Untitled WIP (New story)

With the writing for book 4 completed, I was planning to start working on some of my other projects for a while before coming back to book 5.  I have several different works in progress, and of all of them I like the one below the most.  It's presently about 45k words long in total, and I'm looking for some feedback on it.  Such as a good title.

I'll likely be posting it to Royal Road sometime in the next two weeks, so enjoy the sneak preview!

01.

Altea awoke.

Something was making a dreadful sound.  She growled in irritation, and tried to go back to sleep.  But the sound would not stop.  Reluctantly, she opened her left eye to identify the disturbance.

Her sleeping chambers were deep underground.  Although she could see perfectly through the pitch blackness, it took her a moment to spot the intruder, small as it was.  She only noticed it when she thought to look for a soul, and then the little thing had lit up in her vision like the first star to shine in the firmament.  Once she had identified the source, she looked closer.

She had never seen a creature quite like it before.  It was very small, wrapped in a blanket of woven fibers which it had partially kicked its way out of.  It had peach skin, and black hair, but the hair was only on the top of its head.  She thought it looked something like a shaved Ysgoth, or perhaps a Nukan, but Ysgoth had black skin underneath their coat of green fur, and Nukans had various colors of scales, not soft skin.

Rues, she called, projecting the thought into a summons.  Rues, what is this creature that disturbs my slumber?

A slight pause, as the greater spirit focused its attention on her lair.

It is a human infant, Mistress, the spirit answered.

Altea frowned.  Human?  What is a human?

They are not native to this world.  It is unsurprising you have never seen one before, they arrived after you began your long sleep.

How long has it been?  She asked.

How long since they arrived, or how long have you been sleeping?  The spirit requested clarification.

Both.

It has been eleven thousand years since you retired to your current lair, the spirit informed her.  The human diaspora occurred a little less than eight thousand years ago.

That explained how the little thing had gotten into her lair, at least.  Before entering her slumber, Altea had warded the entrance to her chambers against most indigenous animals to keep them from disturbing her, but those wards would not have worked on a creature from another world.  She could tell by the size of the thing’s soul that it would not have been strong enough to break through them otherwise.  In fact, the thing looked quite pitiful.

Why is it making that sound? She asked.

It is the sound that their young make to alert their elders that they are in distress.  Rues explained.  Unlike your own noble race, humans are born weak, feeble, and ignorant.  They cannot care for themselves until they approach adulthood, before which they are dependent on their parents for food and shelter.  Even when fully grown, the humans to not live independently.  They live in communities of various sizes and are interdependent upon each other.

How much longer will it keep doing it?  I cannot sleep with that noise!

Altea had the sense that the small creature had already been making the sound for some time before she had awoken.

I believe it will die within the next day or two without another of its kind to care for it, the spirit answered, devoid of emotion.  As a greater spirit, Rues was vaguely aware of everything that occurred within his domain.  A single human death, whether a helpless infant or seasoned centenarian, was as meaningful to him as a single drop of rainwater splashing upon his metaphorical skin during a cloudburst.

Altea took a moment to consider her options.  She could simply try to ignore the sound until the child died.  Annoying as it was, she could tolerate it for a few days if necessary, and then simply go back to sleep.  Unfortunately, the body would probably begin to rot soon after that, and the smell would only wake her up again, and who knew how long until that stench would fade away.

Altea gave a great sigh of frustration, her mighty lungs causing a great wind to sweep through the cavern.  She would have to do something about the child now or later, and since she was awake there was no point in procrastinating.  Before she returned to sleep, she vowed she would modify the wards to keep this alien species out of her lair.

While Altea slept, her body automatically returned to its natural state, but she was not bound by that shape.  She could assume nearly any form of which she could conceive.  In fact, the entrance to her lair was much to small for her pass through without significantly reducing her great size.  As she was debating what form to take for this necessary task, she noticed that there had been a second intruder to her chamber.  She simply had not noticed because it was already dead.

It was another human.  An adult?  It was still not very big.  Not to Altea’s eyes, at least.  Perhaps enough to fill the belly of a hatchling.  The corpse resembled the infant, with the same skin and shape, but the corpse had long black hair that was bound in a braid, and the cloth that was wrapped about her body was cut to fit in a dress of yellow and green, instead of the simple blanket the infant was bound in.

