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Duchess Swan was sweating inside her armor. Her suit was fireproof, but that didn’t mean it didn’t get hot when a dragon breathed on it. Thankfully, though, the dragon was slain, the suit was slowly cooling down, and Duchess was now surmounting an incredibly long flight of stairs.
Her armor clinked and clattered as she plodded to Briar’s room, making her feel quite ungraceful. To be fair, though, without the suit, Duchess would have probably ended up as a charred pile of ash. So, slowly, she clinked up the stairs, hundreds and hundreds of stairs until many minutes later, she arrived at a door. The swan pushed it open, and her breath caught in her throat.
The room was adorned with thousands of flowers coating thick, twisting vines. Every surface in the room was covered with them, bursts of pink that were so brightly colored they seemed to light up the room with a sun-like glow. And the biggest bunch of flowers lay atop the chest of the maiden, big petaled buds that tangled in her long, flowing brown hair and rested gently on her bedsheets. It almost made Duchess want to cry. This scene, this room… this was true beauty. She hadn’t seen Briar in so long, she’d almost forgotten what it was like to witness something like this. And it wasn’t even the flowers that made Briar look beautiful in her sleep. It was Briar who made the flowers look beautiful.
Before she’d even fought the dragon, Duchess had come up with some elaborate plan about making sure everything was perfect in the room for the big moment. A plan about taking off the armor when she woke Briar up, about freshening up in a mirror, about making sure she looked just as beautiful as Briar always did. But none of that seemed to matter. Briar was right there, right in front of Duchess, lips softly parted, and it was all Duchess could do to make it across the room without tripping. Still fully suited up, Duchess only managed to take off the helmet before she was leaning down, brushing through Briar’s still silky-smooth hair, kissing Briar’s rose petal lips. And maybe Duchess was a bulky mess compared to Briar’s beauty, maybe she was hot and sweaty and smelly from fighting and not decked out in rose petals, but when the girl’s eyes fluttered open, the world seemed to melt away, and nothing mattered to Duchess more than grabbing Briar and kissing her again. And this time, the damsel was blissfully able to kiss her back.