>>5270608“Why are you still in that form?” you ask, exasperated and unable to ignore it any longer.
“Hmmm?” she muses, tapping her full, elven lips. “Why? Is there some sort of… PROBLEM, Dragonborn?”
You lift your own lip in a frustrated snarl, and snatch her robes up, throwing them into her face. She flails to remove them from her vision.
“Whatever bizarre enjoyment you derive from masquerading as some chesty ape-woman, I will not be distracted like this. There is a mission to organize and prepare for, or have you forgotten? Glory and renown will be soon mine, and with it this kind of mockery will END.”
The Novice stares at you, blinking a few times, and then a wide and mischievous grin spreads across her face and she begins to titter.
“Ah, so this form’s chest provides a ‘distraction’ for you, does it? Stirs the mammalian breeding instinct? Unexpected! But I suppose it only makes sense… Given your ignoble ancestry, oh Noble One. I will take it as a compliment to my skill in crafting this guise!”
She presses the chest-mounds together, and you turn away in what you pretend is disgust, though you and she both know better. She laughs openly, and the familiar-yet-alien sound of her derision filtered through a mammalian maw makes your skin crawl and your blood-pressure rise.
“Just how much DO you know of my heritage?!” you snap, losing your cool for just an instant as your own strange instincts and stifled sexual urges disrupt your usual calm.
The Novice Fleshweaver tilts her head in apparent confusion, and asks: “What do you mean?”
“I mean what did your father, the Chaplain, tell you? About me? About my… Creation?”
She narrows her eyes, and says nothing. Her expression, veiled behind her natural cunning and the unusual and alien visage she still wears, makes her impossible to read.
“I know the entirety of it,” she says, “OBVIOUSLY.”
“Then why?” you ask her, your emotionality exploding out in a sudden burst. “Why did you—did HE—lie to me all these years? Why did you all even PRETEND I was a real Dragonborn?”
She stares, eyes wide. Immediately, you realize you have made a mistake. Damn these pubescent hormones! Damn your half-mammal mother for bequeathing you with—
No. No. You take a breath. You steady yourself. You are Dragon. You are Sovereign. You are BETTER than this.
“What do you mean?” the Novice asks quietly, donning her now ill-fitting robes and elaning in with serious expression.
You sigh. Well, if the human sacrifice is out of the bag, as it were, it’s best not to leave her to speculate. You spill the sordid story of your conception and your tainted bloodline, as you now understand it. To your surprise, the Novice seems truly ignorant of the whole affair.