Altea sighed again.  The adult must have carried the infant into the cave for refuge before she died, leaving the child stranded.  It was fortunate, in a way, that the infant’s cries had awoken her, or it would have been very difficult to get rid of the stench of their rotting bodies.

On a whim, Altea began to study the corpse closer.  Not just with her eye, but touching the flesh with a gentle strands of various powers.  She put all of her focus into it, her understanding of its shape and physiology growing rapidly with each passing second.  Humans, it seemed, were a very simple animal.  Biologically at least.  Although they were shaped similar to the Ysgoth and Nukan, they had no claws, and their teeth were much to small to be used as an effective weapon.  She wondered if they were herbivores, but did not care enough yet to bother Rues with the pointless question.  As fragile as their bodies were, it was unsurprising that they must band together to survive.  Altea identified what she believed was the cause of death; a wound to the abdomen which had festered.  Still, the corpse’s form would suit her needs at the moment.

She began to change.

Altea had gone to sleep with her face pressed against the entry to her chamber.  The human adult, had she been alive and able to see in the dark, would have been very surprised when what she had thought was the wall of the deepest chamber of the cave she had fled into had suddenly opened its eye, and even more surprised when the wall suddenly receded, revealing a chamber that dwarfed the simple entryway she had died in.  Although much of the cavern had formed naturally, Altea had expanded the deepest chamber greatly to accommodate the bulk of her natural form.

As Altea shrank, she changed.  Her body, which had once taken up almost the entirety of the cavernous sleeping chamber, swiftly became the size of a much lesser creature.  Her form, which had been coiled upon itself, began to shift.  Some bones shrank and changed shape, some disappeared entirely, while still others formed from nothing.  Muscles and organs moved about, anchoring themselves in new positions.  Her golden scales softened and disappeared, turning into soft skin only the color.  From her head, long black hair sprouted, growing until it reached her newly shaped hips.

Soon, in the center of her cavernous sleeping chamber, Altea had completed her transformation, with her newly shaped legs wrapped inside her newly shaped arms.  She might have been amused to know that the posture her transformation had naturally left her in was the same posture in which the human fetus developed.  Although it would have been easily within her power, she did not bother duplicating the cloth wrappings that the corpse had worn, mostly because she did not understand their purpose and therefore deemed them unnecessary.

For the first time in millennia, Altea began to move.  For the first time in significantly longer than that, she felt awkward.

Although she had assumed the form of many species in her vast lifetime, the closest in form to humans was the Ysgoth.  She had never particularly liked that bipedal race, and she had spent very little time in their shape.  She had spent some time as a Nukan, the lizard-like people had worshiped her as a god for a time, which had been the source of some amusement.  Perhaps they still worshiped her.  Perhaps, before she went back to sleep, she would seek out some of their clans to check.

But neither of those species shared the same kinesiology as humans.  Their evolutionary history differed vastly, both from each other, and to the strange soft-skinned invaders to their world.  While the basic bipedal shape was the same for all three species, their internal structure differed more greatly.  She tried walking first as a Nukan, and then as a Ysgoth, but both times she found herself shuffling and stumbling as she made her way from the center of her sleeping chamber to the entrance.  It would have been easier if she’d spent some time watching a living human move about.  Instead she was forced to simply guess how the various muscles and joints worked together.  She considered taking on a more familiar form instead – it would have been effortless – but then she stubbornly rejected the idea.

Eventually, she reached the chamber where the human infant continued to cry its small lungs out.  It was simply astonishing that something so small could make so much noise!  Stopping that aggravating sound, she decided, was the most pressing matter on her agenda.  Looking down at the infant, she debated what to do.

She could simply kill it, of course.  That was the most efficient method of silencing it, she was certain.  However, she had a reluctance of killing anything she did not intend to eat, and even an adult human, if the corpse slumped next to the child was truly a representative example of their species, would be less than a mouthful to her.  The lack of prey was one of the reasons she had gone to sleep for so long; she had grown so large that there were few animals large enough to actually sate her.  If she actually required physical subsistence, she supposed she would have starved to death long ago.  Even a hatchling could draw enough energy from their environment to survive through any famine, although it would stunt their growth.  Her race was born with a drive to hunt and eat in order to grow in size and strength.  She had surpassed this need long, long ago, and had only continued to indulge in it because of the thrill of the hunt and the pleasure of food.

