2.1

Jewel had the most foggy of recollections to her own hatching. Impressions and uncertainty. Vision clouded, senses smothered.

Darkness and confinement were chief among them.

Then overwhelming texture, smell, sound.

Barely memories at all.

But she had some.

When she had spoken of it with Tsulogothulan, Jewel had learned the astounding fact that everyone she knew had essentially forgotten everything from their first few years of life.

However, though disjointed and confusing, Jewel did not forget these years.

She supposed that, given how they spent that time, Jewel understood why they would forget.

Jewel’s new sister had spent most of her first days either asleep, crying, or eating. To wit she was not doing terribly much in general, although everyone cooed over her, Jewel included (her sister was utterly adorable after all).

Jewel vaguely remembered similar acts towards herself. Although the memories after hatching were foggy and hard to set in clear order.

Still, she did have those memories.

Memories that felt so much stronger whenever she was in her room these days, nestled carefully around her egg. Passing her wyrmflame in and out of the life within, more out of the need for the comfort it brought her, than any assurance what she was doing was right.

While knowledgeable to the nature of frogs, heron, fish (but for some reason not eels) Tsulogothulan made for a poor wise woman or midwife for Jewel.

Her egg had been laid practically full with a child within, which was very strange according to the weird. Further, the temple priest, and Mother’s wisewoman, and the hen maidens from the village and even the Rochford bird keeper could offer little better.

Of the sorcery Jewel was performing with her flame, absolutely nothing was known.

But it felt right, so Jewel did it. Refusing to impart the flame in her egg filled Jewel with a cold dread the one time she had abstained, and she had never refused to pass her wyrmflame in and out of the egg at every opportunity since.

Beyond this sorcery (which Jewel had to attend to herself) they made sure that the egg was kept at about the heat of a man’s body in her room. And that too had surprised her: how sensitive she was to the temperature it was kept at. When there was a chilly draft in her room, she felt a sapping of vigor.

When there was a heat she felt simultaneously constrained and addled.

It echoed disquiets of similar but entirely different sorts within her whenever she returned to her room and found something amiss.

An open window which had never bothered her before left Jewel’s skin shaking down her coils in waves and filled her with an even stronger desire to coddle the egg.

Jewel did not move it much, however.

Taking great care whenever she settled for sleep or woke for the day, so as not to not over jostle it.

Twice now just past dawn, Tsulogothulan would gently touch the egg and raise it up to check the occupant within against the morning light through Jewel’s window.

No one else was permitted to touch it. If this was how Honeydown had felt, Jewel had found even greater respect for the gryphon formel and her restraint.

Jewel did not understand it, but any touch of the egg, any brush, a simple rattle or shake addled her mind entirely.

The idea of someone breaking its shell filled her with a clenching horror she’d not felt since Alexander was nearly gored by the terror boar.

Jewel had obligations that she was expected to attend to, but given the situation, they were treating her as if she was a new mother convalescing.

And whenever she found herself needing to coddle and shiver against her egg to bring up its temperature, or run wyrmflame in and out, it was welcome.

But the rest of the time it was very frustrating. Other than strange new fears, Jewel felt as hearty and strong as ever.

Nothing like how slowly Mother was recovering from bringing her sister into the world.

At least the egg’s bastardry was resolved just yesterday by messenger bird.

A simple oath on paper and the assurance she had laid with no man applied with Rochford’s seal (Jewel did not yet have her own signet) and the word of the countess saw her child declared immaculate.

Which Jewel had then learned was not even uncommon.

Divinely begotten children were in fact quite rife in the histories if you checked the ones that dealt with gods and the divine instead of stewardship.

Even in recent records!

Jewel being somewhat consigned to her room to ‘convalesce’ from the ‘ordeal’ had little to do for the past five days but read, eat, fuss over her egg and sleep.

So she had finally had the time to dig into Father’s less-read books.

Most of them were old ledgers from the barony itself going back generations, but there were also histories that had been paid in kind for good Rochford vellum.

And in one of those books Jewel found out about one village in Arva of all places that had suffered a simultaneous mass pregnancy of every woman of bleeding age only fifty years ago!

Priests from all over the realm had descended on the village once they heard of it.

Sorcery had been suspected, or possible stranger curses. But eventually the cause was found.

It was written that a woman (whose name was notably absent from the record) was so bereaved by a stillbirth the year prior that she had set out on her own into the wild hills and pleaded fervently with a woodland god for children.

Said god had apparently answered with such enthusiasm that the result was deemed a divine calamity.

There had been concerns of starvation, worries over deaths for lack of care available for the upcoming simultaneous births and it was only by intervention of the then count (the father in law of the Countess Bathory) that the matter did not end in a famine.

Every birth, it was noted, finished with no peril or deaths at all, even in those substantially too young or old for childbearing.

And with the assistance in keeping them fed and cared for, the children all survived to adulthood.

Nothing else was written of them that Jewel could find regarding this mass of immaculate births.

Besides the nature of their conception and interest from some of the temples that had investigated, there was little else of note. These star-conceived children proved unremarkable peasants in every respect, not even a strange hue of hair or skin to distinguish them.

