Lineage

“I must admit,” Suomi said, eyeing me up thoroughly as she circled around. “From what she described of you, I imagined everything correctly except the age. I know Svea finds it hard to get into contact with someone her age, but you being in her bed is akin to cradle-robbing.”

“Leave him be,” Svea said from the bathroom. “The boy’s got a habit of women beyond his years.”

“What about women beyond his millennium?” Suomi asked, calling over her shoulder to her sister. “Did he have to dust you off before going down on you?”

“Don’t forget you’re at the perfect distance to get a bar of soap thrown at you,” Svea growled.

“Oh hush, you,” Suomi said with a roll of her eyes before turning back to me. “Anyway, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Richter.”

“You too,” I said, holding out my hand to shake. Suomi cocked an eyebrow in a disbelieving manner, staring at my hand for a long second before wrapping her arms around me and hugging me tight into her enormous tits.

“I think we can skip past the handshakes,” she giggled. “We’re practically family now, anyway.”

“Get your whore mitts off him, Suomi,” Svea said, walking out of the bathroom and past her sister, thwacking her on the ass with her tail, still in her anthro form. “He’s mine and I’m not letting you have him.”

“I don’t see a mate mark on your chest,” she said, sticking her tongue out. “It’s open season for this one.”

“He’s not interested in you,” Svea retorted. “Right, Richter?”

“I’m reserving judgement at this point,” I shrugged, still clasped in her mighty bosom.

“We totally gon’ fuck,” Suomi smirked, getting an angry glare from Svea.

“I can’t believe how disloyal you are to your women, Richter,” Svea said, drying her smooth body off with a short towel.

“I can’t believe how little you know about me,” I chuckled. “I’m not loyal to anybody, in the same way nobody’s loyal to me. You can have as much sex with anyone else as you want to, Svea. I don’t expect the women I sleep with to brand their asses with my initials and never even think about another man again. It’s why I’ve just had a conversation with my familiar whilst he was in the process of railing one of my employees.”

“Bestiality?” Suomi asked with a cocked eyebrow. “That’s hot.”

“You’re so depraved,” Svea sighed.

“At least I’m not deprived,” she said in response. “Unlike you.”

“Sorry, which one of us here is pregnant again?” Svea asked with a smug expression.

“I can easily fix that,” she said, petting me on the head. “I’m sure he’d be more than up for it.”

“Correct,” I nodded.

“Richter!” Svea snapped.

“What?” I asked. “Fucking lots of women is like one of the only three things I’m good at in life. I’m not prepared to give that up.”

“What are the other two?” Suomi asked.

“I can do a really good impression of my dad and I can do that thing with your thumb where it looks like you’re pulling it off when you’re really not,” I answered.

“Mhm… I can see why you fell head over heels for dear Richter here,” Suomi nodded, finally deciding to let go of me. “He’s a wealth of talent and personality.”

“He certainly has wealth,” Svea chuckled. “One of the reasons I got close to him.”

“You gold-digging whore,” I said in disbelief.

“I’m a dragon, Richter,” Svea shrugged.

“Kinda the same thing,” Suomi added in kind. “We do love our treasure.”

“And Dear Richter’s one of my greatest,” Svea nodded.

“No I’m not,” I said quickly.

“If you say so, dear possession,” Svea said, looking around for her dress only to give up after several moments, lying down on the bed and staring at the ceiling with a blank expression.

“So when’s the mighty matriarch leaving for her gestation getaway?” Suomi asked.

“Tomorrow,” Svea answered. “I need to clean up my abode and carve out a place for the child to sleep and grow.”

“You’ve got three months,” Suomi shrugged. “Make sure the tyke has a bathroom.”

“Should be simple enough,” Svea nodded.

“So… this is goodbye then?” I asked.

“For now, dear one,” Svea chuckled, beckoning me over to her. She sat up slowly, offering me a loving kiss and an embrace before breaking away.

“I shall see you before the end of the year with our child on my hip,” she smiled. “And since I had it first that means you have to love it more than Larra’s.”

“Can’t I just hate them both equally?” I asked.

“No,” Svea said with a shake of her head. “Ours is going to be better.”

“Alright, fine,” I nodded. “I’ll look forward to playing favourites.”

“I look forward to seeing it,” Svea smiled. There was a warm silence between the two of us for a long moment, staring into one another’s eyes without the need for words. We shared a union now, beyond just having a child, but instead a deeper connection that we knew would last for a long time, through thick and thin.

“I’m still allowed to fuck your boyfriend, right?” Suomi interrupted.

“Will you fuck off!?” Svea snapped angrily, using her magic to throw a hairbrush at Suomi. The sibling caught the brush with reflexes I did not expect her to have before chucking it back onto the bed.

“Alright, alright,” she said, turning and heading towards the door. “Still didn’t hear a ‘no’.”

The door closed and the dragon sibling left our sight, myself turning back to Svea to see her still fuming with rage.

“I hate her,” she snarled. “I love her, but I fucking hate her.”

“I’m familiar with that kind of relationship,” I smirked, thinking back to my Aunt and Grandmother (still weird). “Wanna give me a little bit of info on her? I thought all the ancient dragons were dead?”

“Oh no, far from it,” Svea said with a shake of her head. “If anything, the dragon population has increased slightly as the years have gone by. The truly ancient beings, those around twenty thousand years old, like my mother, still have their positions as Draconic Priestesses.”

“Your mother’s still alive?” I asked. “Are you going to tell her you’re pregnant?”