She could also just wait for the infant to die on its own.  Although the effect of inaction would be the same as simply ending its life, she did not feel the same reluctance to letting nature take its course.  However, that sound the creature was making was damn irritating, and although she could tolerate it if necessary, she did not wish to continue listening to it if there was a simple alternative.  Rues had said that it was making the sound because it was in distress, she recalled, so it seemed obvious to her that the infant would stop if she relieved the cause of its distress.

Gently, as though she were dealing with the soul of an insect, she touched the infant’s mind to see what it required.

Ah.  It was cold.  Simple enough.

She softly touched the infant’s chest with a finger.  She was briefly surprised, as she tried to manipulate this new shape’s hands, how sensitive and dexterous they were.  She had thought at first that they were weak and useless.  They were still awkward to her, but she could imagine now that they were much better suited to delicate tasks than any of the creatures she was more familiar with.  Perhaps it had something to do with the humans’ evolutionary success.  It was not easy to cross from one world to another, after all, and the fact that humans had done so proved that they had some means of overcoming their severe physical limitations.

Quickly, she traced a pattern on the child’s skin.  Under her touch, the skin changed from it’s healthy pink to a dark blue.  The effect was painless to the child.  The sigil that she drew had several parts to it, one for temperature, blood, body, comfort, mind, air, water, and stone, with various syntax runes mixed in, drawn all together without once lifting her finger from the child’s skin.  As she drew each, she put into them her concept of each aspect, as well as her intention for how the separate forces would work together to accomplish her goal.

In just a minute, she was done.  The syntax runes on the final three elements indicated that they were the power source, would cause the sigil draw in Power from the designated source.  The sigil flashed, then softly began to glow as it began drawing power from the environment.  The power source must always be drawn last, or the sigil would begin gathering magic immediately.  With nowhere to go, the power would build until an explosive release destroyed the sigil, and whatever it was drawn upon.

As it was pulled from the environment, the magic would flow through the sigil in reverse, which would then program the power to act according to her wishes.  In this case, it would flow through the child’s body, warming it or cooling it to a comfortable temperature.  With three combined power sources, the sigil she had drawn was far more powerful than she needed it to be, but she did not believe the excess strength would cause the child any harm.  More importantly, it would function in any environment, which was her intention.  

It was a somewhat more complicated version of the sigils she had placed about the lair to keep the chamber cool and comfortable to her.  Most of the additional complexity was because she did not actually know what the ideal body temperature for a human was – her only two examples of the species were a corpse and a hypothermic infant – and so rather than setting it at a fixed point, she had to connect the magic to the child’s mind.  It was still not a complicated task.  The sigil took effect, rapidly warming the child.

The sound grew louder.

Altea frowned, the human expression coming to her assumed face without her intention.  Her intervention had the opposite effect that she had intended.  Frustrated, she reached out and touched the infant’s mind once again.

She growled in frustration as she understood.  The cold had been weakening the child.  As it was warmed, its strength returned, and thus its ability to make noise was bolstered.  Although the warmth had been its most pressing need, it had other sources of distress, and so it continued to cry.  She delved deeper into it’s psyche, searching for a way to calm it.

It was, she thought, the most disorganized mind she had ever touched.

It was scared.  It was hungry.  It was wet.  It had soiled itself with its own waste and wanted to be cleaned and its swaddling change.  It did not like the dark.  It wanted to be held.  It wanted to hear its mother’s voice.

Well, she could solve some of those problems.  She would start with the easiest.  She held up a hand, drawing power into it, and she infused that power with her will.  A ball of light formed, and though it was small, it was as bright as the noonday sun.  She flicked it into the air, willing it to stick to the top of the cavern.  It would last a day or so, slowly fading into nothing.  It took about as much effort as scratching her nose.

The sudden light surprised the child, and, blessedly, the sound stopped.  The infant looked around, quickly fixating on her.  Still connected to its mind, she felt recognition, and relief, and something else which she could not identify.  The emotion was directed at her, and it was surprisingly strong, and pleasant.

