Glade 1, 115
Caelum yawned and opened his eyes just enough to assess how much daylight he was going to be dealing with. He brought his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes upon seeing just how bright it was. The next order of business was figuring out where he actually was. He could tell that he was in a bed, but it wasn't his bed. It was empty, save for himself and a handful of pillows that were positioned such to suggest that he'd had quite a fun night indeed.
He swung his feet over the side of the bed and got up, yawning again before shuffling around the room looking for his clothes. He threw on his pants and t-shirt. He'd gotten his jacket half on before the door creaked open.
"Finally awake I see," said a fairly pretty aelven woman. Her tone was unamused as she hurried around the room trying to tidy up.
"That I am," Caelum said with a smile. Much of the previous night alluded him thanks to alcohol but he recognized the woman so that could only mean one thing.
"Well, you're welcome to stay, but I believe you said something about needing to get up early to go training?"
"Oh…" Caelum said as he wracked his brain. In truth, he couldn't remember but it did make some sense. "I should be going then. Sorry about the mess," he said in reference to the state of the room. They'd really gone wild, it seemed.
The aelf nodded without another word and Caelum took his leave, putting the rest of his jacket on and hopping out onto a branch. Training. What was it he wanted to train? "probably druidism," he muttered as he slid along a slope and hopped off onto a main path that was filled with aelves.
He had taken on druidism because that was simply the way of life here, but he was not all that good at it. He was content simply knowing the basics up until a recent trip to the edge of the forest almost ended up with his throat getting gouged out by a monster. He'd incinerated it to dust, but that hadn't changed the fact that he'd nearly died. It was a wake up call, because he knew he would have had no trouble keeping the creature at bay if he'd been able to use the forest to his advantage.
He'd only bound himself to one species of plant – a tree with nice hard bark and leaves that turned a wonderful shade of red in the fall. He'd done the binding with the plant for the sole purpose of being able to manifest bark from his body in times of need… but apparently he could not grow the bark fast enough.
So, today he wanted to work on that. Floramancy, that was the official word for it, he remembered. He eventually came across a nice quiet spot to sit and rest his back against a tree. He was just about to start when a familiar voice came from above him.
There was a rustling sound and suddenly a face dropped down in his field of view. Silk was her name and she was upside down, dangling from a vine. "Whatcha doing?" she asked innocently.
"I was trying to focus," he said, emphasizing the word 'trying.'
"On?"
"Floramancy. Creating bark, specifically." Caelum held out his hand and made a concentrated look as he fed saol into his palm. At first nothing seemed to happen, but slowly, ever so slowly, a brown spot began to emerge from the center of his hand. The more life force he fed it, the larger it grew until there was a solid piece of bark. He let go of his concentration and finally took a breath while Silk cocked her head to the side.
"That's… not very good," she said with a frown. She held out her hand and plucked the piece of bark from his skin, drawing a hiss of pain from the dragon.
"Oops, sorry. Hmm… You looked like you were focusing pretty hard… what were you thinking about?" Silk's body twirled and she landed in front of him gracefully. She squatted down and frowned at his defeated expression.
"What do you mean? I was focusing on… creating bark. Poured a good deal of saol into my hand just to accomplish that much." Caelum sighed.
"Must be a tough thing to imagine. What's using your Grist like?" Silk pressed. She held out a hand and lifted his chin so that he'd look into her eyes.
Caelum stared at her aelven features for a moment then averted his eyes anyways. He pushed himself up to his face, slightly embarrassed at the blush developing on his face.
"It's different. I have a power building up inside of me. It takes time, days, weeks... And that's just the luxium coursing through my veins. There's parts of Grist that happens without me even knowing, without me even willing it to. It's so… natural. It's nothing like druidism." He let out an exasperated sigh and a puff of smoke escaped his lips. He growled instinctively, feeling the urge to let loose a torrent of flames into the sky but he calmed himself. Sometimes he had to remind himself that he was, in fact, a dragon.
"Must be frustrating, living among the trees and not being able to use its magic properly," Silk teased. "Try thinking about it differently. Think of what it must be like to BE a tree. You are part plant if you're a druid. Embrace that part of you. Don't try to force it out like you would a dragon's breath."
"I know, I know…" Caelum said as he tried calming himself. He was fully aware of all the basic advice. He lived among aelves for fuck's sake, he'd had so many teachers he couldn't even recall their names. But it was all easier said than done.
"You don't understand. If I put you in the form of a dragon and asked you to fly, I think it'd be much easier to understand my situation."
"I don't think that would be so hard," chided Silk, "if I had hundreds of thousands of dragons around me happy to teach me. Here." She stepped up to him and grabbed him by the hand. She pushed him against the tree and grinned at his now intense blush. She was an attractive young aelf, no older than twenty five and was as playful as they came. She'd only recently started to realize these things and had begun to use them to her advantage, making males uncomfortable as often as possible.
She stared into his eyes and leaned in as if she was going to give him a kiss. She watched Caelum squirm then freeze but she backed off with a coy smile. She held up their hands and turned her gaze towards it. "Focus," she said softly. Her hand started to sprout petals as she spoke and hummed softly. Caelum looked at his hand and a shiver ran down his spine.
This feeling… it was different. With the tree against his back, with this beautiful aelf right up against him, he felt more aelven than dragon. He willed bark to form and suddenly… Bark. It started quickly, wrapping all the way around his hand and even extending out along Silk's arm. He hardly noticed the saol being drained from his body as his focus was consumed by what was happening.
"Muah"
The magical moment abruptly ended when Silk planted a kiss on his cheek then twirled away. "See? Easy."
"Hey, wait," Caelum said, but Silk had already started climbing up the tree. He tried to give chase, but there was no catching her. He scrambled up the tree behind her but by the time he got to the first branch, the aelf had already leapt far outside of his comfort zone.
"I'll get her for that," he said to himself, rubbing the place where she'd kissed him. He'd never bedded her before. Supposedly she'd never actually done anything of that sort, despite how she acted. Compared to most aelves she was still a baby and he thought of her the same way at times.
He turned his attention back to his hand which had hard bark all over it. He started breaking it off piece by piece, to free his skin of its grip. He guessed he had what it took the whole time, it just took a unique kind of push to get him going. He had to admit that none of his aelf teachers had ever tried an approach like that before.
He tried to repeat the experiment, focusing on that moment and how he'd felt. He channeled that feeling into his other hand and, sure enough, bark started to form quite easily. Even as he stopped focusing on that feeing, he was now familiar with the sensation of bark manifesting and it was much easier to do it.
Perfect.
