The dragon does not need her. The dragon is complete in itself.
One cannot fail to love a dragon. One might as well fail to love the moon. Or the sea. Or the vast sweep of soft silence over a headland, broken only by the unified exultation of a rising flock of birds.
It wouldn’t matter to the moon. And you couldn’t help but love it anyway.
You could not have chosen to love her, either.
That just happened as well.
Her nakedness. Her courage.
Her tender, toothsome fragility.
Her decision to be vulnerable before the perfect terribleness of you.
She was graying. She was dying. You warmed her with the heat of your body, the furnace contained within.
You folded her in wings against your hot scales.
You made decisions, too.
Flight is a miracle.
She cannot breathe, where the dragon takes her. It is too cold, and the air is too thin.
But she is strong, and she is flying, and she can see the whole world from up here.
You were fascinated for a while. For a little while. A dozen years, give or take a little. You are not particular about time. You are a dragon.
It seemed like a long time to her, probably—living on a mountaintop, watching the seasons turn. Singing her songs.
The songs stopped amusing you as they used to. They all sounded the same. They all sounded… facile.
Armored, though she was not wearing any armor. Any armor you could see. Perhaps the armor was on the inside.
The possibility made you curious.
So you set her on fire.
Because you were curious. And because you were a dragon.
She is singing when the dragon sets her on fire. Its head looms over her like a rock shelf. The snow falls all around her, but not behind, because that is where the bulk of the dragon’s body is. It is like being in a cave, or under an overhang.
She never will remember, later, what she is singing right now.
The great head shifts. There is a grinding sound like rockfall. The head angles sharply, and she thinks rockslide, and the snow falls on her body. It vanishes when it touches her, leaving little dots of chill and wetness on her skin.
She just has time to marvel at how cold it is once the dragon pulls away from her, when the muzzle tilts toward her, the massive jaw cracks open, and she looks up, up the beast’s great gullet into a blue-white chasm of fire.
“Why did you set me on fire?” the knight cried, burning.
And of course there is no easy answer.
You burned her because fire is what you are.
You burned her because your gifts come wreathed in flames, and your heart is an ember, and your breath is a star, and because you loved her and you wanted to give her everything you are.
You burned her because you love her, and the only way to love is to take up space in the world.
You burned her because she was vulnerable, and you are a thing that burns.
You burned her because the truth, the nakedness, the sensibility had fallen out of her songs.
You burned her because you are what you are, and because there was no reason not to set her on fire.
It is not a small fire.
It is a fire fit for a dragon’s beloved. It rolls down the mountain in a wave, in a thunderclap. It billows and roils and when it has passed it leaves cooling, cracking slabs of new mountain behind.
She stands atop the mountain, burning. Her skin crackling, her flesh ablaze. She turns; she sees where the fire has wandered. Has swept.
All the trees lie combed in one direction, meticulous. As if a lover had dressed their hair.
Here you are in the wreckage.
You live in the wreckage now.
It is a habitat for dragons.
She doesn’t hold it against you. Well, not for long.
It is the nature of dragons, to incinerate what they love.
The broken woman still loves the dragon. She still loves her. Even though the dragon has broken her.
She can always, and only, be a broken person now.
She can be the woman the dragon burned.
The woman who is burning.
The woman who will be burning still.
The flames were better armor than the armor she took off for you. Nothing will pass through them.
No one will pass through them.
Not even you.
Not even her love for you.
The flames would keep her safe inside.
The burning lasts. The burning continues.
She lives, for she is full of balms, and bitter herbs, and strong. She lives, not yet resigned to the burning.
To the having been burned.
She lives, and the burning continues. The burning continues because having once been burned, if she allows herself to stop burning, she is going to have to think about repairs.
Here you are in the ruins.
The ruins are your home as well.
The woman the dragon burned fears letting the fire die, and the fear makes her angry. She feeds the flames on her anger, so the fire makes fear and the fear makes fire. It hurts, but she cannot stop burning. If she stops burning, she may get burned again.
It goes on like that for a long time.
The fires filled the space around her. The flames were copper, were cobalt, were viridian, were vermilion. They licked your jaw and up the side of your face quite pleasingly as you sheltered her. Not that she needed the shelter now that she was burning.
You wished, though, that she would sing again.
She tried, occasionally. But all that came out when she made the attempt is colored flames.
The woman the dragon burned gets tired of burning. She gets tired of touching the dragon and feeling only flames stroke her hands. She gets tired of touching herself, of dropping her face into her palms and feeling only heat and ash. She gets tired of the little puffs of flame that are all she can produce when she tries to sing, burning will o’ the wisps that are about nothing but the fact that they are burning.
She decides to let the fire go out, but it’s not so easy not being angry. Not being afraid. Finding ways to steal fuel from the fire.
But bit by bit, she does so. Bit by bit, the flames flicker and fade.