It was Fated Mate’s birthday. For her, less than a year had passed since he’d forced her and Golden Son to leave. But it had been nearly a lifetime for Xenon. All those many centuries ago, he’d made a vow to stay alive, and meet her again, no matter how long it took.

And he’d kept his vow, even after the Widower’s Madness set in. However, he still had a hard time believing the female sleeping across from him was Fated Mate.

“Are you…real?” her voice asked inside his mind, giving voice to his deepest fears.

“Yes, Reverence,” he answered. “I am.”

Xenon enjoyed the brightening of her yellow flame, and the soft smile that lifted her lips, before asking, “Are you real?”

“Totally,” she replied, pulling him down for a sleepy kiss.

Even after a whole year on a private island, gifted to them by Knud’s father-in-law, they were still having trouble believing the reality of their life together.

As they so often did, drakkon and wolf consummated their words with the press of bodies and lips. Quietly proving their reality to one another with the single act his delusion could never perform.

Xenon was old now, in his final two millenniums of life. But when they came together like this, he had the stamina of a 2000-year-old.

“I remain your drakkon,” he murmured as they began to crest.

“And I, your wolf—oh, God!” Fated Mate broke off with a cry to her mother’s god as she found her joy.

Since discovering Xenon was the origin of the one the wolves called Odin, she’d completely stopped mentioning the Fenrir Wolf. On Drakkon, stories were nothing more than factual reports. However, as he’d discovered through the millennia, humans were altogether too fond of changing stories through poetic license in order to suit their own tastes and desires. Fated Mate’s concept of the Fenrir Wolf bore little resemblance to the story he’d told the Zone 2 wolves during the many years he’d spent preparing the Fenris line for their fight with the drakkon.

But that was then. He and his Most Revered now lived in peace.

Meanwhile, Fated Mate fell back into a tranquil sleep once they were sated, her soft snores another sign that 15,000 years later, Xenon had finally been granted his most fervent wish.

The delusion he’d called Fensa never slept. Never snored. Never pulled him down for sleepy kisses on her birthday. Every day he knew with a little more certainty that Fensa had been nothing more than a delusion, and Fated Mate was his only reality.

As she slept, he carefully left the bed. And after evacuating into a modern toilet, he pulled on a pair of pants and snuck out of their room…only to be waylaid by two little girls.

“Daddy! Daddy! It’s Mommy’s birthday!” they whisper-shouted as soon as he stepped into the hall.

They were less than a year old now, but as it turned out, they were true drakkon.

“I’m going to have to ask Ola to bring us some of those homeschooling books for kindergarteners the next time she visits,” Fated Mate had said a few days prior. Then in a much quieter tone, she lamented, “In this timeline, I lived without my fathers for the first five years of my childhood. But at this rate, I’ll only get the twins for five years in total. Funny.”

And sad.

But they didn’t spend much time dwelling on the sad parts of their lives anymore. They had anywhere from 70 to 130 years with each other. They had five years of childhood with their twins. That was more than either of them could have hoped for when he seeded her with their daughters over 15,000 years ago. Neither of them wished to waste the time they had left on sorrow.

Besides 15,000 years felt like nothing when these two little girls greeted him like the king he used to be. All memory of suffering fell away, and he could feel nothing but grateful to have this time with his children.

For this reason, he let his daughters guide him down the wooden stairs to the island house’s cooking area. The kitchen, as it was called in these relatively civilized times. There they made pancakes upon a piece of electric iron work called a griddle, while the girls shrieked “Happy Birthday” in drakkon as if to practice for the big moment when they’d help him bring the tray up to the room of the person they simply called “mama.”

“Eos! Eos!” they cried when their brother landed with a heavy thunk outside the east-facing kitchen wall, which was not so much a wall, as a collection of floor-to-ceiling plantation windows.

The island was located in a truly tropical region, and only had a few supporting walls that didn’t open to the great outside. They frequently left the plantation windows open. Not only to cool the house but to give Xenon peace of mind. He liked to see in all directions, which meant if his cousin, the King of Drakkon ever found them, Xenon would see him coming.

Xenon watched his daughters run to hug their brother, who according to Fated Mate, now looked like he should be “starting high school” in human form. Not quite like a five-year-old. But not nearly like a wolf.

Something else, Xenon thought as he watched Golden Son shift back to human in the loose basketball shorts he wore in lieu of the smart hose that Xenon had lost the means to replicate. His family, his children—they were something nebulous and undefined. And he could only wonder what the King would do with the information Xenon knew he must have by now: that there was at least one she-wolf strong enough to mate with a drakkon, and that two mostly drakkon girls had been born upon a planet without any drakki.

Dwell on the time you have left with them, not upon what might happen, he reminded himself before calling out to Golden Son, “You have arrived at a good moment. We were just about to go up to Great Wolf Mother’s room with her birthday breakfast!”

But then Xenon stopped when he saw the color of Golden Son’s chest flame.

“Oh hell, here they come,” Knud said to his brothers, as the two winged beasts, one large and dark, one golden and only slightly smaller flew towards them. “Told you the kid was doing a security sweep when we saw him earlier.

“Fuck, they’re big,” yelled Nago from behind the wheel of the speedboat. “Keep waving that flag, Rafes. Hopefully, they know what it means or else we’re about to get burnt to a crisp. Seriously, lift it higher, bro!”

Rafes did as instructed, but glared at Knud as he did so. “We wouldn’t have to risk our lives like this if you hadn’t helped them hide where no one could find or get to them.”

“Hey, it was my father-in-law, not me. And they wouldn’t have had to hide if you hadn’t—”

“You know what, I’m going to stop,” Nago said, efficiently cutting off another Knud/Rafes argument as he had done ever since they were kids living in the Viking era. “Maybe if we act like sitting ducks, they won’t roast us first and ask questions later.”

“Maybe,” Rafes and Knud grumbled, proving Ola and Fensa weren’t the only ones capable of talking in stereo.

Speaking of talking…

The two dragons descended and stopped just a few feet from the boat. They both pulled their tails down and hovered, flapping their gigantic wings as they let out a series of caws that Nago was sure could be translated as, “What the hell are you doing here?” Or maybe, “Give us one reason why we shouldn’t set all three of you on fire for coming here uninvited!”

“Oh, shit, we’re going to die. Today’s the day,” Knud said with an ironic shake of his head.

Rafes didn’t look much more optimistic.

“Hey, how’s it going, guys!” Nago called up, struggling to keep his voice casual. “Great to finally meet you, too. Sorry I couldn’t before. Look, we know you value your privacy. I mean, or you wouldn’t be living out here in the island boonies. We never would have tracked you down if it wasn’t important.”

Neither dragon morphed back into humans, but they didn’t caw anymore, either. Which Nago decided to take to mean, “Go on, we’re listening…”

So Nago lowered his hands to say, “It’s Ola. She’s been taken. We’re pretty sure it was Damianos Drákon, and we need your help to get her back.”