Garden of Embers: Beneath Devouring Eyes #2

Chapter 17, Final Part

Domi was the first to break the stunned silence following Ausus's words. The sly smirk on his lips warned Valens his alumna was about to say something inappropriate even before the kid's mouth opened.

"You know," the boy drawled, "when people tell you to hug a clivia, they don't mean you should go so far as to--"

"Domi!" Aix scolded. Valens could only snort as Buccina chuckled.

"What?" The boy leaned against the webbed wall and crossed his arms. "Last I checked, we all know how babes are made. If those things are really somehow his sons..." He jerked his chin toward the pair of tiny clivias in the Blended man's hands and lifted his brows.

A blush turned Ausus's otherwise blue-touched cheeks lavender. "I didn't have relations with a clivia, Son."

Domi stiffened, all humor fleeing his face. "Don't call me that."

The Blended man winced. "Very well, Laetus."

"Or that," the boy snapped, his expression stony.

"His name is Domi," Daedalus said in a soft, tense voice. Valens studied his other alumna and frowned at the clenched fists at the older twin's sides. The boy glared at the pod's brownish-gray webbed floor.

Ausus swallowed and turned carefully to the son who would still meet his gaze. "Sorry, Domi." The younger twin's shoulders relaxed. A little. "I did not-- That is not how clivias have children. They..." He cast Kaitlyn a pleading glance.

The eidolon's hair flared bright orange, as did Logos's own beside her. "You want me to explain clivia sex to your kids?" She rolled her eyes as he just waited. "Fine." She turned to Domi. "Simple version? Clivias don't have sex. Not even close."

The kid frowned. "Then how do they have babes or whatever you call them?"

"They collect tissue samples from their own species and other lifeforms and extract favorable attributes."

"Attributes?" Buccina asked. Her apple-green eyes widened in alarm as the pale filaments of a passing adult female drifted through the door. The Princeps swept the edge of her crystal white paenula away from the bestia's reach with a grimace.

Ausus glanced at the doorway, his brows furrowing. The pod's walls knit closed, gray threads weaving across the opening like a thick, messy spider web and blocking the female clivia.

"They collect attributes like the ability to eat certain kinds of food or fly," Kaitlyn said as though the Blended forgeholder had not just shut a wall with his mind.

She nodded at the two pups, which squirmed out of Ausus's fingers and flew up to his shoulder. Perching side by side with half of their filaments tangling with his hair, the pups pointed the other half straight at the eidolon like a pair of blue arrowheads.

"When a female gathers enough useful information," Kaitlyn went on, "she clones herself and then adds the collected attributes to form two male embryos. They grow as buds on her filaments and then separate after about ten days as newborn pups."

"How old are these two?" Aix asked, eying the pair.

"Thirteen--" A pulse rippled from one of the tiny clivias. "Fourteen days," Ausus said.

Valens stared, his astonished thoughts chasing themselves in wild circles. "I'm sorry," he began thickly, frowning at the pups as their blue tendrils shifted his way. Eternal Radiance, were the bestias actually following the conversation? "Do those things know how to count?"

"Only up to twenty," Ausus said, his lip quirking, "but they're learning fast."

Valens's jaw dropped. Eyes devour, since when did clivias understand numbers, let alone how to put them in sequence? This was too much to take in. His spinning head felt like it hovered somewhere near the webbed ceiling.