, like dreams are wont to do, shifted time and place suddenly and she found herself, though still only able to observe, in the throne room of an ancient tower that had grown a castle but remained, in spirit if not in reality, a tower. It lay in a small, fertile valley surrounded by some of the worst terrain of a giant desert wasteland. Seals, both of Black and of Holy magic, were on it to hide it from anybody who did not know where exactly to look for it.

A tall, lean man who looked to be perhaps 25 and very handsomely so, sat in a plain stone throne in its center, looking not stiff but somehow like he had been born to look commanding from it in his loose, flowing robes, his long red hair held back by a plain iron circlet. His golden eyes watched, emotionlessly, the living, solid shadows that were his subjects play with nearly worn out humans.

He stood up and walked through his keep, the scenery dissolving and shifting as he moved until he was in an underground room of highly polished black marble. In each corner was a strange-looking lamp made of a dark grey metal, and in the center of the room was a pillar of the same metal holding what looked like an exact duplicate of the jewel in Xelloss's staff.

There was a name for them, she knew with the certainty of a dream.

Filia still twisted, and Xelloss had to control himself to keep from using any more force than he already was because of the risk to her. Then he caught a phrase of what she was muttering in her sleep. "The eyes of Shabraningdo." His eyes flew open, and he stared at her sleeping face.

The dream shifted away from the man as he knelt to the jewel, and now she was standing in the road in front of her house. However, her house was ashes, and the town itself was still burning in places. Those didn't draw her attention as much as what was in the remains of her garden.

One of the creatures from the man's tower, a centaur with a monstrous canine head, sat in what had once been her flower bed. A small pile of bodies lay, neatly stacked, beside him. She recognized all of them: a few of her neighbors, Jillas, Grabos...and her own body. Parts had been cut off from them, and there were a few bones on the stack.

The thing finished cleaning the flesh from the leg bone it was munching on, and hit it against the nearest stone, breaking it open. Filia watched, feeling sick, as it contentedly sucked the marrow out.

Xelloss shook Filia, trying to wake her up. Whatever she was dreaming had her producing a feast for him, and while he normally wouldn't object to being so well-fed he didn't like it right now. If she really had been talking of what he thought she was, he needed to know how she knew about it as soon as he could.

Then, suddenly, her eyes flew open. He let go of her wrists, not sure why he did so but knowing that was the right thing to do, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned her face against his shoulder. He sat still for a few moments, recognizing the taste of her emotions but surprised that she'd actually cry on his shoulder, then cautiously embraced her.