"...I...hate dragons."

Said with hate. Real, almost tangible pre-occupying hate. It wasn't something flippant or devoid of commitment. It was a verbal recognition of something the young man believed to be inseparable from himself as a person. It was part of him. It was as much a part of his identity as his temperament or his name or his hopes and dreams. He hated them. Feared them. 

The fear and hatred of dragons wasn't anything uncommon...but the intensity to which the young man hated and feared them was something abnormal. He hated the thought of dragons. The hated the word 'dragon'. He hated anything that resembled a dragon. He hated old warrior's fables of dragon slaying and children's fairy tales of magical dragons and any established pub that dared to boast a name similar to 'The Dragon's Tail' or 'Dragon's Breath'. If his hatred of the beasts was something stemming from a traumatic event then it was one he had longed blocked from his memory and had no intention of dredging up ever again. 

The thought of dragons kept him up at night. Dragons were all his childhood nightmares had to offer. A perfect world would be a world completely devoid of all things scaled and growling. Unfortunately, he hadn't the courage nor the sheer, physical attributes to help make that happen. Even if he did have the bravery to join the crusaders and 'fight the good fight' against all things inhuman, a childhood of sickness had left him with a stiff left leg and a reliance on a walking cane. No kingdom or militia would take him.  He had no choice but to pursue other career ventures. That was what brought him here. 

Culdpepper Pass was no man's land; a thin, gnarled strait connecting to the mainland with a reputation as bad as any piece of land could possess. A hotspot of conflict between humanity and the intelligent beasts of the wild during several past wars, it was country only for the brave and the stupid (and the young messenger was neither). Misbehaving children were tricked into shutting up and eating their vegetables through threats of being taken to Culdpepper Pass and left there...though, unlike most bedtime yarns weaved for obedience, Culdpepper Pass was very real. Rumors of bitter man-beasts, black horrors, and, dare he think it, dragons scouting the pass in preparation for future conflicts were common.

The young man stood at the entrance to the pass with glassy, fearful eyes and a shiver in his one good knee. It was the only way. He hadn't the money to procure a vessel to cross the ocean and the offer of a scholar's position at the mainland college wasn't something to last forever. In times of war and want, scholars were a rare breed with little demand. He hated dragons. He hated poverty more. 

He'd prepared as best he could. Delved far too deeply into anti-dragon superstition than he would have liked, but he couldn't care less about his paranoia. Though weak-legged, he had a strong back...strong enough to carry  three day's worth of supplies. He was no survivalist, but he did his best. Food, tools...and a jar of what he was told to be 'dragon repellent'. "Keeps them wily, wantin' beasts away" the toothless old man had said. "At least, it does 50% of the time." 

80% chance to actually reach the mainland. Maybe a 10% chance to see something truly inhuman? Less than 1% that it ends up being a dragon...and then a 50% chance that his one deterrent would actually work. He made blind guesses and neurotic, paranoia-induced calculations even as he hobbled onto the main strait.

~

"Where'd he go?"

"Come ooooooout. Come play with us, silly hyooooo-man."

"We can smell ya, ya stupid crippled thing."

"Show yourssssssself."

He clutched tightly at his chest. His teeth ground together as he fought to control his breathing and the ridiculous pounding of his chest. Four. Four of them. He heard four of them. He saw four of them. What were the odds? He didn't know. He didn't care. He just hated it. Hated it. He hated dragons. 

He was going to die. If not by meat-rending teeth, then by the failure of his own heart. It was going to give out. He was going to die of fright. Every childhood nightmare and scare and insecurity had suddenly bubbled up from his gut and settled down into his heart and throat. Nothing but a scared, bullied little kid again. 

He'd seen the four from a distance. Horrible things. Four grinning heads on four long, snake-like necks peeking up from the faraway bushes. They were rimmed with studded spikes and fins and set with sharp, hypnotic yellow eyes. He ran immediately...and stupidly, that was probably what alerted them to his presence. He made too much noise. 

