Chapter 1557: Womb Garden
"Say what?" Ginger growled, glaring at Vasilissa as veins bulged across her face, directing blood to her eyes, which now glowed red. The air around her seemed to twist and contort, distorting light and magic.
In front of her were two Vasilissas; they looked similar, but utterly different.
Vasilissa’s true body was far paler than the doll she let live in the mortal world, having skin as white as alabaster and hair of dark purple color, with faint white sparks flowing down it like the night sky. Her eyes were vibrant purple, with the pupil inside reflecting a whole galaxy, all sparking with radiant power.
It didn’t take a smart person to tell that the woman standing in the middle of their living room was a monster.
"Ah," Alcott’s mother, an old lady in her late seventies who could barely walk without her cane, walked in, approached Vasilissa, and looked at her with a smile. "It’s been a while, Violet."
"A while? Years." Ginger growled, "Where has she been all of those years?"
"I too want to know." Alcott was sitting on the couch, looking careless as always. But everyone knew that behind his calm and smily face, he was either about to blow up, or losing interest.
His mother looked at him, then at Ginger, "I’m sure Violet would explain, but..." She pointed at Alcott, "I told her to leave without saying a word, because that would’ve been best for you and Ginger."
Violet sighed, "When a void drakaina gives birth, it doesn’t happen in a day or two; it usually takes several decades." She looked at Alcott, "Especially since it was Arad. The brat was nothing but trouble, he and Gojo as well."
"Now that reminds me." Alcott finally spoke, "Who’s Gojo’s father?"
Violent laughed, "Well, you. They are twins. Arad’s human half was normal and took more from you. Since your human genetics were already too good, Gojo developed the high human mutation and was born like that."
She looked at Alcott’s mother, "Gojo won the human genetic lottery, while Arad won the draconic lottery."
Ginger giggled, "Hard to believe, Gojo looks nothing like Alcott, he doesn’t even look like any of Alcott’s relatives."
"That’s the high humans." Alcott sighed, "Pale skin, white hair, blue eyes, weak bodies, powerful magic... I bet the only reason he wasn’t born crippled in some way was because of his draconic blood."
Alcott’s mother nodded, "Many high humans don’t live past ten, they all are just too sickly and physically weak that they perish to the first cold that hits them."
"Not buying it." Ginger growled, and Violet looked at her with a shrug, "Fine, you get it for free then." She then looked at Vasilissa, "This one is the human doll." With a single flick, the doll disappeared.
Violet pulled a chair and sat down. "So, I got pregnant. What should happen is that the early stages of pregnancy would take me decades, so I could live with Alcott till he dies. But, I felt it immediately that something was off."
She looked at Alcott’s mother, "The pregnancy was fast, like human fast, just a few months, and I had to live to give birth to them."
Alcott’s mother nodded, "Violet, it’s probably best if you explain to them in detail."
"We give birth inside our stomach first, we create a small world we call the womb garden, when the wyrms are born and taught."
****
In the middle of a peaceful and green forest, a wooden shed lay. Its door kicked open, and a kid with white hair and blue eyes rushed out, running toward the forest, "Heading out! Heading out!"
"Gojo!" Violet shouted at him from the window. "Don’t go too far!" But Gojo was already gone, disappearing into the thick woods. She turned back with a sigh and looked back. On a bed at the other side of the room, a small black wyrmling was asleep, curled into a small ball.
"Gojo never learns, does he? Let’s wait and see how he comes tonight." She approached the sleeping wyrmling and sat there.
That evening, Gojo returned from the forest, all scratched up and with a massive bite wound on his left leg and right forearm, crying his eyes out.
"See? What did I tell you? The forest is filled with monsters. Look at what they did to you." She waved her hand over his wounds and looked at them, "They are deep." She frowned.
"Mommy, it hurt!" Gojo cried, but she sighed, "I told you, now go to the garden and pick the herbs I taught you about."
"But it hurt..." He kept crying, and she smacked him on the head.
"You’re a dragon, Gojo. I know it hurt, but you have to find herbs and treat yourself. You won’t find me by your side all the time." She looked at the window, "Besides, you’ve made it all the way here, you can take a few more steps."
Gojo slowly stopped crying and went to the garden, picked the herbs, ground them, and treated his wounds under her watch.
Days later, the sleeping wyrmling woke up, and it took him a few more days to be able to take a human form.
The second child was Arad, a kid who didn’t look older than a year and could barely stand on his own two legs.
"Arad! ARAD!" Violet shouted, "Gojo! Did you see Arad?" She called, and Gojo was also gone, lost in the forest.
She could sense that Arad was in the house and that he had crawled into the pantry, but she wanted him to start understanding speech. Dragons grow fast, so she must teach them everything they need in a short time.
