2.3

Tsulogothulan considered the child with long, slow blinks and a keen interest. The size of the Bog Weird’s eye made it easy to track where her friend’s gaze was falling.

Running up and down the body in a quick pass.

Then slowly lingering on different features.

Jewel watched from both sets of eyes, meeting the blurry indistinctness she knew was her friend.

Her smaller snout was shorter than Jewel’s original in proportion. But still much too long for a human. Mouth and nose running together as Jewel’s did. Giving the infant’s head a profile with a slightly stretched out appearance, almost like a dog’s.

The ears were much as Jewel’s were, somewhere indistinctly between a horse’s and a wolf’s.

The horns were in the same place as Jewel’s but barely nubs, instead of long and sharp.

The mane was wider on the head than Jewel’s. The hairs were sparse but you could tell where the dark strands would fill in to give a full head where Jewel’s more resembled a horse’s mane sprouting in a narrow ridge down her back.

The hands were almost the same as a man but bearing Jewel’s claws instead of nails. And lacking the smallest finger each.

The tail was just long enough to reach the knees if it relaxed straight. But it often writhed with Jewel’s mood.

The scales were exactly as Jewels had been freshly hatched. Finer than wheat grains, bigger than sand.

Paler on the front, the palms, feet, finger tips, under the arms and down the inner side of the thighs.

Darker along the back where Jewel’s mane grew along her larger spine, this smaller back was otherwise bare, however, save for a splaying of darker scales over the shoulders, almost in the shape of wings.

After the inspection, Tsulogothulan raised a single finger out of their cloak and moved it. Jewel watched the finger with both pairs of her eyes. Although it was a barely distinguishable smudge to the smaller ones.

A vague black blur in the misty indistinctness of her bedroom and the fading afternoon light streaming through the window.

“Well, she seems healthy to me, hard to judge, but she looks like a mostly human child.”

Jewel gawked at her friend.

“She’s covered in scales.”

Tsulogothulan shrugged very overtly, meeting the incredulous expression that had settled onto Jewel’s smaller face with a placid blink of their one eye.

“She’s got horns.”

The Weird finally turned their otherwise featureless hatchet of a face towards Jewel then tilted to one side so the vastness of a single eye big around as her father’s fist could fix on Jewel judgmentally.

The reedy strands of black hair framed the pale hook of flesh, more like the bedraggled vines of some creeping plant clinging to a tree than any kind of hair.

The wide, almost fleshy brim of the hat and its pointed peak, subtly writhing with a texture of shifting things and drifting mucky currents.

Jewel weakly tried one last time against the silent judgment.

“She has a tail.”

The weird turned away from Jewel, twisting in a tight spiral that obviously wrung out the trunk of their body.

A long, scaly tail with twin ridges on its back suddenly slapped its way out from the murky, black flesh strands of the wizard’s ‘robe’. Pale square plates and triangular spines were more or less the same hue as the hatchet of a nose.

The purple eye came back around to fix Jewel with a tilt and an impression of a raised brow even though Jewel had never in all the years with her friend ever seen them bother with one.

“I can have one of those too if I want, hardly of consequence.”

The mentioned appendage slurped its way back into the robes and then a faint churning snap of something wet and springy tearing sounded as the wringing twist broke and rewove itself back into the usual vaguely human countenance that the Weird kept when they were being ‘presentable’ to Father or guests.

Their tone takes on a soft friendly jest.

“But more seriously, Jewel, this is not the strangest mein I’ve seen mortal men have, even at birth. When workings of sorcery, or star sent divine acts are concerned this is not even that severe. Perfectly normal baby, all things told.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

Jewel gawked a bit.

Her friend turned back to look at the child and extended a hand to waggle fingers in their face, it was somewhat dazzling in her poor vision. They appeared and vanished with the rapid motion in and out of focus. Drawing her to stare at them despite herself.

It was like a sorcery act all of its own just from poor vision and fast fingers.

“And when Wyrmspawn are involved? I don’t want to alarm your sensibilities, Jewel, but men and women of a peculiar taste have occasionally succeeded in fruitfu-”

Jewel’s wings were flaring and both her own throat and that of the maybe child rose. One spouting half coherent outrage, the other crying and warbling in distorted manglings of speech that sounded like warbling birds drowning in mud.

“No! no! No! NO! I do not need to hear about such debauchery, Tsulogothulan!”

The weird blinked in bafflement at her.

“Jewel, you literally can hear your parents every night they do the act, you could tell when your sister was conceived!”

Jewel’s wings were splayed as far as they would go in her bedroom, the membrane touching the ceiling and walls, her neck was curled back as far as she could, horns brushing the arch of the stones overhead.

Her forelegs had long since left the cushioning of her bedroom floor.

In contrast to that however the smaller form felt a furious rush of blood within, especially in her face and ears.

Jewel’s voice rose far higher and louder than she wished. Likely several people could hear her now.

Her smaller self warbling below the louder words from her voluminous throat.

“Th-thats different! Mother and Father are Properly Married! It’s not fornication if you're married!”

Which brought up the weird short for several long moments.

Then came the slow, languishing blinks that Jewel had come to understand meant her friend was mulling over something especially tricky for them. Which was not always a thing that Jewel thought should be difficult.

It gave Jewel time to calm her scandalized breathing, laboriously relax her wings, unclench the tautness in her neck and carefully extract her horn tips from the grout in the ceiling vault.

This was fine, sometimes Tsulogothulan or wizards in general for that matter were strange about sensible and obvious things. It was letting Jewel get some control and composure over both of herselves. Although she had no idea what to do about the rushing blood in the smaller face.

Jewel still had not succeeded in explaining to Tsulogothulan why freshly baked bread should never be simultaneously crisp, warm, flakey, soggy and droopy.

This blinking confusion lasted for a few more wet rolls of heavy lid across an overlarge eye. But finally in the most befuddled and incredulous tone Jewel had ever heard from her friend the words broke free from the Weird.

Their lid closing to a squint and their eye’s pupil going to a pinprick as if Jewel was somehow a flaring sunrise.

“Jewel, would you not be bothered by... by a man laying with a gryphon if they were properly wed?”

It was Jewel’s turn to stare at her friend in equal incredulity. What an absolutely silly and incredibly weird question.

Which she supposed suited her friend.

“Well of course not! Assuming it was done properly and their parents consented. Why would I?”

To which her friend blinked again very slowly before turning away.

“Your child is fine, Lady Jewel.”

And then in a squelch the Weird vanished more abruptly than Jewel had ever seen.

Which was incredibly rude of them.