FANG & FLAME
A Wings of Ash lore letter · by Ruthie Clark
Darlings,
Let me start where my dragons start everything — with scent.
A dragon's strongest sense isn't his eyes. He can walk into a room and smell your species, your bloodline, the mood you're hiding behind a polite face. He can smell a lie while you're still deciding whether to tell it. Useful, terrifying, and deeply inconvenient if you were hoping to keep secrets from a man three hundred years older than your country.
There's exactly one scent that breaks all that beautiful control.
His mate.
She walks in and the floor tilts. Every protective, possessive, half-feral instinct he spent centuries leashing snaps taut at once — because the thing he's been missing his whole long life just crossed the room smelling like completion. Like home, if home could also ruin him. His mind takes a moment to catch up. The dragon doesn't need one. The dragon always knows first.
And her? If she's human — or a dragon someone taught to forget what she is — she won't have words for it. Just a pull she can't explain. Heat. Need. A pointless ache for a stranger, and the deeply annoying sense that her body has opinions her brain never approved. I write a lot of women being furious about this. It's my favorite thing.
Now the part that wrecks me every time I write it.
A dragon mates once. One soul, for eternity — and I do mean soul, not lifetime. The bond doesn't live in the body. It lives somewhere deeper, somewhere death can't reach. Lose your mate and you don't move on. You deteriorate. You wait.
And sometimes, if you're very old and very patient and very lucky, that soul comes back wearing a new face.
"Dragon souls find each other across death, across time." An old wolf I'm fond of says that. She's usually right about the dangerous things.
That's the engine under this whole world, darlings — not the magic, not the war. A bond stubborn enough to outlast dying.
Oh, we'll get to the war. I promise you the war.
But I wanted to start with the thing worth fighting it for.
More soon. Lock your doors.
— Ruthie, Queen of Dangerous Kisses
Fang & Flame is an ongoing peek into the Wings of Ash world. No reading required — just a taste for the dangerous.