“Your mother died in childbirth?” I reach out to take his hand. “I’m so sorry.”
His eyes drop to my hand on top of his, then swing back up to mine. I can feel his pleasant surprise at my unexpected touch.
“You honor me with your sympathy, but it was a common occurrence back on my home planet. Also, my father did not suffer Widower’s Madness, so it did not affect my life much before I came here.”
“But didn’t it though?” I ask, squeezing his hand. “That was your mother and you had to grow up without her.”
“This was the fate of most mothers on our former planet. The reason for Reverence itself.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“You see, drakkon praise our mothers as your species praises your deities. Whether they live or die, we revere them for the rest of our lives. The Betrayer King’s father, the Third Blue King, had a special palace erected in his drakki’s honor after she survived the birth of her first son. It was so large one could see its heat signature from space. By the time she died giving birth to the former Second Prince of Drakkon, her first son and her mate had an entire millennium to revere her. That was considered a very rare privilege. Most drakkon are like the Second Prince and me. We can only revere our mothers as drakki we never knew.”
I think about and almost understand what he’s saying. Before my fathers came back when we were five, I didn’t quite understand that they were time traveling Vikings who the history books assumed hadn’t survived the Great Serpent battle. But I knew they were heroes from the way everybody talked about them. I remember how they’d seemed more like gods than real-life people, who had actually lived and breathed.
My heart pangs with understanding, and a new realization…. “So most of you dragons were born after accidentally killing your mothers in childbirth? And that’s why you treat your mates like you do. Because you’re afraid you’ll lose her like you did your mothers?”
“Yet another clever summation, Reverence, but not quite specific enough. The mortality rate is so high, the more apt word would be assume. The best most of us could hope for was the live birth of our progeny. And toward the end of our drakkon civilization, we often did not achieve that.”
I place a hand over the baby, suddenly less disgusted by its squirming than scared for both of us. “You don’t think either of us will survive this birth?”
“We should change the subject. Your flame is becoming upset.” Damianos nods toward the carton of ice cream. “Eat your ice cream so that your flame might once again burn with content.”
I bug my eyes at him and set the carton of ice cream aside. “My brain is raining The Scream emojis right now. And there’s no way ice cream is fixing that. You need to finish telling me why you assume me and this baby are going to die in childbirth.”
Damianos lets out a cloud of steam, which I think is his version of a sigh. But he starts talking again, just like I demanded.
“If you were a drakki, I would assume I would lose at best you, and at worst both you and baby in the birth. But the Betrayer King has given me hope. He told me he had assumed the same thing before the birth of his Golden Son. And of course, he did not have high hopes when he sent Fensa back to her original time after the discovery that she was pregnant with twins. But she and his three hatchlings survived both births beautifully. And now he has a hypothesis to explain why. He believes that our mating with your species might be an evolutionary necessity of sorts.”
“An evolutionary necessity?” I repeat.
“It is a bit like the history of your anthro ancestors. For a short period of time, they were scattered all over the globe and only interacted with their own tribes and regions. They shared the same features, rituals, and ways. With the invention of boats, they encountered people from different regions. Most often this would result in war and death by sickness. But there were other results, too. Reproductive interactions—many of which produced children who were even hardier than their parents.
“Many humans went against their cultural dictates and laws to pair with others outside their region and tribes. And now thanks to advances in medicine, none of which can be attributed to one single culture, the ancestors of these mixed interregional interactions have reached the very cusp of the quantum leap. It is as if your designer programmed you to distrust other humans until you reached a certain stage of technological advancement, but then pushed certain buttons to make you seek out those with dissimilar DNA to make strong children who could survive in any part of the world.”