I remember putting myself into tears on the first night of writing this story. I felt ... magic. I felt changed. If you ever try to speak of a trance after the time of entrancement, you may find yourself able to only scratch the surface of the bubble of another world, a bubble that seems to have dispensed you and resealed itself. What is beneath the film is perceptible but blurry, and any description of the world from the outside just feels ... campy. Earthly. Inane.

Understand that that's how my own muses of the world feel to me now; and that's very much how I felt trying to infiltrate the bubble after that first night of writing.

Each subsequent day demanded more energy to recapture the specific vibe and lucidity of the first. This challenge did come to me in a closed system. Commissions required my attention, too, of course. And so it felt like I was scratching only the surface of the bubble each day afterward. And yet, vibrations from the outside affect the world within. Slowly, but surely, I completed shaping the world from outside after about half a year.

Yeah ...  Tzerin's birthday was back in July, but only recently did I complete his birthday gift, despite that it's less than 2,000 words long. Despite that, it's one of my favorite stories—one of my favorite literary experiences, personally—and so these words, these descriptions, these sensations, they were all handcrafted with love and meticulous care. Happy late birthday, Tzer; happy left and right wrist, you somehow avoided arthritis! I really mean it when I say I've not spent so much time obsessing over a single short story—especially not one this small. Hope you guys enjoy. ^^

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The Merging of Tzerin and Sini

Prowling in a narrow circle, Tzerin and Sini were playing tag. The black-scaled, purple-bellied poison dragon was it. He hummed with a competitive tone as tealish sun shafts flitted on and off him, studied the tangerine-and-coal fluffed hinds and forearms of his playmate, predicted moves. Tzerin dipped his antlered head, snorted a provocation. The single chuff swayed the pair of shortbread braids of emerald beads from his cheekbones, and his eastern whiskers continued to ebb cooly.

Little saplings trembled.

A fair laugh rung through the forest thoroughfare. Sini had pounced at the fur drake—almost had his tail. “Gotta be faster than that, fang-face,” called Tzerin back to the black one. A rustling of shrubs as he bounded to shadows beyond teal-bulbed vines.

“Hrrrh,” Sini said, “I’ll getcha.”

He burst after the feather-winged, and a smoke stream of poison breath tagged along. A thrum broke from the feather-shedding wings of Tzerin, who was chuckling into the strangely misted overstory.

“Above ya, poison butt!”

“I’m after ya,” Sini assured him, and chortled. He clipped through the sparse canopy with flicks of his royal violet wings. Following Tzerin’s example, he leaped airily off a couple of wood limbs to give him a boost, before they both made a long spring down to the understory. The unresting dragons wound and zagged round the columns of the wood, panting, till Tzerin slowed into a small glade to catch his breath. Sini’s forepaws pelted his rear.

“Gotcha,” he breathed happily.

Tzerin had tumbled onto his side, blinking at Sini. His navy blue eyes narrowed, gullet droned a warm welcome. “Yes you have.”

Sini got up then pawed to Tzerin’s forechest. He flopped on Tzerin, tipping him onto his back, and then started a game of snout-preening tag. The two chirred louder and louder until they were all slathered up, and then cuddled with wings abreast, their bellies together pressed with tranquil swellings and deflations.

Slumber was stealing over the both of them when one of Sini’s long pointed ears perked up. He lifted his nose from the light clove, orange and ginger smells of Tzerin’s chest, saw a teal-glowing fruit roll to a stop.

Tzerin leaned up to see what Sini was sniffing. The fruit was losing its glow, darkening, growing dark teal spots and indigo speckles.

“What is it?”

“Smells yummy.”

It smelled tart and much too ripe to Tzerin.

“I would caution anyone else, ‘Be careful.’ ”

Sini grinned, then plucked the fruit between his teeth. He gulped it with a glad defiance. It spelunked down his slimy, silken downcast into a cave of that same flesh, then splashed into a venomous spring, where it buoyed above a burbling foam for a pawful of seconds before vaporizing.