After Arad didn’t respond to her calls, she went to find him, and find him she did. Arad was in the pantry munching on a rat.
"What are you eating!?" She screamed and rushed to snatch the fat black rat from his hands, but Arad shoved the whole thing into his mouth and hissed at her.
Not playing his games, she grabbed him by the face, forced his mouth open, and pulled the rat. "Why... don’t put anything you find in your mouth."
Arad glared at her for a while, then bit her finger, "My prey! I hunted it!"
She grabbed Arad by the head and dragged him out of the pantry, "If you’re that eager to go hunting, then I’ll send you out with Gojo to train. Make sure to listen to your brother well; he’s already starting to do well."
As it happened, Gojo was just returning from the forest, dragging a wild boar, "Mommy, I got a sniffer!" He threw the boar on the ground and sighed, stretching his arms before yawning a puff of fire.
"That’s a wild black boar." She sighed.
Gojo was now doing well. He wasn’t that gifted physically, but he did extremely well with magic, as expected from someone with the blood of a high human, so Violet focused on teaching him the basics of magic as well as she could.
Even if he couldn’t remember those days after being born into the world, the knowledge would still lie dormant in his mind and help him master magic quickly. This knowledge would prove invaluable to increasing his chances of survival.
Arad, on the other hand, was just getting developed enough to move. She had tried to teach him many things, but unlike his brother, Arad wasn’t that fond of books and magic. He preferred to lung at things headfirst, bite and claw his way out.
In the coming days, Arad started going out to hunt with Gojo each morning, and the two of them were taught by their mother in the evening.
Everything was going well, until one day arrived and the two of them had ventured a bit too deep into the forest chasing a deer. Their mother had warned them that they weren’t developed enough to go there, but they had lost track of their locations and got lost.
By the time Violet realised the two had gone too far and teleported them, it was already too late. The two had faced a large dire wolf.
Gojo got rushed down and had his arm bitten off; the wild beast tanked his magic without a problem.
Arad was the one who surprised Violet. The wolf bit him on the face, and Arad took that chance to bite the wolf’s tongue, eating it and causing the beast to start bleeding rivers.
It didn’t end there. Even with his skull almost cracking in the wolf’s jaws, Arad had managed to puncture the wolf’s eyes and claw deep wounds into the beast’s throat and neck.
The beast quickly died from blood loss and the wounds it received from Gojo’s magic. Even in a human form, Arad still fought like a dragon, being violent, aggressive, and beastial.
Only after everything was done and over, he would feel the pain of his wounds and start crying like a child.
After almost two decades inside the womb garden, it was finally time for Gojo to leave and be born into the outside world as an egg. He left first, and Arad followed a year afterward.
Mom had told Arad once to be careful picking his wives because the mother’s personality would affect the newborn son the most. This was the part she was talking about. The time they spent in the mother’s womb, garden training and learning before even getting born as eggs.
This was also the reason why Gojo and Arad were born in adult human bodies instead of those of children, because they had already lived those earlier years inside their mother’s womb.
Their memories of those days quickly faded away, leaving only the experience and the knowledge they picked up. Thanks to that, Arad and Gojo were born able to speak both draconic and human language, quickly learn magic and fighting arts, and even navigate their way through the forests without getting lost.
****
Violet looked at Alcott after telling that whole story.
"So?" Alcott looked at her, "You are saying that you should’ve stayed pregnant for at least a hundred years before giving birth, which would’ve allowed you to live with me until I died. But instead, you had to give birth in less than a year, which forced you to leave the womb garden to nurse the two of them."
Ginger glared at her, "Which took two whole decades?"
Violet nodded, "That’s right, a hundred years pregnancy then around two to three decades of womb garden, that makes the total normal time to be around a hundred and thirty years."
Alcott’s mother approached her, "So, in their case, it only took twenty years?"
"Twenty-two years to be exact." Violet sighed, "I suspect it’s because Gojo came from a high human, which might’ve had a strange reaction with the draconic blood and accelerated the pregnancy."
While she said that, Violet was lying. The reason her pregnancy was so fast and sudden was because of Arad and not Gojo. The moment he started growing inside her, she could feel the world shifting rapidly and twisting. She knew Arad was AO, and so she had to do something about it, leave, and get him to safety.
She consulted Yog, and they decided to kill Gojo before he could be born to make sure Arad would survive without a problem. Real twins in dragonkind are rare because one of the twins consumes all of the magic and nutrients, causing the other one to die.
They didn’t want to risk AO dying, so they decided that aborting Gojo was the best they could do.
But their interference failed and was probably what caused the pregnancy to be so fast and Gojo to come out as a high human.
But those details weren’t to be discussed with Alcott and his family. Yog warned Violet that it’s forbidden knowledge to Alcott. If he knew that Violet and Yog tried to abort a child of his, all hell would break loose.