No welcome parade.
No press release.
No lavish ceremony with chandeliers and monogrammed bassinets.
Just me. Him. A quiet corner of a clinic where they still respect patient privacy, and a heart that has no more room for spotlight.
But the holonet can’t be silenced forever.
Already, I feel it humming—just beyond the walls, beneath the polite silence of the nurses, between the lines of the med-docs who pretend they don’t know who I am.
They do.
And soon,everyonewill.
The story is coming.
But for now, he sleeps in my arms.
And I breathe.
It always happens like this.
Not in the quiet, not when you’re ready. But in the in-between, when your guard’s down and your hands are full of diapers and formula and a child who won’t sleep unless your heartbeat is the rhythm anchoring his own.
That’s when the world claws its way back in.
It’s a clip.
Six seconds.
Grainy. Unstable. Side angle.
Me—hood up, shoulders hunched, cradling Pyramus close to my chest as we step into the pediatric wing at a quiet medcenter tucked away behind the industrial dome. He’s got a little dragon-printed blanket pulled up to his chin, golden eyes wide, blinking at the world like it’s too loud already.
The footage doesn’t show the nurse nodding gently as I passed. Doesn’t show the fever that brought us in. The little cough that made his breath hitch. The panic in my chest when he wouldn’t latch.
It just shows me. Andhim.
And that’s enough.
By the next morning, I’m on twenty-three subfeeds.
No headlines yet. Just whispers.
“Confirmed sighting?”
“Isolde Verrix—hidden heir?”
“Who’s the child?”
“Hybrid speculation rises.”
Some of the comments are kind. Curious, even.
But most?
They’re monsters dressed in text.