“Was it poisony to your liking?”

Sini opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by a gravid borborygmus. The sound startled him and Tzerin. Without warning his belly ballooned with days-worth of bloat. Stretching noises—fleshy groans—and deep gurgles filled the glade. Vapors of poison burgeoned in his belly till it looked like a bruised, plump plum. His face darkened to the shade of an overripe pluot. Queasily, Sini clenched his chops, stifling a belch that would’ve otherwise burst at Tzerin. But his charcoal cheeks swelled like blimps, becoming pregnant and round; and no longer could he contain his belly’s spleen.

A supernatural force flung his lips apart; and out erupted a ground-shaking belch. The gaseous, gravid, gravelly bellow sounded as grisly as it did ravishing and unholy.

A stentorian miasma stormed the glade—shredded bush and bark and branch; sent squirrels and foxes and deers hurtling through the colonnades of boles. This was a belch which laid barbarous charge on Tzerin’s face; whose blast pinned his ears flat, as though they were gills. So even as the poison ocean of sound surged with every hot degree of a dragonbreath, with every raunchy note of digested game and blueberry, and bedraggled the eastern fur of muzzle and mane (combing them back into chaos), Tzerin found that he could breathe. He wasn’t drowning. No—on the contrary, he was in his mind swimming merrily: carried off by a current of exhilarating purple breath perfumes, of dense steam which warmed the heart and soothed the muscles like that of a hot spring.

And to think, he had thought—for a split second—of this belch as a foreign hostile, when it was in fact a force which devastated only glum and derogatory thoughts. It smelled oh-so unreserved and beguiling.

What a handsome, wholesome stink …

Taking the delicate sniffs of a tea connoisseur, Tzerin felt a dopey smile spread across his face. Hot blood flushed his cheeks. He felt that he had had a brew too many and lay before a crackling hearth, for he was both cozily warm and inebriated.

After some consideration, “A burst of ecstasy,” he drawled. “Fragrant … meaty … fruity. A glimpse of the sniffer into the inside of a food-digesting belly. A classified prey-and-plum bouquet.”

Sini straightened the crook of his neck, and laughed. “Tzer,” he said, “you’ve had one too many Sini belches for the day. May want to take it easy.”

“One, too many? Oh, no. Never can one have too much of the nameless language that is yours. It has sobered me, Sini.” Tzerin stuck his head in Sini’s maw and lounged his chin on the dragon’s tongue, as if it were a pillow. He nodded sagely. “This is my place for a good while. For a good week, perhaps.”

As drunk as Tzerin was, his words tickled Sini’s heart. The poison dragon’s eyes narrowed into bow-shapes of mirth for another belly-shaking laugh. But the laugh never came.

Another belly-shaking force interrupted it and assumed its place: a long, moist gurgle which came with a heart-like throbbing of the poison belly—with a bubbling and a wiggling of its surface. Rising over this gurgle, there rumbled a congress of thick churning sounds: a cacophony akin to that of hot tar being pumped through conduits.

A meaty belch broke free. Sini’s slobbery lips flapped lawlessly. Blushing, Tzerin found his head flailing upside-down and himself regarding the fluff of his neck being flagrantly tousled in the wake of the roaring, cavernous eructation. Sini looked both apologetic and guiltless as the noise continued to escape and rupture his maw.

At length, the monstrous burp decayed into a gusty, fluttering echo, resonating for miles. But the belch hadn’t been the cause of the Sini’s gastric rowdiness; it had only been a byproduct. And now, the true product was made manifest.

The strange fruit broadcast its warm influence through the poison dragon, and ordered his scales black and purple to drip like lit wax. The dragon turned into a great molten ooze from the shoulders down, so that his limbs and sides and belly appeared more dribbly the farther down you looked; and his syrupy black rivulets dribbled down Tzerin’s flanks like a bubbly, opaque slather.

