They worked at it until the sun cleared the horizon, with Yenni chanting Use your runes like a mantra, until at last Weysh flew them home. Home. He loved that the word had new meaning now. Home for him and home for Yenni. They didn’t sleep outside anymore, preferring to curl up together in bed instead, as they did that night. Exhausted from the day’s events, they fell into happy slumber.

Yenni’s voice is strong and clear as she sings, as she paints, even though the wind screams and slaps her braids against her face, even as the sky cracks and flashes. The storm is not meant to harm them. Weysh stands before her in dragon, and she paints him in great swaths, singing of wind and of lightning, singing to Mother Ya.

The storm rages, but she is not afraid. It fuels her runes. It offers protection.

It drives her, and she paints with abandon. Soon Weysh is covered in white runes that glow all over his dark scales. Yenni’s heart swells with pride. He is beautiful, and he is hers.

But what is this? A strange discord interrupts the grand music of the storm. She listens.

As the rumble of thunder subsides she hears it again, under the singing wind. A rage-filled dragon’s roar.

Yenni gasped awake, and Weysh bolted up beside her.

“What? What is it, Yenni?”

Why was her heart pounding?

“I’m right here, lovely.” He stroked her braids and kissed her forehead. “Another bad dream?”

She’d been having night terrors, and no wonder, after all she’d been through.

“What was it this time?” Weysh asked soothingly.

She shook her head. “I don’t remember.” All she knew was that anxiety and fear coursed through her blood. The dream had something to do with Weysh, and runes. She scrunched up her brow. “But I want to paint you.”

“En?”

“In dragon. It would give me some peace of mind to know you were protected by runes.”

“Now?”

Now, yes, now. “It will help calm me, I think.”

He slid from the bed and they went to the rooftop, where he changed.

Yenni unscrewed the top on her runepaint and took up her brush, almost sighing at the comforting feel of it in her hand. She went to start the wind rune, but somehow it didn’t feel right. Something about the air, the humid stickiness of it, reminded her of a summer storm, made her want to sing of lightning. She moved all around Weysh, singing him the lightning hymn, feeling a secret, thrilling connection to Mother Ya, the formidable Mistress of Storms. The hymn was fast, zipping up to sudden high notes at times, or rumbling and low at others. She seemed to fall into a trance as she worked, the hymn hypnotizing her so that when at last she was done and she took in Weysh, she reeled back.