To Desire a Dragon - Amanda Milo
PROLOGUE
Nalle
In all of the plains on the great Isle of Venys, there are two types of theft that cause the greatest devastation among tribes: penis reft and cum raids.
If you’re a Venysian inhabitant, you’re well aware of the fact that the most valuable object in all of the land is a man of good breeding ability.
Because Venys needs men.
Why do females outnumber males to such a vast degree? Why the enormous disparity?
Legends and tales abound, but none of our people know for sure. My village, the North Plains Tribe, no longer cares to seek out the why of male scarcity. Instead, we concentrate on how best to keep us from extinction by protecting our males and using them as fairly as possible for repopulating the tribe. The few men left to us are equal to precious treasure, and that’s true of males anywhere. Thus, the men-raiding.
The things women will do to secure a clutch with a man are detrimental to tribes. Penis reft, for example, is straight-up man theft, where a marauding tribe captures another tribe’s menfolk and steals them for their own tribe’s breeding purposes.
Cum raids would seem, on the surface, to be preferable to losing breeding men. A cum raid is where women sneak into camps and villages, slip into the breeding lodges, and gag a man so he can’t call out for help. They ride the male, encouraging him with every asset they have available—be it their mouths or cock rings—to keep him in a swollen, semen-spewing, rigid state. They don’t steal the male specimen; they only steal his cum, racing off at dawn with it dripping from between their thighs, leaving an exhausted, used man behind, sore and drained.
Give him a little time to recover and he’ll easily be able to impregnate his tribeswomen again. He’s not lost to the women of his village forever. But the danger in cum raids is insidious: if one of the raiders gives him the shaft chancre—or crotch crickets, or trichy itch, or any number of the riddling diseases, infections, and bugs that jump from rider to dick—he could go on to infect his whole tribe. Depending on the type of prick rot he contracts and what he passes to his women, it could cause everything from miscarriages to suffering babies. There are whole generations of tribes who’ve grown up with oddly swollen joints, impaired vision, sharp body pains, saber shins, and dental defects—all because they were fathered by a man who was genitally compromised on a cum raid.
The only ones spared will be the women too pregnant or too fresh from a delivery to have bothered riding him. And a tribe can’t thrive with puny numbers of healthy people. And while things may be different in the jungles or deserts of the southern hemisphere, or in the frozen wilds of the far, far north, in our corner of the world, we began to seek methods of aggressively guarding our men.
That’s how I ended up mated to a dragon.
CHAPTER 1
Nalle
“Dragons are small,” Yatanak assured me. His grizzled face, seasoned by many harsh-winded winters and scorching summer suns, creased with a confident smile. “No bigger than a partapa. But very fierce.”
We need fierce. Our tribe (smaller than some, with a good number of the women being my half-sisters) could use serious fierce. An adult male partapa would perhaps be as tall as my knee—not their withers, but the top of their head. I eyed Yatanak dubiously. “And one dragon can protect our tribe? One lone dragon, knee-high?”
Yatanak nodded. “It was said that there is nothing in the worlds that fights more ferociously than a dragon when he’s guarding those under his protection.”
It was promising news, and that’s what spurred me to action. I cling to this hope of the ultimate knee-high protector as I rotate my wrist, whipping my hook-on-a-string in a lasso as I pick my way higher up the mountain.
The hook is a wicked-looking bit of curved metal about the size of my thumb. That’s from joint to nail. It’s too big for fish, but Yatanak decreed it would hook a dragon. As the eldest among our people, his sage advice is sought out often and followed always. It’s hard to catch time alone with him. He may be aged to something resembling conifer bark, but his summer turf house is never empty because our women miss male company—and he’s it.
As the last unrelated male for a chunk of my tribesisters (every female of The Great Antelope Hunt generation and