You had almost forgotten what her presence felt like when the air began to hum again. The stars dimmed, the wind slowed, and somewhere deep within the veins of the world, the pulse of a dragon stirred. It always began this way — a quiet trembling beneath the earth, a signal that the dormant instincts of Dan Heng’s blood had awakened once more.

When she arrived at the Sanctuary of Marble, her steps were soft, precise, as if every movement carried centuries of discipline. Yet her breath betrayed her — shallow, tremulous, burdened by something primal and ancient. You felt it before you saw it, the way the ground responded to her pulse, the subtle heat that grew between the stones.

Dan Heng never said it out loud, but you knew. The cycles came rarely for her kind — not like other dragons, who burned through their needs every few decades. Hers came like celestial storms, centuries apart, violent in their restraint. Each time, she sought you. Not because of power, nor because of what you were to her, but because you were the only one who could still her chaos without breaking her.

When she stood before you, her eyes were bright with that impossible turquoise glow, veins of light flickering beneath her skin like rivers of molten jade. Her horns — sharp, spiraling, divine — caught the lamplight like obsidian. There was reverence in the silence that passed between you, the kind that existed between gods before creation.

“You're back.” you murmured.

Dan Heng didn’t answer at first. Her voice, when it came, was low and rough, as if scraped from stone. “I tried to resist it this time,” she said. “But it’s… different now. Stronger. Louder.”

You reached for her, not in comfort but in recognition — the same gesture you had made every few centuries when this ritual repeated itself. Her pulse was thunder beneath her skin, her temperature rising like the desert wind before a storm. She trembled, not out of weakness, but out of the unbearable control she forced upon herself.

And you… you felt the ancient bond pull taut again. The connection between a Chrysos Heir and a Dragon, older than language itself. Her need wasn’t merely physical; it was metaphysical, like the earth calling for rain, like the cosmos craving its own reflection.