>>5539829You step forward. The Novice glowers, tail lashing and gracefully long hunch loweringa s she enters a defensive crouch.
“I am not in heat any longer,” she reminds you.
You spread your arms, and wrap them around her. She awkwardly wavers in place, clearly not sure how to respond.
“I know,” you say.
You muster your courage.
“In truth,” you admit, clearing your throat to avoid a strange hitch in your voice, “I am not sure it would matter if you were.”
The Novice looks at you queerly, and you cringe a little at her searching expression. In truth, you had almost been dreading the Novice’s heat, because you knew, on some level, it would lead to this conversation. But then… What is love, but the opposite of fear, right? You resolved to be done with hiding yourself away.
You tell her of your spiritual dream-mating with the Dark Goddess called Lady of the Rookery and Mother of Dragons—a mating you initiated in a haze of power-lust and with ambitions to demigodly legacy, but which ahs haunted you ever since.
“Well, perhaps she has done all we of the female sex a favour,” the Novice Fleshweaver jokes. “ Your <appetite> was always overactive.”
“But it is now nonexistent,” you lament.
The two of you are seated beside each other now, upon some bare and blackened stone. The Novice makes no physical contact with you, the emotional intimacy you are displaying clearly more than she is used to coping with even WITHOUT any physical contact.
“But… No offspring ahs yet been produced,” the Novice states, with a hint of a question.
You confirm as much.
“And the Nothic,” she says, referring to your messenger-tutor, sent by the Master of the Insightful Eye and God of Wisdom, “This is the ‘affliction’ he spoke of?”
You nod again.
The Novice adjusts her red-and-white robe-of-office, and is quiet for a moment.
“This may be serious, “ she eventually acknowledges. “I TOLD you that you were over-trusting of the Dark Gods. They never give freely—it is in their nature! She has taken something from you… Or given you something roe, more than what you believed you were receiving… More than you wanted.”
You look at her, faintly alarmed, and cannot keep the pela from your voice as you ask:
“Can you fix this, Fleshweaver?”
The Novice hisses and grimaces at this.
“My aptitude is FLESHweaving, not… Spirit. But… Maybe. When we return to our home, MAYBE I can find a way to make this right, with help!”
You cannot help it—you embrace her again, clinging to her. The Novice is stiff and uncomfortable for a time, but eventually she sighs and ebraces you about your waist, curcling her head and neck against your own.
“You are genuinely defective,” she murmurs, like a sweet nothing. “A helpless hatchling. A broken little thing masquerading as a monarch.”
“I love you too,” you reply.
She scoffs, but doesn’t renounce the implication outright.