Her race did not tend its young.  The females laid an egg somewhere secure, near easy hunting grounds, and then they simply left.  The hatchling was born with all the knowledge and instincts it needed to survive on its own.  And if they did not, well, that was the way of nature.

Not that a hatchling knew all the workings of the universe, nor had they the deep understanding of the manipulation of power that an adult of her kind possessed.  No, they were little more than mighty hunters.  But in time, they would be driven to seek out others of their race.  Each meeting would mean a fierce battle, one which the hatchling would inevitably lose, unless perhaps it was against another hatchling.  But deaths were rare.  Killing her kind is extremely difficult, and even the victorious and prideful young can rarely manage it.  An elder could kill a hatchling effortlessly, of course, but the elders understand that the instinct for battle with their own kind is not a drive to kill, but to learn.  And so instead of killing the young, they instruct them in the knowledge of their kind which was not passed down in blood.  

Besides that, it was boring to kill the weak.  That was part of where Altea’s own reluctance in killing the infant before her came from.  Far more interesting to give them a chance to grow stronger, and issue a new challenge.

Altea herself was no different from any other of her kind.  Her own understanding of the flow of power, deep and nuanced as it was, did not begin to develop until it was used against her by an elder.  A very long time ago, and a place very, very far away.

Like the humans, she too was not native to this world.

Altea understood that lesser creatures would care for their young.  It was a necessary survival tactic for those animals born weak.  But she had never considered that there would be such powerful emotions involved.  She had children of her own, of course.  Seven of them on this world, or at least there should be seven if none of them had managed to kill their siblings.  She did not think any of the native species would be a match for them; not after the hundreds of battles they’d had against her, and her mate, Rokkan.  He should still be here too; he had followed her through the portal she had created, and it was unlikely that he, nor their children, would have been able to figure out how to open one for themselves.  If he wanted to leave this world, he would have to find her and force her to open the way for him.

Or at least he would have to try to force her, she thought wryly.  She was much older, and, when they last met, much stronger than he was, both in body and in the use of power.  He had won the right to be her mate through prowess in battle, but that was against her other suitors, not against her.  Each of their matings had been preceded by a battle which had ripped holes in the heavens and left scars in the earth.  A battle between male and female, and the pheromones they released during it, were necessary for fertility in their kind.  But he had never once been able to truly force her to submit to him, as males thought was proper.  Rather she had yielded to his advances of her own will once she had sensed the change in her body to signal the beginning of her ovulation.

This was not uncommon for older females, who would otherwise be unable to find a suitable mate.  It was, in a way, a compliment to Rokkan that he could push her into that state at all.  But the males found it humiliating to know that they are lesser.  Rokkan must have suspected for a while, but at their last meeting he had finally accused her of deceiving him and demanded she fight with her full strength.  Altea had complied, and although the damage she had done to his body would have recovered long ago, the fact that he had not sought her out for over twelve thousand years proves that his pride still had not.  It was part of the reason that she had gone into hibernation; to allow him a chance to grow stronger, to put up a better show upon his next challenge.  

It was not out of fear that he hid his face, but humiliation.  Now that she had demonstrated her full strength, he would not be willing to mate with her again until he could best her honestly in battle, but the only way for him to do that was to battle someone stronger than he was.  Unfortunately for him, she was the only suitable candidate on this planet, and every battle with her would remind him that he was unworthy of her.  

Still, he was her mate, and she felt no drive to find another.  Eventually, his ego would forget the insult she had caused him, and he would be driven to seek her out again.  She was content to wait, however long that may take.

As for her children, she was, in a way, neglecting her duty to them.  She had warded her lair to make herself difficult for them to find.  Unable to battle her, and thus to learn from her, they would be forced to make due with only themselves, and Rokkan.  But it was also, in a way, a test for them.  She was disappointed to realize that they had not succeeded in finding her in all of the time that had passed.  She was certain that they could have, given the time and drive to do so.

Perhaps Rokkan had told them that she had left this world.  It would have been a bald faced lie, but it would not be terribly out of character for him, and the children would not know the signs that a portal has been open.  Opening a portal to another world requires a tremendous amount of power.  It would dim the sun and the stars for weeks to charge the spell, and the activation would be felt throughout the worlds.  Both this one, and the target, and any that were on the neighboring stars of either locations.

