“The mage is nothing in solitude. Their powers mean nothing. Their learning means nothing. It is only when they are placed into contrast and competition with other mages that they come to realize the value of what they have and begin to push for more. Complacency and contentment are two sides of the same coin.”

—Systems of Abuse, Thele Bovradia

Once upon a time, Sylvas would have said that there was nothing worse than death. That when a life ended, there was no possibility for it to be redeemed or improved. That was before he had spent the night drinking with the recruits from the Blackhall, Whitehall and Greyhall. Now he knew that there were worse things than death, and he was experiencing about five of them when he woke up.

Before the drinking had started again in earnest, Sylvas could not remember having found out where they were meant to be staying that night, yet he had awoken now in a bed, so he had to assume that someone else knew, at least. The knowledge that he was in a bed was one of the first things to penetrate the fog, followed by the knowledge that the pain in his head wasn’t actually going to kill him no matter how much it felt like it would, which meant that there was no escaping it.

The next stage of his grief began as he realized that he was not alone in the bed. He could feel the weight of another body resting against him, a head nestled into his chest as he lay flat on his back, willing himself not to make a sound in case he woke whoever it was. He could not possibly have had so much to drink that he had taken one of the other recruits to bed with him. Surely. Even in the depths of his drunkenness, surely he had held onto his morality, or at least his bone-deep dread of getting into trouble from his commanding officers. That left an even shorter list of possibilities for his bedmate, and as a hardened ridge brushed against his arm, his mind immediately shot to TiChi. She had been flirting with him. She had been serving him drinks all night. She would have been more than strong enough to carry him off to bed if he had passed out, then done whatever she pleased.

The memories would be inside his head somewhere, he knew. But just the thought of digging for them made the hangover’s steady wail rise into a crescendo of suffering. There was only really one rational solution to his current situation, which would be to open his eyes and look to see who was snuggled up in bed with him, but the moment that he did, there would be no going back. In this moment it could have been anyone, but the moment that he looked, the uncertainty collapsed and his future was permanently changed.

Whatever else he might have been, Sylvas was not a coward. He opened his eyes.

Gharia was laying with her head on his arm, coiled around him like he was a hot rock that had been left out in the sun. In the dim artificial light of their bunk on the station, her stark white scales seemed to shimmer. The delicate, tiny scales down the front of her neck spreading out into wider ones across her chest. His uniform and her uniform were nowhere to be seen. Her scales were pressed to his flesh. Her face had been the hard ridge that he felt. Not a fiend’s horn, but a najash’s brow. And in the gap between where their bodies lay together, where her hips pulled away from him before her tail coiled forward to weave through his legs, there lay a clutch of eggs.

They were safe so long as neither one of them moved, and with the way that Gharia had cuddled into him, she had essentially ensured their protection by pinning them both in place. The eggs, there were a half dozen of them, greenish, soft looking, moist and glistening. Sylvas was not ready to be a father. He had not even considered that family and children might ever be a feature in his life. He had known the horrors of being an orphan and never meant to bring any life into the universe that might suffer the same fate, particularly when both of these najash-human hybrids had parents who would go on to fight Eidolons as their full-time job. How were they going to care for them? How were they going to raise them? Were the Ardent going to take them away, to prevent distraction from their duties? Had he fathered a clutch of orphans, ready-made, to be cast out into whatever hellish orphanage that the Ardent maintained? Would he be cast out of the Ardent for this, forced to abandon his duties to the Empyrean so that he could fulfil his duties as a father? What was he meant to do? The rules for everything were so different here. Back home, they would have been shamed and despised for what they had done out of wedlock. Should he propose marriage? If they were going to be raising children together, then surely it was the decent thing to do. Would Gharia even accept his proposal? When he’d fumbled the courtship with her so thoroughly through his ignorance?

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Feeling his breathing change, and the tension in his body now that sleep had left him, Gharia stirred. Both sets of her eyelids parted, and she looked at him and his expression of mounting horror, with one of such sweet softness that it would melted his heart if it wasn’t hammering so hard it was trying to escape his chest.

“Mmm. Good morning, lover.” His heart jumped into his throat at the sound of her voice. Vibrating through his chest from where she was nestled still. He opened his mouth to answer her, but nothing came out. Her gaze turned from him, still startlingly warm for a cold-blooded creature, and she looked down at the eggs. “And look what our love has made. I hope that they all grow to be as strong and handsome as their father.”

Panic had already set in for Sylvas, but now it was holding him rigid and wordless. His mouth working, but no sound coming out. Gharia reached down between them, perilously close to… parts of him that she had obviously made the acquaintance of last night, and she ran a caressing claw over one of the eggs. “We can be a family now.”

What was he meant to say? What could he say to that. “Gharia…. I…”

There was a purr in her voice as she leaned in closer, rubbing the ridge of her cheek against his. “You were such an animal last night. After what happened on Strife, I thought that you didn’t want me, but when you found me last night you were so passionate... and… well, let’s just say I accept your apology.”

Once more Sylvas locked up in abject horror. A passionate animal?! “Gharia, I don’t…”

She carefully cradled her clawed fingers around one of the eggs, lifting it up and bringing it in between their faces. A tiny life that they had created. “It’s hard to believe that we made love so many times in one night that I laid a full six eggs…”

She bit into the egg and chewed thoughtfully. “Because we didn’t. You idiot.”

It felt distinctly like his brain had just been turned off and on again. The pain was still there, but the chaos that had been roiling in his mind had vanished.

She took another bite of egg. “They’re pickled. You moron. We got them in the bar.”

He flopped back on the bed with a groan. “And why did we do that?”

“Because the look on your face…” She finally lost her composure, letting out that rhythmic grunting wheeze that najash produced when they laughed. In any other species, Sylvas probably would have described it as cackling.

Kaya’s laughter meanwhile, was more like guffawing. He twisted around to see her where she sat on the bunk beside them, roaring and laughing. “Stanzbuhr… your voice… G-G-Gharia…”

Gharia was in fact laughing so hard by this point that she accidentally rolled off the bed, leaving Sylvas alone with his five remaining pickled offspring. “I hate you both. I hope you know that.”

“That’s what you get for ditching us all day, Stanzbuhr!” Kaya was hooting and hollering. “That’s what you get.”

Gharia had managed to stop laughing long enough to get her head up, her chin resting on the edge of the bed. “One thing wasn’t a joke, Sigil.” She said to him, obviously trying to hold back more laughter. “We’re even now.”

She reached up and offered him a clawed hand, which he shook out of habit. She gave him a slow blink. “Friends again.”

He flopped back onto the bed groaning, accidentally splattering another egg. The girls went on laughing a little longer, until it had finally abated enough for Sylvas to ask the one burning question that still remained in his mind. “If nothing happened between us, where are my clothes?”

Kaya flopped back across the other bunk cackling, so he had to turn to Gharia for answers. “Kaya took them off for you. Said she’d seen it all before.”

Sylvas bit back the first few choice remarks that he had about that, slowly bringing his Paradigm back into action to filter out his anger. “If I could have them returned to me, I would appreciate it. As I would like to leave this room now.”

“Aww are you mad…” Kaya cackled.

“I am not angry.” There would be no advantage to showing how badly they had shaken him. “I simply wish to leave.”

“We all want him to leave!” Luna’s voice called out from the other row of bunks. “Some of us are trying to sleep!”

“Give Sigil his pants!” Someone agreed. It sounded like Harvan.

“Shut up!” Ironeyes called out from what sounded like Luna’s bed. “My head is killing me…”

Mild mannered Anak flung something at them from his bed at the end of the row. “He can have my trousers if it’ll shut you all up! Now get out!”