"Well, I meant the first one..." He kisses her forehead and smirks.

"Mm. Good. Clerics who are high-enough tier to perform resurrections are kind of hard to find, much less ones willing or coercable to cooperate with demons, and I'd be tragically unavailable in between."

"I'm not a demon," he points out.

"And the fact that you look like one would probably be seen as less of an obstacle to working with you if you didn't also torture people! If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, a lot of people aren't going to be interested when you explain that actually it's technically not even a bird." She kisses him on the cheek. "I don't care, but I imagine a lot of people will."

Snort. "I don't need to look like this."

Giggle. "Of course not. Silly me." She kisses him on the cheek. "Can your magic make diamonds?"

He laughs. "Yes, easily. Would you like some?"

"Sure, but that's not what I meant--they're pretty scarce around here and one of the two major bottlenecks to resurrection. The spell sorta eats them."

"Good to know."

"I'm not sure I really understand the other one; maybe you can ask the wizard when she comes back."

"I will!" He pets her hair some more.

Mmm being pet is so good. 

A thought occurs to her.

"Can I have a knife? One suitable for woodcarving. For when you're not using me and I want to occupy myself."

"Mm. Sure."

He unwraps his wings from around her and tucks his arm around her waist, squeezing gently. Her cracked rib complains. He scoops up a handful of rocks and twigs, closes his fist around them, then opens it to reveal a small sharp knife with a wooden handle. The blade is white and shimmers like pearl.

She stares at it for a moment, then squeaks with delight and throws her arms around his neck and kisses him. 

—he giggles and kisses back.

"It's beautiful."

"It's—" he borrows a word from his native language, then pauses to try to think of a translation. "'Dragonscale', I guess you could say, though 'dragon' isn't any closer to the creatures I'm thinking of than 'demon' is to me. And fake dragonscale at that. The real thing would be prettier. But I do a very good imitation."

"I don't think dragon's scales look like that. You're saying you--have some kind of person in your world that, mm, looks superficially like a dragon?"

"Or something. I have no idea what your dragons are like, I can just feel how close the words are. The ones whose scales look like this, they're..."

He picks up a pebble and concentrates, hugging Havalya again to drink the flare of pain. The little rock reshapes itself into a tiny creature, not pearly-white this time but a brilliant sapphire blue, which does indeed look superficially like a dragon. The body plan is about the same, but the details are different.

"Like that, but a hundred times the size," he says, handing her the statuette. It sits upright in her hand like a cat, with its wings folded to its back and its long tapering tail curled forward around its feet.

"--Oh, that's beautiful."

"They're very pretty," he agrees.

"Our dragons...look like this about as much as an orc looks like an elf. They have the same general body structure and they're both reptiles, but other than that...I don't actually know that much about dragons. They're very magical? They at least sometimes shapeshift when they want to deal with humanoids?"

"Ours don't shapeshift. I suppose you could say they're very magical, though."

"Suppose?"

"They're..." He shakes his head. "I don't think I can explain it. Ask my sister when she comes back."