Then a thought occurred to her.  Perhaps they had felt the arrival of the humans, and thought that it had been her abandoning them.  Damn.  She was surprised that she had slept through such a calamitous event.  She would have to find one of her brood to spread the word that she was still here.  Another thing to do before she returned to her slumber.

Although she felt a certain affection for Rokkan, and her young, and the elders she had left behind on other worlds, those emotions were cool and intellectual.  What this child felt for Altea, thinking that she was its mother, was stronger and more fierce than anything the ancient female had expected from a creature so small and weak.  It was … intriguing.  And pleasant.

The child’s silence lasted for but a minute, and then it began making that sound again.  She growled in frustration.  It wanted to be held, did it?  Very well.

She lifted the child up, awkwardly, by its armpits.  The blanket fell away, revealing the naked infant in its entirety.  It was a male, she noticed idly.  Or at least she assumed that the sexes worked the same on whatever world the creature had come from.  Altea had identified what she thought was a womb in the corpse whose body she had assumed, which had been part of the reason she had selected it.  But she supposed it was possible that there was a third sex to human reproduction she did not know about.  Of the five worlds she had visited in her lifespan, one of them had been like that, and another in which all the native animals were hermaphrodites.

She noticed, with greater annoyance, that the boy was also covered in his own filth.  Most of that had remained in the blanket, but enough of the sticky substance clung to the boy’s body to aggravate her sensitive nose.  No wonder the child wanted to be cleaned.  That became the next item in her list of priorities.  Fortunately, there was a stream just outside the cave in which she could wash him.  Or at least there had been when she’d gone to sleep.

Why wrap the child in cloth if it could not control its bowels, she wondered.  Then she remembered that the boy had been freezing to death when he had awoken her, and she supposed that might have something to do with it.  If the creatures were so damn sensitive to the cold, why did they not grow thick coats of fur, like the Ysgoths?  Well, the sigil she had drawn on his chest would solve that problem permanently.  Unless of course he was separated entirely from air, water, and stone.  She could have included the runes for sun or stars to cover the eventuality, but although her kind could survive in the vacuum of space – unpleasant though the experience was – her glimpsed understanding of human physiology led her to believe that they would swiftly die from other causes before hypothermia became a problem.

Holding the boy awkwardly in front of her, she began to exit the cavern.

Her lair was deep in the earth.  She was surprised that the humans had delved so far into it; its natural formations twisted upon themselves and made the journey confusing even to those creatures that could see in the dark, which, based on her understanding of how their eyes worked, the humans could not.  Altea wondered what had driven the mother so far from the surface.

And then, at the entrance, she had her answer.  Three Ysgoth were guarding the cave, unable to enter themselves due to the wards.  They must have been chasing the woman, and she had fled deeper into the cave, hoping against hope to find another exit.  It must have been the pull of Altea’s own breath which had led the woman into the final chamber and then, finding it blocked, she had collapsed in defeat and slowly died.

If the infant’s cries had awoken her sooner, perhaps the woman’s fate would have been different, and she truly would have found salvation in that cave.  Although Altea could not revive the dead, healing such a minor wound would have been quite simple, had she deigned to do so for a lesser creature.  It would have been as simple as driving off these Ysgoth.

When the primitives saw her, one of them threw a spear at her.  That, at least, could pass easily through the wards.  Altea pushed it aside with a slight flutter of power, and then, still holding the sobbing infant in front of her, she willed into existence an overwhelming show of force.  Lightning shot from her eyes and crashed into one of the trees behind the Ysgoth.  That surprised them, but was not enough, so she opened her mouth and spat out a flame, which grew in size and split into three, one for each individual.  The primitive creatures were terrified of fire, and fled immediately as the flames chased them into the forest.  She did not believe they would return any time soon.

It was wintertime, Altea noticed.  That somewhat complicated her task of cleaning the messy child, as the stream would be frozen over.  Still, there was enough snow on the ground, and very few tasks were difficult if you had access to enough magic.  She sent out a pulse of power, willing the snow to melt, willing it to defy gravity, willing it to spray forward at the child and cleanse him.  In just a moment it was done.  She released the water from her control and it sloshed to the ground.

