Stone Circle Love, mom

Little Swiftlet’s infant mind was incapable of the impassioned and lucid thought that his mother’s was, but it was not at all dormant. It was frantic, straining to parse the sensations barraging it as he struggled against the turbulence unravelling his world as he understood it. He could not know that a safe, loving home existed beyond the membranous bounds of his mother, or that what he was experiencing was the beginning of his life and not the end of it. There was no real action he could take to resist the change of his circumstances, but he willed it as hard as an unborn thing could, and through some force or the other his birth was made something his mother had to battle for.

She did not, however, have to quarrel with him for a sign of livingness. He let her know right away that he had arrived, quite alive and quite unimpressed, with a stream of sharp, rumbling squeaks—a neonatal growling as it were. His paws, too, engaged in the protest with aimless scrabbling, too weak to move him and unable to take him where he wanted to be regardless. 

Nothing about where he was felt right and he raged until it did. Until he had been drawn against his mother's breast, until he became cognizant of the presence of the other he was accustomed to, and until the milk flowed and began to warm him from inside out. Only then did the squeaking settle, petering out to an almost inaudible gurgle as his stomach distended further and further. This was not the womb, but he had found all that the womb had been to him here. In time he would learn the differentiate between safety, love, and home; where each began and ended and how the three were connected. But for now, they were just one thing—the one thing he needed and wanted and would fight for.

Full and content now in his new surroundings, Tauris' firstborn son heaved a great sigh, and his gurgle turned to a whispering snore.