The dragon's harem

After the girls had their fun, Aella had her chance with Arad, and she took her sweet time. Unlike any of them, she was already used to Arad and his passion. The night was still long, so she didn’t hold back, not one bit.

Zephyr, on the other hand, sat on the bedside table and watched. To her, this night was nothing but an amusing show, and she only needed to keep an eye on Arad, just in case something went wrong.

Focusing back on her magic, Zephyr engulfed the entire room, then spread her senses outside the Merlin’s labyrinth and into the inner castle, then to the outside world. She still had one mission to finish this night, and it was to make it easier for Aella to control her expansion.

While Zephyr is the one who grants power to Aella, what she grants is just pure spirit wind magic, nothing else. The one who shapes that magic into refined spells is Aella herself. It is like giving water to someone, then watching them turn into flavored shaved ice.

But to achieve that level of success, Aella had to learn and match Zephyr’s magic wavelength and resonate with her. It wasn’t impossible because she was her herald, but that was still hard and lowered the potential efficiency she could eventually reach.

Because of that, Zephyr had to take her own advice to heart. She had once told Arad that relationships are built upon compromises. Finding someone you perfectly match is nearly impossible, and all long-lasting relationships have both parties giving up something to tolerate the other.

While the relationship between Aella and Arad is romantic, and the compromises between them are somewhat obvious, the relationship between Aella and Zephyr is a bit too murky. Certainly, it’s not romantic, and it’s not that of business partners or friends either.

The two were like family. Aella’s mother had been Zephyr’s herald before, and now Aella took her place. That had made Zephyr feel like a stepmother to her; she had even watched conception, birth, and growth.

Out of everything that Zephyr had contracted in her thousands of years of life, Aella was indeed the most talented and lucky, because she got to live at the same time as Arad. The way Arad, no, the way AO influences the world is both mystical and rooted in physical reality.

It is the same as when a world record, which was once thought to be unreachable, gets broken; suddenly, many more athletes start breaking it as well. When Arad Orion was born, the universe itself shifted, shuddered, and started to change, hoping to match the newborn ruler.

Aella, who was a slave, probably fated to die abused or in a random mine somewhere, had ended up between the creator’s arms. If she were to suffer, if she were to die, then the one paying the price would’ve been the universe itself.

Zephyr was certain that both Linda and Aether had seen such a future when Arad snapped, and there was no one to stop him. A grim fate where Aella died right after meeting him, at the hands of nameless bandits. In that fate, Arad, being a young wyrmling, snapped, was blinded by rage, and went on a murderous rampage, violently ripping the lives of anyone in his path.

The weakened Alcott at the time couldn’t stop, nor could Merlin. When Arad almost ran out of energy, he instinctively started breaking down matter, irradiating the entire forest, and killing even Nina, who tried to rush him down. Eventually, his life flowed in the same way Gamond’s life did, ending with him killing everyone in the entire world, becoming a world power, then turning into an unstoppable world eater.

Such a fate was only avoided thanks to the universe bending itself backward to accommodate Arad’s wives and make sure nothing triggers their all-powerful husband.

Zephyr looked at Arad and Aella, seeing her in his arms, she couldn’t help but thank her and all the other wives for keeping this man in check. When he learned that Zephyr got sealed, Arad almost erased Alina, and he destroyed an entire world just because one person in it had killed Tyal’s parents and made her cry.

In Zephyr’s eyes, Arad is more than just a man, a dragon, or an ancient god; he is a force of nature, much like her. One that had to either tame himself or be tamed by others. In Zephyr’s case, she starved and weakened herself to keep her arrogance and power in check, and in Arad’s case, his wives are the ones keeping him under control.

The only reason Arad isn’t just instantly going for the kill against each enemy is that one time Mira yelled at him for being too violent, and the only reason he isn’t ruling this empire like a proper dragon is because Isdis is making sure his rule benefits everyone equally.

Right now, with Aella moaning in his arms, Zephyr became more certain of those facts and now had to make sure her power is easily accessible to Aella at a moment’s notice. She has to compromise a bit and change her elemental expansion a bit to suit Aella, and not wait for her to change.

Right now, one of Arad’s incarnations was here in bed with Aella, and another one was far away, in a whole other dimension, in the depths of the abyss, standing alone in the dark shadows of the massive, desolate layer of pure death and damnation.

This layer was dark, forever shrouded in black mist with very little, almost no light at all. The black clouds were called the demonic miasma, a toxic and highly corrosive vapor that melts flesh and bones, and can even infect mana and slowly turn anything into deformed demonic horrors.

A demon, an old and ancient being who had lived in the miasma for over a thousand years. He was a shadow demon that had mastered both stealth and magic; having several demon lord heads under his belt, he had never faced anything worth his attention.

But today, for the first time, he had felt true fear. Standing there, Arad’s pale face, large body, and burning purple eyes stared into the depths of the darkness as his skin faintly glowed with blue light, sending a shiver down the demon’s spine.

He had later told the other demons: The man wasn’t glowing! The darkness was afraid to approach him. I didn’t live because he didn’t notice me, but I lived because I was nothing more than another bug crawling on the ground.

“He is the God of Destruction, The Abyss’s Emperor, and the literal G-O-D.”