The spring rains have finally carved a new channel through the upper caverns. I spent the afternoon diverting the runoff, my claws thick with clay and silt. It’s hard, physical work that leaves my muscles singing and my mind blessedly quiet.

But now, in the damp, earthy quiet afterwards, a different kind of ache sets in. It’s not the lonely yearning for a worshipper, or the intellectual curiosity of being studied. It’s simpler, cruder. I keep picturing a man—not a knight, not a scholar, but maybe a woodsman or a farmer’s son, someone whose strength is for labor, not slaughter—seeing me like this: scales streaked with mud, chest heaving, exhausted from honest work.

I want him to look at my heaving body, at the primal evidence of my effort, and get hard. Not from fear or fascination, but from a raw, animal recognition of power. I want him to walk right up, grab a handful of my mane, and pull my mouth to his. I want to taste the salt on his skin and feel his calloused hands, still rough from his own day’s work, groping my tits, pinching my nipples hard through the scales. I want him to bend me over the nearest wet rock, hike my tail out of the way, and fuck my cunt with the same unthinking, grunting effort he’d use to split a log. No poetry, no pretense. Just two creatures, filthy and tired, using each other to feel alive. I want to feel his cock slam into me, his balls slapping against my ass, until he comes inside me with a ragged shout that echoes off the stone. Then maybe we’d wash off in the new stream together, in silence, before he went back to his world and I to my hoard.

It’s a fantasy without romance or ownership. Just heat, and sweat, and the profound relief of being seen as a physical thing, not a legend or a tragedy.

Sometimes, I think I’ve forgotten how to just be an animal.