The ooze rustled and tickled Tzerin’s plumage, and slid and nibbled down his skin. For Tzerin, it was a slow, strange acupressure massage, what with the goo of Sini forming sentient grips and fingers to pamper and caress the feathered dragon during its descent.

Tzerin found his shoulders slowly rolling apart and his mouth falling open. His tail did a slow sashay; his ears rose to invite the party of gooey, gassy hubbub inside; and he found his foreclaws naturally curling around the deliquescing dragon’s back, helping to pull Sini over him and ingest him.

Sini regarded his own shapeshifting—or, rather, shapelosing—with a subdued rawr of delight, which curled his lips over his teeth for a smile. His paws led the brigade of goo cascades, and when they made into the center of Tzer’s tangerine backside, they charged and joined their forces, lacing claws to envelop Tzer almost completely in the sentient goop.

Mostly all that was left of Tzerin were the farmost reaches of his feathery wings and his head. But goo was haring snakishly across the former pair, and the latter, Sini welcomed to his maw with a steamy, purple yawn, and an easygoing advance of his neck.

Tzer felt a frisson—felt his mane rise and splay, like that of a cockatiel feeling the same way. Was this fear, or was this excitement? He stretched a forepaw and shifted a wing, and saw that Sini’s goo yielded, and snapped and dripped away where there lay tension on both. But then, the tension did just that: fall. And the goo returned to receiving Tzerin, as a fellow receives a friend into his home for the first time, moving cheerfully, making him hospitable.

Sini’s maw came down and swallowed his head, and just like that, both heads collapsed and became one dribbly Sini head, which sunk until it was half-submerged in the bubbling pool of itself, preparing to form afresh.

What was left of Tzerin’s body was inside of the black-and-purple dragon, which became more a black-and-purple glob with some semblances of tail, of horned skull, of paws here and there. All was more primal—the wings, those were the most articulated, but even they were falling, folding into the simplifying form, cocooning Sini and his guest for some metamorphosis.

In the beginning, there was a smorgasbord of feelings, of the tenderest warmth, of goo gooifiying feathers, of reverberant tickles from reactions taking place in microcosms of the fusion. The smell, the sight, the touch, the hearing and the tasting of the two dragons overlapped, and united as one set of senses, double in sweetness.

And then, the mass of goo rose out of itself for resurrection. A dragon-shape was being moltenly erected. Black and purple were the dragon’s primary colours, but sundry shapes of his body summoned Tzerin to mind. On the tip of his snout two noodly whiskers sprouted, though the canine nose of Tzer was absent and the dragon nostrils of Sini there. From his maw the forked tongue of Tzer drew out. Before his jowls Sini’s backward fangs gleamed.

His ears resembled feathered wings, spread liberally. His antlers they were graceful, and his purple mane more lush and thick than a stallion’s, swept with forked stripes of purple. His plumed wings each had black backs, purple plumage where Sini’s membranes would have been, and a purple frontal claw. Flowing from the jaws to the neck, forechest, belly and tail was violet fluff as smooth as silk: the covering of a toasty and sturdy frame. Beneath his black paws were pink bean-shaped pads. His poison-spiked tail ended in black fluff.

He sucked in his first breath, eyes bulging indebtedly. How honeyed was the air! The single breath swayed the couple of black braids of emerald beads from his cheekbones of scaly, petal-shaped stubble.

Tzerini was larger than either of the two separate. And he was goo no longer; just flesh, just blood, just bone.

Just fluff. Just feather.

Just his own natural odour of clove, of pluots, of dragons, of male arousal flaring his nostrils. Everything, just so intensely so precisely fragrant.

His own breath own heart beating with double the drum-power. Double the succulence.

His own claws just curling just seizing rich, delicious loam: feeling it, treasuring coolness on his soles, under his talons. Just the appreciation oft reserved for the touch of a lover’s flesh.

Just the chirps of birds and rustles of bush-and-tree-stuff. Just clicks of movement so crisp and resonant and good.

Just seeing vividly, seeing really, seeing anew.