Chapter 39: Hatching Frenzy
The sound wasn’t a crack. It was a splintering of the world.
Taichi gasped, a sharp, startled sound as his entire chest seized. Twin points of heat bloomed beneath his nipples, a sudden, urgent pressure that had nothing to do with arousal. A warm, thin dampness spread across the front of his ruined robe. His milk had let down, triggered by that crystalline summons deep in the stone.
Ryuu was moving before Taichi could process it. He scooped him up from the chair, silk and all, cradling him against a chest that felt like vibrating granite. “They come,” Ryuu growled, and his voice held a tremor Taichi had never heard—not fear, but something vast and primal. “And they will need their mother.”
He carried Taichi out of the library, not toward their bedroom, but down a deeper, warmer corridor Taichi had only glimpsed once before. The air shifted, losing the scent of parchment and taking on the mineral smell of wet stone and something else—ozone, like after a lightning strike. The walls here were smoother, shot through with veins of gold that pulsed with a faint, inner light.
The birthing nest wasn’t a room; it was a geological formation. A cavernous space opened before them, walled in polished obsidian that reflected the soft, sourceless glow. The ceiling was high and vaulted, pierced by narrow shafts of actual sunlight that cut through the mountain’s heart. In the center, on a bed of luminous moss and warm, porous stone, lay the clutch.
Four eggs. Not the massive, singular obsidian egg of his dream, but each the size of a rugby ball, nestled together. Their shells were a dark, iridescent blue, like a raven’s wing dipped in oil, and they were veined with cracks that glowed from within, a network of fiery gold.
Crack-crick-crick.
One of them shivered. A piece of shell, no bigger than a coin, popped off and skittered across the stone.
“Put me down,” Taichi whispered, his own voice strange to him.
Ryuu knelt, setting Taichi gently on the soft moss beside the nest. The warmth from the stones seeped into him, but it was nothing compared to the burning, full ache in his chest. He could feel them. Not just as eggs, but as four distinct, sharp points of hunger in his mind, needly and insistent and his.
“Aki and Sora hatched within minutes of each other,” Ryuu said, his hand a steady weight on Taichi’s lower back. “It is a race. They are competitive from the first breath.”
As if on cue, another egg rocked violently. A long fissure raced up its side, and a small, scaled snout, black as jet and wreathed in tiny tendrils of steam, poked out. It made a sound—a tiny, rasping skree—more vibration than noise.
Taichi’s breath hitched. He reached out, his fingers trembling, and brushed the warm, damp shell. The consciousness within the egg pressed against his touch, a blind, desperate seeking. Hungry.
“It’s okay,” Taichi heard himself say, the words soft and automatic. “I’m here.”
The snout withdrew. For a second, nothing. Then the egg exploded outward, not with violence, but with a determined, shoving energy. Shell fragments flew, and the creature within tumbled onto the moss.
It was a dragon. Minuscule, perfect, and utterly alien. Its body was long and serpentine, covered in damp, black scales that shone with blue highlights. Two nubby horns crowned its head, and its wings were crumpled, wet parchment stuck to its sides. It lifted its head, milky blue eyes blinking open. It sniffed the air, its head weaving, then zeroed in on Taichi.
Skree.
It began to crawl, movements jerky and uncoordinated, dragging its wet wings. It moved with a single-minded purpose, straight toward the heat and the scent of milk.
Another egg split open, then another in quick succession. The nest became a scene of chaotic, quiet birth. Three more wet, scrambling forms emerged, each slightly different—one with hints of crimson in its scales, another with a wider, sturdier build, the last with a longer, more elegant tail. Their discordant skrees filled the chamber, a chorus of raw need.
The firstborn reached Taichi’s knee. It butted its head against him, then started to climb, its tiny claws pricking through the silk. It was stronger than it looked. Taichi sat frozen, watching this impossible thing scale his body like a mountain.
Ryuu’s hand shifted, pulling the wet robe open further, baring Taichi’s chest. The cool air made his nipples peak tighter, and another bead of milk, opalescent and faintly glowing, welled up.
The dragonet saw it. With a final heave, it hauled itself up, draped its slender body over Taichi’s pectoral, and nuzzled. Its snout was hot and rough. It latched on.
The sensation was not pleasure. It was a deep, pulling suction that seemed connected to his spine, to the base of his skull. It was a drain, a demand. Taichi cried out, his hand coming up to cradle the small, trembling back instinctively. He felt the milk let go, a hot stream flowing into the hungry creature. The tiny body vibrated with a purring rumble.
The other three reached him. They clambered over each other, a tangle of scales and tiny claws, each seeking a place. One found his other nipple. The remaining two, thwarted, nosed at his collarbone, his sternum, mewling in frantic disappointment.
“There’s only two,” Taichi gasped, overwhelmed by the pulling, the reality of these things feeding from him.
Ryuu moved. He carefully lifted one of the seeking dragonets, the crimson-scaled one, and guided its mouth to where the first was already latched. “They can share. They will learn to queue.” His voice was thick with an emotion that clogged the air. He did the same with the fourth, placing it at Taichi’s other side.
Taichi was pinned, nourishing four ancient, newborn lives. The pull was relentless, a constant, steady draw that left him feeling light-headed and profoundly used. He looked down at the cluster of small, scaled bodies, their eyes closed in focus, their tiny throats working as they swallowed. The milky blue film was already clearing from the firstborn’s eyes, revealing pupils like slivers of molten gold.
He looked up at Ryuu. His boss. The dragon lord. The father. Ryuu was watching the scene with an expression of utter, devastating conquest. His fingers traced the line of Taichi’s jaw, then the curve of his shoulder, possessive and reverent.
“They know you,” Ryuu murmured. “Your scent. Your magic. Your blood. You are their absolute world.”
One of the dragonets, the sturdy one, detached with a soft pop. It blinked its now-clear golden eyes up at Taichi, gave a satisfied little chirp, and then, before his gaze, its form shimmered. The scales rippled, the body compacted, the long tail retracted. In a span of three heartbeats, the tiny dragon was gone. In its place, curled against Taichi’s side, was a perfectly formed human infant—with a dusting of coppery scales across its shoulders and a faint, smoky warmth to its skin.
Taichi stopped breathing.
The baby yawned, revealing a tiny, pink mouth, and nestled deeper into the silk.
The others, one by one, finished their first meal and began to shift. The long-tailed one became a slender baby with dark hair and sapphire-blue scales along its spine. The firstborn, the black-scaled one, shifted last, becoming a quiet, watchful infant with eyes that still held a ring of fire around the pupil.
The chamber was silent but for their soft, sleeping breaths. The obsidian walls reflected the image back at Taichi: him, disheveled and half-dressed, cradling four impossibly beautiful, not-quite-human newborns, with a dragon in man’s skin kneeling beside him in worshipful silence.
The empty, aching fullness in his chest was gone. Replaced by a different, terrifying fullness in his arms.
From the corridor outside, there was a faint, hesitant scuff of a shoe on stone.
Hana’s voice, thin and shell-shocked, whispered through the entrance. “Taichi? I… I brought towels. And, uh, the internet said… formula? But I guess…” Her sentence died.
Ryuu didn’t turn. His eyes stayed on Taichi and their clutch. “Enter,” he said, the word a low command that echoed in the quiet. “See what your friend has wrought.”
Taichi finally looked away from the babies, toward the archway where his old life lingered, holding a stack of fluffy white towels and a look of utter, life-altering disbelief.