The child was screaming louder than ever, to her frustration.  Apparently he had not appreciated the novel cleaning method she had used.  The water had been cold, and although his body would never grow cold, he could still feel it on his skin.  She waited patiently for a moment, thinking perhaps the child would stop again once he had dried off.

Instead, he peed on her.

She growled in frustration.  Ungrateful little beast, she thought.  She sent out another pulse of power to the remaining snow and repeated the process to clean her own body.

Dammit, I give up.  Rues, how do human mothers soothe their infants when they are making this sound?  She projected.

I don’t know, the greater spirit answered.  I haven’t been paying them much attention.

Well, pay attention!  Find out what I am doing wrong for me, she demanded.

One moment, Rues answered.

She waited, and shortly, visions began appearing in her mind.

Rues was not the strongest spirit of this planet, but he was one of the major players.  He ruled over the northern continent, and, if he chose to pay attention, he could be aware of almost anything within his domain.  There were, at this moment, hundreds of crying human infants within the scope of his vision, and once he had focused in on them, he fed the visions directly to Altea.  Not one by one, but all at once.

To a lesser creature, it would have been overwhelming.  Even to Altea, it was not a particularly pleasant experience.  But her mind quickly sorted through what she was seeing, isolating actions and methods which seemed to be effective and ignoring ones which were not.

She realized that she was holding the child incorrectly.  She changed her grip, awkwardly cradling him against her body into one of the most common holds she witnessed.  The boy responded almost immediately, his mouth latching onto her nipple, as she had seen many of the infants doing in the vision, although she did not understand why.  Regardless of why it worked, the child was finally silent for longer than it took him to pull in a breath.

Despite the success of this intervention, Altea continued to watch the visions of the human infants and their caregivers.  She had been correct in assuming that humans had two sexes, she noted idly.  What she assumed were the females had bodies like the one she had assumed and were dressed in cloths mostly similar to the ones the corpse had been wearing.  There were more visions of this sort of human caring for the young, but there were enough of the other kind for her to identify some of the key dimorphisms.  What she assumed were the males did not have protruding breasts, and most of them did not wear their hair long.  They dressed in a different style of clothing, and many of them had hair growing on the front of their face as well as the top of their heads.

She also noticed that, for whatever reason, none of what she deemed to be the males were baring their breasts for their children to latch on to.  Instead they resorted to other methods of calming the child or, if those methods did not seem to work, they found a female, and the female bared their breast for the child to suckle.

Curious.  She continued to watch, almost captivated by the – to her – complex social interactions she was witnessing.

Abruptly, the method stopped working.  The child released her nipple and resumed its wailing.

Dammit!  She once again touched his mind to see what was wrong.  The two primary emotions she felt were hunger and frustration.

Rues, what the devil do these things eat?  She asked.  She had seen some of the older children being fed mushed up substances, but none of the children the size of the one in her arms.  A handful of the infants that size had their caregivers using various methods to drip some white liquid into their mouths, but Altea had no idea what that liquid was.  And it seemed to her that she should be seeing many more of the infants being fed.

Primarily human infants rely on a liquid which is produced in their mother’s breasts for their sustenance, the spirit answered.

Oh.  She was witnessing many more of the infants being fed.  That also explained the child’s frustrations, he had been attempting to feed for quite some time, but her body had not cooperated with him.

If she understood that liquid’s composition, she could probably trigger her body to produce at least a close facsimile, but although she had encountered many endotherms on the various worlds she had visited, none of them shared the mammalian method of feeding their young.  The closest method she knew of was … well, she could try that, but she was uncertain what effect it would have on the child.  It could potentially kill it.  It would certainly change it, as it had when she’d fed the children of her Nukkan worshipers in that method.  It was one of the many reasons they had worshiped her.

She considered the option for several minutes, before deciding that she saw no downside to the method.  If it sated the child, then that was well and good.  If she accidentally killed the child with it, well, that was too bad, but at least it would stop crying.  She would not feel guilty.  Killing the child accidentally while trying to help was a significantly different action than killing the child simply because it annoyed her.  Intentions mattered.

She decided to try the Nukkan method.

