Lion Head Mesa everybody loves you, baby [m]

The black jackal showed his teeth, afraid for the pain when his wife was not! His growls would deepen if a woman got too close. He was in a rumbustious mood and didn’t need much more encouragement to lash out.

Heqet, hasten the birth! A wordless prayer coarsened as the air around them burned. It was with desperate invocations he lathered Toula’s damp forehead, watching uncontrollably as her expression abstracted. She called out for her mother.

“Not Treva,” the man crooned, “Tavina,” and he fastened his arm tighter about the shoulders, glancing furiously to the sesh. He found a new worry in himself– that Toula might die as her skin leapt apart and pink fluid flowed from her. That she would leave him.

Again she was seized by a contorting spasm, but this time it was unlike the others. The crown of a head appeared as her cries grew higher and louder and possessed him in a dreaming sense of unreality. He dreaded that the child might be stillborn but what he saw was a thick flaxen pelt writhing gently in the doctor’s embrace.

Love came so suddenly it was as instinctive as breathing. They looked like their mother and he prized them all the more for it. The child was laid in their mother’s arms and latched onto her swollen nipple like a hunter the throat of his deer. Rashepses stared in awe, for every little movement was the first enactment of a God.

The second-born entombed any doubts of survival– the child’s voice resounded over the tender cries of their mother before they'd cleared the womb! Semer-wati was taken unawares when the cub was surmounted by a shock of black curls that would later gleam with streaks of gold when the sun shone upon it. They waved their arms and kicked out so strongly that the father could not speak. His eyes burned with tears of disbelief as their birth cry rang out, angry and hot with a tempestuous temper– a perfect mirror of their father.

“Two boys?!” Two boys! Two sons! Two Princes! Two inheritors of the double crown! Rashepses could hear the voices of the nursemaids as they hailed the royal princes of Akashingo! He leaned forward intently, muzzling each child, feeling all his love and devotion crystallize into that of his wife and their two perfect forms.

Toula’s gaze was raw and tired but she glistened divinely with beaded moisture upon her brow. “You have made me a proud husband,” the man lulled to her as they stared down at them, the physical proofs of their love before another shock thrawn her belly.