It clung like nothing he’d ever encountered. Coating his palm and knuckles in a film of jelly resistant to vigorous scrubbing that only seemed to spread a greasy film of rendered fat over whatever he touched. Leaving him saturated with the scent of a nesting brood mother.
A beacon screaming danger to any who might venture close enough, or dare entry to this den.
“Fuck,” he whispered, because it was a foul boon indeed. One he could test on his captive audience.
Abandoning the carcass at the entrance to his den, he turned heel and darted back the way he’d come. Eyes well-adjusted to the gloom, pupils blown wide as they might go, he nipped through the tunnels. Armor light on his back, breathable as he moved at speed.
Sultana was exactly where he’d left her. Her consorts swirling around the tombstone keeping her interred, trying in desperate futility to unleash her wrath.
At the sight of their mother’s skin cut, trimmed, and sewn into something new, the males scattered, issuing startled, horrified yelps. Leaving him free to surge forward, take a steadying breath, and kick the lid off Sultana’s prison.
A whip of primal fury streaked past his shin. Blurry, sinuous scales that lashed up and out. Moving in a vicious, jagged slash, Sultana landed coiled atop her grave. Frill rippling about her angular cheeks, forefeet braced, she pinned him with a gleaming alien glare and let her jaws fall apart on a rattling, dual-toned hiss.
Before she could issue the command to kill, he flashed his palm wet with the ichor of her mother’s potent musk. Let her forked, flicking tongue catch the scent of the congealed jelly glued to his skin, and watched when, in an instant, Sultana’s crimson frill snapped shut. Tight to her nape as she uttered a new warble. One of terrified submission that tugged at his heart in a way that gave him pause… for it was a sound he recognized.
One he himself had made countless times, as Anhur claws tore through his flesh…
Throat flexing, the Omega male swallowed a lump that only grew as he choked it down. Blinking back the salty burn of helpless memory, for this was what he needed! This was survival, a test of his metal.
He’d be a fool to reject an easy meal for sentiment.
And then Sultana whimpered.
Tail wrapping tight about her hindquarters, she lifted her left forepaw—and rolled. Showing the pale underbelly where he might sheath his obsidian blades and eat well. A statement made with his first meal the flesh of lava-kin. Tender and young.
“It’s the law of this place,” the Omega whispered, and clutched at the hilt of one of his many obsidian knives. Hesitating long enough that his grip grew slick with anxious sweat.
Sultana trembled.
A foul liquid leaked from a gap in the scales tucked neatly beneath her tail.
As if it were the signal they’d been waiting for, the males began to rattle—and it was the sound of a tide turning. Watching through slitted glares as their unblooded queen was tested and found wanting, their muscles bunched as the scent of rejection grew ripe in the air.
“Shit,” he hissed, and stepped back. Wary of the gathered neonates, whose eyes were filled with an unmistakable gleam.
Murder.
Where he hesitated, the males surged into action. Homicidal eyes fixed not to him, but to the tiny flailing queen who couldn’t stop the serpent from consuming its tail.
Five sets of claws skittered against stone.
They were on her before he could take a single, shocked breath. Moving with one mind, frantic squeals rang out. A storm of chaotic need, of neglect and desperate survival, they turned on their queen. Trying to tear at those impenetrable scales while Sultana thrashed and whipped and tried to evade her former consorts.
It was to be her end.
The conclusion written by the vicious nature of where they’d been born, a place where she could either rule or die. Where shades of grey meant nothing more than another day yielding to a violent night… the pattern repeating over and over and over again.
Until someone with the means broke it.
“No,” he whispered, because no matter his rebirth, that he was to carve a place for himself in lonely wilds… he couldn’t sit and watch a queen die. To do that, was to give up the best part of himself.
And so, as if commanded to act, the Omega male surged forward with a war cry of his own. Jaw clenched, ears flat, he plunged an armored fist into the mass of writhing, scaly bodies. Caught a tiny, wriggling serpent and wrenched her free.
He was answered by a frustrated wail, and all five remaining clutchlings set their wrath upon him.
Ignoring the slicing nip of teeth that found chinks in his armor, he held Sultana aloft, and swiped at her brethren. Sending two spinning toward the cave wall, only to watch them twist and reset before their tiny claws had even touched stone.
Above him, Sultana’s frill snapped open, delicate, yet rigid enough to move his fingers. The boney length of her tail wrapping tight about his wrist, she anchored herself and took a breath.