Gently, she placed a finger into the infants mouth.  Like her nipple, he quieted for a moment and began to suckle.  She willed herself to bleed from that finger.  That was all it took; there was no need to actually injure herself.  With the thought her capillaries opened wide and her blood flowed from the tip of her finger and into the child’s mouth.  The greedy little monster took two deep swallows before he realized that the liquid he was drinking tasted nothing like his mother’s milk and began to spit it up.

He cried again for a moment, and then stopped.  His eyes went wide as a heat entered his body, starting from his mouth, esophagus, and stomach, and swiftly spreading to the rest of his body as it absorbed Altea’s blood.

She had not given him very much, but she suspected from her experiments with the Nukkans that a fraction of a drop would have been sufficient, although it might have taken longer for the changes to begin.

Her blood flowed through his body, making changes to it in its wake.  It carried her will, to strengthen and nourish the child, but her understanding of human physiology was spotty at best.  This was the danger to the child; that her blood would identify some key characteristic of the child’s metabolism as a weakness to be corrected as it began to make him more like her.  The intervention did not seem to be immediately fatal to the child, however, and after a few moments Altea decided that the danger had passed.  If her blood caused a more insidious build up of toxins in the child’s system, it would most likely be able to identify that weakness and correct it in time.  

Most of the alterations her blood was making to his body were invisible, even to her, but she could sense them in the way the power flowing through and around his body began to change.  And there were more obvious alterations as well.  Gradually, his skin’s hue shifted.  From its normal light pink-peach color, it deepened and darkened to match her own golden coloring.  His irises also changed color, turning from an emerald green to a deep violet.  And more than that, his soul was changing.  Its faint light grew brighter, and changed from a soft, pulsing blue to a vibrant gold.  However, her blood made no overt changes to his basic anatomy.

The boy did not cry throughout the alterations.  His delicate nerves did not know how to interpret the strange sensations which were floating through him except as heat, but it did not build to intolerable levels.  And, perhaps more surprisingly, his hunger had vanished after only a few drops of that strange liquid on his mother’s finger.

He cooed pleasantly.  Altea rocked him gently, as she had seen the many human parents doing to their children, although she was still somewhat awkward in her movements, and in a few moments the boy was asleep.

Well, at least it was quiet while it slept, Altea thought.  But what to do with it now?

Rues, where is the nearest human settlement? She asked.

There are scattered hamlets near the edge of the forest.  The Ysgoth keep most of them out of their territory; it is surprising that this child’s mother braved to venture so far inside of it, The spirit answered her.

Would they care for this child, if I delivered him to them? She inquired.

A slight pause.  Well, they might have before, the spirit replied.

She frowned.  Clarify, she demanded.

You have altered him.  He no longer looks entirely human, and more importantly he no longer feels human to me.  The humans have very weak senses when it comes to power and spirits, but even they would be able to notice the changes you have wrought.  If you had delivered him to humans, or at least to his relatives, it is likely they would have adopted him before, but I do not think they will readily accept him as he is now.

Damn, she thought.  In her haste to quiet him, she had not considered the long term consequences of her actions.  The Nukkan had universally accepted their altered children – revered them even – but she had been foolish to think that the humans would do the same.  Had she asked Rues before she acted, she could have whisked the boy away to the nearest humans, handed him over, and be done with it.  But to do so now might be the same as having killed him herself.  And, although she had risked his life with a reckless act only moments before, Altea decided that she did not wish for the child to die.  As annoying as she found that sound that he made, he had captured her interest.  And that emotion that he had directed towards her, when she had been touching his mind?  That was quite pleasant.

The child would be rejected by other humans, and despite the strength she had given him there was little chance he would survive on his own without someone to care for him during his vulnerable years.

How long do humans take to become independent? She inquired.

They are rarely ever completely independent, but they reach physical maturity towards the end of their second decade of life, the spirit answered.

Twenty years?  She considered.  Twenty years was not so long.  She could care for the child for that long, then see to the other necessary tasks she must complete before returning to her slumber.  Who knows, it might even be enjoyable.  But if she was going to raise a human child, she would need to learn more about his species.

Rues, she demanded, show me more of these humans.  Not just how they soothe their children, but how they live and interact with each other.

A pause, and then the greater spirit obeyed her command, filling her with thousands of visions all at once, stretching even her mighty mind to its limit.  She sifted through the vast stream of information, and although she understood very little of what she saw, she began to learn.