>>5762591Finally, and at long last, the day is upon you. Only two days after your enthusiastic farewell romp with the Serpent Queen, you are called back to her laboratory’s ornate ritual-chamber. The egg is hatching—your heir is to be born!
“Am I too late?!” you ask a you enter.
The attendants shake their heads, and the Serpent Queen shakes her head, hand on hip.
“What does it matter?” she asks, more amused than annoyed. “Do you think your presence is required for it to be born? What do you plan to DO, besides gawk?”
You aren’t really sure how to answer, in truth. Something just tells you that you OUGHT to be here, to oversee this great moment—the birth of Bloodrise’s first native-born king-to-be. So, yes—you watch, or ‘gawk’ as the by-now-brittle outer shell cracks and splits, and the thin, whitish membrane beneath it warps and bulges with tiny blows from within. You have never seen any hatching or birth before, and a part of you feels out of place among these female rookery-priestesses and kobold den-mothers. If any of THEM regard your masculine presence as untoward or unusual, though, they dare not say so, and you ignore them, focused only on your child’s first, formative struggle. You can remember your own first moments as you watch the hatching—blurry, without context at the time and distant in mindset to the extent that it hardly feels like your memory, but it all comes back. The first time you truly perceived the world beyond the warm, soft embrace of your egg, the weightlessness of yolk and white. The first glimpse of light and of darkness, and of another’s face…
The Serpent Queen laughs aloud, cackling and pointing at you.
“What is that look on your FACE?!” she demands, still rattling.
“Shut up,” you snap, before turning back and immediately feeling your heart hammer in your chest with a new feeling as—for the very first time—you see the face of your successor.
Wide, yellow eyes—almost like those of the child’s mother, but flecked with gold and copper. Small buds of horns, and fine, sharp teeth set in a somewhat-pointed snout. An elegant, aristocratic neck—strong, and long, allowing the hatchling to turn and regard each of its many attendants. Smooth, shiny baby-scales in an earthy copper-brown, tinged green, with flecks of blue-green down the chin, neck, and chest of the emerging Serpent Scion.
“Well?” the Serpent Queen asks, and gestures. “Go ahead. Help it, hold it. You obviously want to.”
“You do not?” you ask.
Your mate scoffs, and you cede the point: obviously, she will hold the child soon enough, and she is not so sentimental as to care about who does so first. You do as she suggests, then, hurrying to catch it before it sends its ovoid home for the last few months toppling from the dais and dashes its tiny skull. You catch the child, and strip away the last of the shell from it, and regard…
>60; roll for hatchling's sex“…A female?”