There was a note that the god who had caused all the trouble was identified but its name had been locked away and all who knew it sworn to an oath or otherwise silenced.

It was deeply disturbing to consider that apparently a god could simply be convinced by some random woman in the woods to force motherhood upon an entire village of women and girls.

Wedded or not.

But for Jewel, the important part was that the status of Immaculate superseded any claim of bastardry and with such a precedent, Jewel’s own child, her own honor and future betrothal was safe.

The child would be of both Rochford and Bathory houses as it inherited directly from only her line.

And the Countess was unlikely to annul the betrothal she had declared Jewel would have over it anyway.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The young wyrm sighed, flexing her wings and coils a bit.

The feeling of being exposed had passed after the first few days. Immediately after her laying she’d been too mortified to even move her hips out from under their blanket coverings once she fully comprehended what had happened.

That she actually possessed indecent parts that might need covering outside of bathing had been terrifying.

However the visibility of such things faded.

But with that strange new shame gone other issues arose.

Her room was feeling even more confining than usual.

Almost like it was pressed in on her.

Against her back, close to her nose, at her sides.

Like it had felt in her egg.

Right before-

Hatching!

Jewel’s neck jerked.

But it was not her neck.

It was short, tense, and far too weak.

It was obviously not the sinuous arcing shape of Jewel’s neck which was longer then any man.

But it was her neck, attached to her shoulders, fitted into her head just back from her jaw-

Another jerk of her neck and shoulders.

A spasm.

But Jewel was utterly still.

What was going on?!

Was she somehow ensorceled?

But no words whispered to her flame to demand she move.

And move she did not.

Another spasm that Jewel could feel all throughout her body but not see.

Movement that was not.

Strange revelatory memories of her own hatching catching in her mind.

It took the sharp and sudden crack of her egg to draw Jewel’s attention to turn and look down.

To see a single spiderweb of cracks along her egg, just at the top of it where nothing could have touched it.

The spasm rushed through her entire body once more. Like she was being grasped and shaken in a way no one had been physically capable of for most of her life.

But it was not her familiar body.

The neck was short, the shoulders too close to the head, the arms overly long, the legs and hips too close to the shoulders, the tail stubby.

The wings entirely absent.

She spasmed with shape and form unfamiliar and yet was perfectly still.

Looking down to watch as her egg flexed and cracks spread.

A shape within jolting and flexing as she felt her own move.

Without even thinking, Jewel passed her wyrmflame in and out of the egg. And with it she felt a sharpness of clarity, of impression, of strength and assurance.

The power of it overwhelmed with an imperative, a familiar echo of her own memory now fresh and sharp and absolute.

Confinement, confusion, a need to move.

And then flexing hard, Legs pressing, back arching, head and neck shoving forward.

Jagged cracks spread.

The shell of the egg bent and bowed from within.

Jewel could feel the tiny spots where toes and feet pressed from within. She could feel them from both sides.

Where the shell bent and flexed into the side of her belly, where it was protectively wrapped around the egg.

Where the shell bent around her feet and around short toe claws from within the egg.

This was not right, this was not birth, this was different.

This was sorcery!

Jewel however could not speak, her throat was clogged full of fluid, almost jelly like in how thick and intrusive it was.

Her throat was clear and overly long and vast. She could not quite clearly discern how she was supposed to move it.

And then another spasm passed through her body. Involuntary, forced, moving her as she did not wish.

Foreign and alien.

It passed through her body within the egg.

At last the shell broke open.

A split and pressure breaking free.

A thin membrane so much like her own hatching.

Her first hatching.

The memories muddled over one another.

The old and the new, confusing in their similarity.

Shocking in their differences.

Jewel’s head broke free of the egg and its warm confines.

Was shocked with a stinging bitter pain as air finally broke over her face for the first time.

For a first time.

A second first?

Jewel was hale and hearty. Not even a tremor in her coils.

She was wracked with exhaustion.

Her lungs were full of fluid and she was coughing up gummy slime.

The coughs brought more flexes, sharper bends of her spine, thrashing tail, kicking legs.

Her egg’s split broke entirely.

The slime and wetness that yet remained spilling out over the carpets and cushions that the Countess had gifted her.

At last air dragged into fresh lungs for another first time. Her eyes would not open but she could see herself fine.

She was much as Jewel was.

The same scales, although these were even smaller.

A similar face as Jewel had, but shorter, stubbier, eyes much bigger, horns not even nubs.

Barely a mane of dark hair.

A tail.

But there the similarities ended.

The body was stretched and strange.

Short and stubby in some ways, lanky and over-long in others.

It looked like Jewel’s sister in that way. Like a freshly born babe.

Jewel stared dumbfounded and addled.

Until the cold made her smaller self tremble uncontrollably in a way Jewel had never felt before.

And she enclosed the fragile trembling body in her coils and a blanket.

Scales almost rattling with the force she shook them to bring warmth to her-

Was this even a child?

She looked like a babe, more definition in that regard then Jewel had ever shown.

But Jewel felt her as assuredly and absolutely as her own claws, her own tail, her own wings.

This was not someone other.

This was Jewel.

Somehow.