"Sure."

He walks to the far side of the balcony and puts his hands on the cliff face. Glimmers of red light spill down the stone, pouring like water and licking like flames, until they reach all the way into the foothills far below. Then the fiery shimmer spins outward into the shape of a broad spiral stair, and fills with stone like a glass filling with wine. Last of all, the section of railing where the stairs join the balcony peels outward to merge seamlessly into the railing on the stairs.

She... looks at the stairs. Those are a lot of stairs. Horror and understanding slowly dawns as she sees just how many stairs there are. A lot. There are a lot of stairs. She's going to have to go down those, and then back up. This might be it, this might be how she dies. Not from the dragon that kidnapped her, from the dragon's stairs.

"Thank you," she says, anyway, because it's nice of him to make them even if they're possibly going to kill her. "Um, could you point me to some paper and a pen?"

Red light flickers between his hands. He holds out some paper and a pen that didn't exist a moment ago.

"And if you want somewhere to sit and write you can come inside," he says. The doors in the cliffside swing open.

"That would be great, thank you."

Is that a smile from the princess? It looks like one!

He leads her inside.

...it's stunningly gorgeous. He's had thousands of years to work on this place, and it shows. Everything is designed at a dual scale, comfortable for either dragon or human, and as a result the rooms are really, really big. The balcony on the outside is mirrored by another one on the inside, overlooking a cavernous hall with a high vaulted ceiling and a floor so far down that the light from the open doors barely reaches it - but there are magelights everywhere, and sections of cliffside artfully thinned so that sunlight can come through them even though from the outside the whole thing looks solid.

"Oh," she sighs, enraptured. "No wonder you don't get out much, why would you. You built all of this?"

...he grins at her. "Yep!"

"It's lovely," she breathes, still staring. "And I live in a palace, it's slightly harder to make me gawk than the average person, excellent job."

He giggles.

She indulges in a few more moments of staring, then:

"Okay. Let me pick my jaw off of the floor and go write a letter, before I lose my nerve to tackle the stairs. Direct me to a table, please?"

He takes her down a turn of stairs and into a human-sized side room with more of those thin stone 'windows'. There are tables and comfy chairs and beautiful decorative lamps.

Pretty!

But she has a letter to write, so she sits down and starts writing it. It's a hard letter to write, she ends up revising it twice to make sure the implications are exactly where she means them to be. She'd rather avoid her parents misinterpreting a sentence somewhere and worrying that she's being mistreated.

The dragon gives her some space; he flops into a chair across the room from her table and closes his eyes.

Saveth finishes writing her letter soon enough.

"Okay," she says, half to herself, "now to brave the stairs."

"Sorry about the stairs. I can carry you down but down isn't really the hard part, and I don't know when you'll be back."

"It's okay. It shouldn't take very long, maybe an hour or two at the most. Though, I would love to dodge the stairs if I can, I'm pretty sure I might just die trying to climb them, even if I took breaks. We can coordinate a meeting time?"

"I can wait for you at the bottom in two hours," he says agreeably.

"Okay. Thank you, that'd be great."

Wry smile.

She smiles back!

"Right then," she says, standing. "Carry me away, oh great dragon?" Pause. She looks around at the room. "... We need to be in a dragon sized room, don't we. Okay, shuffle thataway, and then carry me away, oh great dragon."

...he giggles.

He leaves the human-sized room and goes out onto the balcony again and returns to dragon form and waits for her there.

(His dragon form is... really pretty.)

She follows him out, ambling towards his foreleg so she can easily be picked up.

(It is really pretty. It's much easier to admire it when she's not being carried off. Not that she indulges in much of an admiring gaze, she's still a little nervous about being this close to a giant dragon, especially after being carried off by him not too long ago. She's clamping down on the urge to flee.)

He gently scoops her up and hops over the railing into a spiraling glide that lands them at the base of the stairs. There's a path winding away through the hills.

She makes a little squeaking sound when he hops off the railing, but this seems more like an expression of squeak than actual dismay with her situation.

"... In retrospect I should have asked how far away the nearest town was. If it's super far away I will need to change my earlier assessment."

"...suppose you would've had other things on your mind when we were flying here," he acknowledges. "It's not that far, I don't think? I could fly there in a couple of minutes, I think you could walk there in less than an hour. Maybe not by much."