Stupid. Idiot. Useless cripple. He should've known. He couldn't outrun them. His best bet was to keep quiet and sneak about, hoping their noses and ears didn't pick up on him. Instead, he tried to run. He made too much noise and now he was dead. Hindsight had excellent vision. He'd found shelter in a nearby hollow tree stump, crawled right in and hoped for the best. 

"Come on. Don't be immature. Just take your fate with dignity."

"It's not so baaaaaad. Really. You might like it."

"Beh, he probably ain't worth it anyway."

Four voices, deceptively feminine and alluring, hissed out a mixture of insults, provocations, and comforting feel-good words. All four very distint, he instantly attributed identities to them. A calm one that seemed to speak intelligent, a child-like one that spoke in a higher pitch, a crude one with a gravely voice, and one he couldn't quite rationalize...but she voiced her words carefully and sparsely and with long, slurping hisses.

His hands shook uncontrollably. He tried to be quiet. Tried to reach into his bag without rustling about too much, but the powerful tremors quaking through his arms made it virtually impossible. His fingers found glass. A jar of (probably) fake 'dragon repellent' seemed to be his only hope at survival. 

"Got."

"You."

Two flowery voices spoke in precise order before long, clawed appendage gripped his weak leg. He gave a strained, suppressed yelp as he was powerfully dragged from his hiding place. His spine met the leaf-covered ground with a dull 'thud' and he felt the air burst free from his lungs. He squinted hard from the pain but through the blurred vision he saw the beast that had taken him. 

Four heads. One body. All four slithering, honey-throated heads joined at the collar into large, scale-covered form. Despite their voices and apparent sex, it was hard to discern many overtly 'girlish' characteristics in the actual body. Chest was flat and smooth, long arms wracked with bulging sinew. All formed into a powerful base with a slightly rotund stomach and massively thick legs with broad, rounded hips and a swaying, muscular tail. On closer inspection of the actual faces they were far more expressive than he would've imagined. Almost human-like in the way their faces moved and changed despite the long snouts and almost nonexistent lips. The eyes especially...four sets, all bright and shimmering with intelligent, sharp-looking and effeminate. She/they dwarfed him in size...at least twice his height and easily three times his weight. 

"Look."

"What!"

"We got-"

"Here. Sssslrp."

He identified all four by tone of voice. From his left to his right, the childish one, the mature one, the gruff one, and hissing one. 

He panicked. He nearly fainted, but that desire for self-preservation was greater than his own fear. He grasped the bottle of liquid tightly, opposite hand attempting to pop the cork but to no avail. His hands were still shaking. He couldn't get a grip.

"...What's he doin'? Is the little cripple givin' us a present?"

"Ha. How noble."

The difference in strength was like that of a misbehaving child and his disciplining father. Jar was torn from his fingers so easily that it was pathetic, four-headed fire-breathing holding it up so that all four heads could get a good look.

"Is it!?"

"It is.

"What sssssstrange thing to carry around."

Gruff one was the only one to address him directly. Dipped down nose-to-nose, close enough to where they shared the same air and he could feel the heat from her voice. "Hey. Empty-head. What were ya gonna do with this?"

His mouth opened. No words came. They started in his throat but were too cowardly to move to anywhere past his teeth. 

"I hear some humans use this as a trick to escape from us."

"Really!? How's that work?"

"They throw it and shatter it away from them. Then, the smell attracts some of us to it rather than the prey." 

"...That's dumb. Why would you go after that stuff when you can get the thing that makes it?"

"Not all of us can be gifted with the treasure of intellect, sister."

The childish one and the mature one carried on a casual conversation in the midst of pinning down a day's catch while the other two merely snickered derisively amongst themselves. The gruff one spoke next.

"Hey. Idiot. Ya didn't pay somebody money for this, did ya?"

He didn't respond.

"If ya don't start answerin' me when I talk to ya then I'm gon' hafta show ya how a dragon's gut works. D'ja pay for it?"

Threats made him obedient. He nodded enthusiastically. 

"How much?"

"T-...t-...ten."

"Ten?"

"Ten. Yes. Ten."

