She was not expecting the fire to feel like THAT.

Heat pooled in her stomach and between her thighs, in a way that made her gasp then arch.

Pressure closed in from every direction and she could no longer see the surface, fully submerged.

Maddox’s gold fire surged bright. It felt like his hands and mouth everywhere at once.

"What..."

Her nipples tightened into painful points as the flame licked and sucked at them from within. Lower, it slid between her legs, thick and insistent, stroking her sensitive bud.

Then it did something she wasn’t expecting or prepared for.

It pushed inside of her, as large as Maddox was in real life, thrusting straight into her core. A shocked moan tore from her throat as she clenched around the sudden, burning fullness.

Through the fire she felt him. His fears, raw hunger, and love for her. The flame moved like he was there with her, deep and desperate, as if he were pumping himself into her.

Right before she was about to orgasm, it stopped. All of it. At once.

For a moment, she was suspended in fire, disoriented, but not burning.

She shook her head once, and began to swim.

The motion was wrong. Fire did not behave like water, and her body kept expecting resistance that came from the wrong direction.

The other flames swarmed her in a hungry mass. Touching her hair, sucking the mark on her neck. They grew bolder the longer she swam. A purple flame stroked her clit. A silver flame was kneading her breasts. A red flame tried to push into her.

She stopped swimming, then heard a roar. Gold surged brighter around her and the other colors immediately recoiled.

Then it started slamming into her core again, claiming every inch they tried to steal. The pleasure was building again faster this time.

"Fuck, this is hard."

She said it to no one, and continued moving through the sea while her body was ravished. It seemed to work harder the more she tried to ignore it.

It was kind of adorable in a very messed up way.

After a good minute of trying to swim, she lost the fight. A wild, desperate sound left her throat as she gave herself over to it. Her hands flew to her hair, her eyes shut, and her hips fucked him back harder than she’d ever done it in real life. Harder than she knew she was capable of.

This time it brought her to a peak and didn’t stop. Her body convulsed for at least a minute. She lost track of time and the fact that the other flames watched this occur. If they had eyes, that is.

Was this normal? She honestly didn’t know. No. This was insane. There was no way that old man knew what the hell this was. None.

She started to swim again.

Orbs of different colors were suspended in the flame. Each one pulsed with the signature of a dragon. She ignored them.

Then she heard his voice.

Guinevere.

Once. Clear and warm and unmistakable in a sea of fire and whispers. Coming from somewhere ahead and below, deeper in the flame.

She dove.

The pressure increased. The fumes thickened. Her lungs were burning, and her vision had narrowed to a tunnel.

The orb was there.

Floating in the deepest part of the flame ocean, surrounded by gold so concentrated it was nearly white. It pulsed in time with a heartbeat she knew better than her own.

She reached for it, and her fingers closed around it.

It pulsed once in her hand. Warm. Alive. The same warmth she had felt when she ran through his column of fire in the forest. The same warmth that had rolled over her fur and found her in the dark of the pit minutes ago.

Then the merge began.

The orb shattered inward and the flame entered her through her palm and her wrist and her veins and her bones. It was warm at first. That quickly turned into boiling.

The pain that consumed her kept growing, moving beyond anything she had a framework for. Beyond silver chains, broken ribs, and the shift that had shattered her skeleton.

This was her skin being burned away from the inside, while blood boiled in her veins. Every cell in her body being unmade and remade at a temperature that should have killed her and was killing her and was also, somehow, rebuilding her at the same time.

She screamed.

The sound tore out of her and ripped through the flame ocean and bounced off the chamber walls. High-pitched. She screamed again. And again.

Each one louder than the last because the pain was not stopping, it was deepening, and her body was locked in place, every muscle rigid, unable to move or do anything except endure what was being done to her.

Her wolf howled in a way she had never heard, desperate and agonized. It tried to shift as a survival reflex, but it could not. The flame held them both in place. They were trapped in the merge, and the merge was not finished.

The pain crested to a peak so high her consciousness started to fracture at the edges.

The other flames closed in. The gold fire around her body had gone inward with the orb, and the protection it had offered was gone. She felt the first lick of foreign fire against her arm. Then her leg. Then her back.

Her cries grew louder. Her wolf, battered and howling, wrapped itself around the gold flame inside her and refused to let go.

She moved. One arm. Then the other. Her muscles obeyed through a fog. Her legs kicked until she broke the surface.

Her hands caught the stone edge. Then she pulled herself out of the flame ocean with arms that were shaking so badly they nearly failed twice. She collapsed on the black stone at Tormund’s feet, face down, gasping, her body spasming in small involuntary waves.

Gold light pulsed under her skin. Faint. Alive.

Tormund stood over her. His face held no humor. His eyes were wet at the edges, and the hands clasped behind his back were trembling.

"In one century, only one other woman completed the third task."

Guinevere could not respond. She was breathing against the stone, and every breath felt like swallowing fire, and the gold light under her skin pulsed in time with a heartbeat that was hers and was also, now, unmistakably his.

Tormund knelt beside her, hand resting on the back of her head.

"Welcome to the fire, child."

✦✦✦

Five hundred miles east, a roar ripped out of Maddox mid-flight and his wings faltered.

The warriors flanking him scattered as his trajectory broke, and for three seconds the High King of Velkaris was falling because his dragon body had stopped cooperating with the sky.

He had no context or warning. One moment he was scanning the dampening field for signs of Ryker’s column. The next moment his blood was boiling and his skin was on fire and his mate was screaming through their connection with an agony so total it whited out every sense he had.

All he knew was that Guinevere was in more pain than he had ever felt through the matebond, and it was getting worse.

Maddox: GET ME STERLING.

The mindlink hit the edge of the dampening field and died. No response. No connection. Static and silence.

He tried again.

Maddox: STERLING.

Nothing. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Her pain climbed. Higher. Sharper. The matebond carried every second of it into his nervous system with surgical fidelity, and he felt her screaming before he heard it, a high-pitched sound that existed only in the space between their connection, and his dragon thrashed inside his chest so hard he shifted to human form mid-air.

One of his men dove, catching him on his back. Six more surrounded them.

His men were operating on protocol because their king was injured, and mindlink was not working.

All of his muscles locked as her pain flowed into him, and all he could do was endure.

Every instinct he had, human and dragon, overrode the mission and the war and the two thousand missing men because his mate was dying. She was dying, and he was too far away, and the matebond was showing him exactly what it felt like in real time.

Then the matebond went quiet. The channel that had been flooding him with her agony went flat and dead and empty in the span of a single heartbeat.

Silence. Worse than the pain, because pain meant alive, and silence meant—

He could not finish the thought.

A dragon roared from above. More came from the sides.

The battle had begun and the King of Drakencrest couldn’t turn around and rush back to get an answer to a question he was not prepared to hear.