>>5415826>>5415749>>5415674>>5415652>>5415607>>5415477>>5415348>>5415338>>5415315“Maybe…” you pause, musing for a moment. “Maybe a blessing for my own race—something similar to what you offer the elves? Our heat cycles limit us, and our birth-rate declines.”
The Mother Goddess sniffs, and in her chorus of three voices, she tells you “My gifts are what keeps your people fecund at all, little one. I have done all that I can for them. But yes, those who follow you and take my sacrament, they shall bear healthy and strong young as well.”
“And many of them?” you ask, pressing your luck just a little by intruding upon divine mystery for clarity’s sake. “More young than normal? Perhaps an extended season?”
“Oh? I thought you and the so-called ‘Sun-Eater’ values quality over quantity?”
You nod slowly, but then her words spark an idea—a risky, dangerous notion, but one you cannot shake.
“Then perhaps,” you say, lifting your eyes to meet those of the least-terrifying, Reptilian visage of the three-headed Goddess, “I should be mating with he Mother of Might?”
The Lady of the Rookeries coils cease their slithering… And then, like a crashing tidal wave of flesh and bone, then sweep inward to encircle and lift you, trapped and confining you. You feel the urge to struggle, to free yourself and to flee, but you resist it. You hold fast.
“Oooh ho ho?” the Dark Goddess asks through her dragon-face, while the insectoid countenance chitters and the stretched-and-warped mammal one chuckles darkly, sniffing at you with deep whiffs. “You have come to think yourself quite the seductor, haven’t you, mortal?”
In truth, the experience is terrifying beyond words: being wrapped up in the immeasurable power of a God, her divine perception focused on you with a tangible intensity. The pressure exerted by her examination is as if the stars descended from the heavens to meet you… Blinding, burning… Or something still greater and more terrible emerged from Beyond The Stars, to destroy you even more utterly. Her manifestation is hardly a thing of sensuality, either—this dream-vision is, I truth, nightmarish.
“I have heard that great heroes in days of lore… Have been graced with such honours,” you say, keeping the tremor from your voice.
“Dragon Kings and Serpent Priests,” she softly whispers. “All of them came to me seeking my blessing of protection. My price was their seed, to raise up champion children… Vandria, An-Ur, Gorgon, Scylla… Servants and founders of new races. I deemed them suitable for such a trade by right of their accomplishments. And yet you come here, young and yet fresh to the worlds of war and mystic knowledge, and ask for the same bargain?”
“I offer… Request… The mating, nothing more.”
The laughter which rings out is like thundering storm, like roaring flame.
“Very well, bold little boy,” the Dark Goddess says. “I promised you a gift…”