The childish one scoffed in gleeful surprise. "You paid ten human-whatevers for a jar of someone's spooge?"

The four shared a laugh before they uncorked the bottled surprise themselves. They seemed to bicker over the vile contents of milky liquid, all four seeming to alternate between control of the one gripping hand before the hiss-voiced one on the right won the battle. Her mouth opened, showcasing rows upon rows of sharp, knife-like teeth. Her tongue spilled forward...ridiculously long even by the standards of her great size. Copious amounts of saliva dripped to the ground as she upturned the bottle and slowly poured the contents onto her outstretched tongue with a blissful moan. Her eyes rolled back in joy, as if even the taste of it was enough to drive her into a gentle, orgasmic glow. 

She wasn't as he greedy as he thought. She ended up sharing. The gruff sister next to her opened wide as they pressed their mouths together. Tongues lashed together in a series of wet, messy squelches...openly kissing one another and sharing the bottled seed. The sequence continued, each head giving a dripping-wet throat kiss to the one beside her. Eventually, the sequence was forgotten as all four met in the middle, a choir of filthy moans and giggles accompanying their perverse behavior as they slid all four tongues messily together until not a drop of was left. 

The young man looked on in some mixture of abject horror and unwanted arousal. Their oral attributes far outshined that of any human woman, another strange species that he'd only been intimiate with one or two times in the past. 

Even as the quartet licked at each other's chops, the mature one seemed content to elaborate. "It would be nice if you didn't insult our intelligence. Anyone with a brain knows that you, in human terms, always choose the cow over the milk. Only a truly primitive and humiliating example of our kind would be distracted by something like this."

Childish one piped up, squeaky-voiced and cheerful beyond comparison. "Why would you want to avoid us anyway, huh? Come on, come on, come on. This'll feel good." Said as her serpentine neck slithered through the air, seductively aimed at the young man's crotch. The sudden thought of dragon's mouth near his most vulnerable place caused his body to jerk back...only to be stopped by powerful, clawed hands clamping down on his shoulders and keeping him in place. He started to flail his good leg, but hiss-voiced head clamped gently down on his calf with her teeth. He dared not move it too wildly for fear of being shredded. 

Apparently lacking control of the hands, high-voiced head simply dug right in her teeth. The crotch of his pants was torn away like parchment paper, to reveal already thick, throbbing length. "Ahahaha! Got hard from seeing us all snark on each other? I like hyoo-mans like you."

He'd underestimated those tongues, even after seeing them in action. Long, dextrous, dripping-wet, and amazingly hot. As if it had been warmed by a fireplace, it was heated to the point of therapeutic as it made contact with the sensitive flesh of his member. Fear and arousal mixed together seamlessly as he tossed his head back violenltly, simultaneous seething in discomfort and groaning in a kind of pleasure a normal woman would never be able to provide. Gruff and hiss looked on with perverse fascination, each licking their teeth in turn. Mature also stared in pre-occupying interest, but while speaking in strange, disarming fashion.

"Ahhh. Don't mind them. It's just been a while for them...well, me too, I suppose. Human ejaculant is something of an addictive substance for us. I theorize that it was something bred into us by our ancestors to cease war between our kind and your kind...but really, it only made things worse. Just made kidnappings and assaults more plentiful while the males of our species grew envious." Her neck stretched forward until she was nudging gently at his cheek for his attention, producing the friendliest smile she could muster while hiding her teeth with scaley lips. The feminine contours of his facial structure were more obvious at this distance. He'd almost consider her pretty. "Don't let their rudeness get to you. If I was control here I would at least ask permission first, but...oh well. So, what brings you here?"

"H-huh?"

She seemed to pout...or at least tried to, but lacked the exact facial structure needed for the expression. The young man actually wondered if she'd studied human facial expressions on purpose. She had to if she was attempting something she was naturally incapable of. "You know...here. Why are you here? Not many HUMANS-" She stressed the word while flitting her eyes toward her pre-occupied sister. "-come through here."

"Nnnngh...job."

"Job?"

"Scholarly work on the mainla-"

His voice cut off. Childish head's tongue had begun to slowly wrap around his organ. She started from the base and coiled it all the way to the tip, encasing his cock in soft, wet, tongue-flesh before she began to gently coil and uncoil in rhythm. The sensation was so alien and wonderful that he came instantly. Tongue was so tightly wound about his cock that it didn't even spew upward despite the intensity of his climax. It pooled within cocoon-like tongue, only bits of milky liquid bulging from the cracks in between. It was a free-for-all for the three remaining heads at that point. Childish one's tongue uncurled and the three shared the reward, each moaning pleasurably as they tongue-kissed one another and licked the dripping femains from the young man's vulnerable penis. 

Mature one didn't even seem to notice. Her face brightened, teeth inadvertently showed as she gasped and smiled. "Oh! A scholar? Really? How interesting. Haha. Ha." She laughed nervously. "My sisters aren't one to discuss human scholarly matters, but I've...always held a pre-occupying love for human culture. I-I don't mean to gush or anything of that sort, but I just have so many questions. It's been AGES since I spoke to a real scholar. What kind of scholar are you now?"

Voice came out haggard and heaving, words spoken through gasping breath and the oncoming drowsiness of afterglow...even as he was licked from three different angles and made hard once more. "L-...literary. Scholar."

"OOH!" Her voiced raised an octave in excitement, eyes twinkling with child-like wonder. "What have you read lately? W-what would you recommend? It's so hard to find good books out here, that I-WAIT!"

She was interrupted rudely by the childish one, allowing the two remaining sisters to lap at their prize as she stretched up and got face-to-face with their catch. Pressed nose-to-nose before burying long, dripping tongue into young scholar's open mouth. Any words he spoke became muffled as he was treated to one-sided, air-stealing kiss. He expected the bitter taste of his own fluids, but it had all been sucked down greedily and he was left only with the hot sensation of dragonspit, which wasn't as unpleasant as he had imagined. 

"Sister, I am trying to have a conversation." 

"Unnngh...wait 'til lay-tah! Eattup 'fore th'all gone!" 

Gruff one chimed in. "Yeah! Ya can talk to 'em when he's all jizzed out."

Mature one gave another attempted pout, lamenting sadly to herself. "...They're always too tired afterwards to do anything but sleep." Said even as she slithered down to the young scholar's exposed loins. "And when they get woken up you three just start going at it again. Shameless gluttons." Look of shame revealed that the sense of hypocrisy was not lost on her. 

The way they used their tongues told leagues about their personality. As much as, if not moreso, than their voices and general behavior. Childish one was playful. She fancied tricks and teasing and fancy oral acrobatics. Mature one was remarkably precise, kept a steady rhythm the whole time with no surprises to be had. She was consistent. Gruff one was just as rough and violent as her way of speaking. She licked roughly and seemed to enjoy squeezing him into he yelped. Hissing one was simply the definition of messy, completely without form or care but made up for it with the sheer volume of saliva and the animal-like hunger and enthusiam she used. Messy, sloppy, beastly, but indescribably satisfying. 

Tongue slipped free from his throat as, for the first time, all four joined in unison as they pleasure his rod. It never stopped. Even upon orgasm, at least one tongue was alwyas present to slurp noisily at his cock. Restraining his arms was no longer necessary. After so many orgasms he no longer had the energy to feel hatred...or fear...or to flee...or to think about anything but the unparralled pleasure he was receiving. Even when he was entirely spent and could no longer achieve erection, they amused themselves for some time. Removed his clothes, dragged naked tongues along his bare body. 

"Ahhhh. Tasty! What's the verdict? Keep the hyoo-man?"

"Ehhhh. Ah've had better. Still, ain't bad for a cripple."

"Hm. Keep him. But only if you three control yourselves when he wakes. I want to have an intelligent conversation for once in our lives."

"Slllllrp. Keep."

He felt his body lifted, raised into the air with incredible strength. He hadn't the energy to do much, but managed to whisper quietly to himself before unconsciousness took him.

"I...love...dragons."