“Oh, of course I am,” Svea nodded. “She’ll be one of the first to know once I’ve finished excavating the cave. I’m sure she’ll be a little upset that the father isn’t a dragon, but I’m sure she won’t eat you once I’ve introduced you to her. She stopped doing that to my boyfriends when I was about twenty-five… for a while, at least.”

“Oh… yayyy,” I commented in a nervous manner.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure she’ll have calmed down in her old age,” Svea said, patting me on the head before standing up. “Now, give me the best kiss you can muster. I’m not going to see you for a while.”

“Will do,” I nodded. “You take care of yourself.”

“I always do,” she giggled, lowering her head down and locking lips with me again, allowing me to get the best taste of her blueberry-flavoured mouth that I would for a long time. With a passionate kiss and a gentle squeeze of that big ass of hers, we broke apart, wishing each other the best time we could before parting ways. I left the room and headed down to the courtyard where I spotted Luna and Celestia training with one another, with something strange about them both. They didn’t look right. Something was off about them and the closer I got the easier it was to spot:

They were a lot shorter than they used to be. Like, shorter than me. And Celestia’s body type had completely changed from her usual, buxom hourglass figure to a much thinner, leaner, and stronger one, both of them having drastic reductions in breast and ass size to the point where it was definitely noticeable. I watched with a confused expression as the two of them duelled one another, with quick strikes and superb footwork that put my meager swordplay to complete shame by comparison.

The fight seemed to belong to Luna entirely, and even Celestia’s skill showed the rust that was allowing her younger sister to keep the upper hand. The normal rules of duelling seemed to be out of the window entirely, with punches, kicks, and grapples being completely allowed while they were going for more than poke points and instead lashing and slashing at one another with ruthless intent, wounds visible through open holes in their armour and clothing as they clashed viciously.

There seemed to be no timer or referee for the match, and as a result I was confused as to how long the match was to go on for. I figured it it would go until one of them was either disarmed or too tired to continue, but Luna answered that question for me by unleashing a vicious flurry of slashes on a level almost too fast to comprehend. She knocked Celestia’s guard aside, slammed her fist into her face, knocking her further off balance, before launching forward with a brutal knee to the gut that caused her to hunch over, and then ending the fight by slamming her pommel into the back of Celestia’s head, knocking her straight to the ground.

“You lose,” Luna said in an exhausted manner, removing her sword from the back of her sister’s head and sheathing it. Celestia climbed to her feet, wiping the blood from her bust lip onto the back of her hand before extending her other in a gesture of friendship.

“Indeed I do,” Celestia agreed in a pained tone. “You still haven’t lost your edge with a sword.”

“It’s just a shame you’ve lost your edge with everything else,” Luna sighed. “You don’t train anymore. You haven’t trained seriously since Cadance was born. And now we’re here, about to take on what’s essentially a god, and you haven’t even gone through your basic footwork in half a century.”

“You’re angry at me, aren’t you?” Celestia asked.

“Yes, I’m fucking angry,” Luna growled. “You’ve been living your life as if we’re in complete peace, with any problem being waved away with a peace treaty and a smile for the public, and not acting as if there’s an Archdemon baying for both your blood and the daughter you managed to snatch from him. He nearly killed the both of us last time we fought, and that was back when you used to train your hardest. If he comes back now, we’re all dead.”

“Last time we didn’t have three other Alicorn on our side,” Celestia responded.

“Celestia, you can tell me anything you want in confidence that I will never judge you for it,” Luna growled in a hushed tone, this entire conversation only privy to me thanks to my super-hearing. “But don’t you dare look me in the eyes and seriously try to tell me that the other three would be anything more than meat shields and a distraction to him.”

“Cadance would be-”

“Be the only one to get out alive,” Luna interrupted. “Because she’s the one he wants, he’d kill you, kill me, destroy Twilight and… I don’t know what he’d do to Richter.”

“Richter might be able to…” Celestia began, but once she looked into the cold blue gaze of her sister’s eyes, the sentence fell apart.

“Richter would have results if he joined that fight: He’d either be brutally murdered by some low-level scum that we could take care of in a heartbeat, or he’d get abducted by his grandfather and turned into another one of his demon spawn. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the thought of the last surviving male alicorn on this planet being essentially handed over to the biggest evil we’ve ever faced because you were too content to sit on your fat ass and focus on whether or not to grant funding for a horse farm for disabled children than to protect your family.”

“It’s… it’s not like… I…” Celestia stumbled, unable to find any sort of justification for her choices.

“Cut the bullshit, Celestia,” Luna ordered. “We have three and a half Alicorn on this planet against an entire army from the Hollow realm, with one of our Alicorn being about as useful as a drunken brawler with no arms. Now Twilight can be boosted with artificial means to make sure her magic is super-powered so we don’t need to worry about her coming into direct combat, Cadance just needs a lot more sex to get her power level up to something respectable so she too can rely on her magic.”

“But Richter?” Celestia nodded, rubbing her eyes with her fingers.

“But Richter?” Luna echoed with a cynical laugh. “That boy has nothing. He can’t fight anything stronger than an untrained human, he can’t cast any spells stronger than what you’d need to strike a match, and he has no chance of unlocking that power at any point in his life. For fuck’s sake, Celestia, if it came down to picking a team of four to take on that bastard’s army, I’d rather have the boy’s father by our side. He has been coddled and babied too much by this family for his entire life, and it’s only made him weaker because of it. And you know as well as I do that it’s Cadance’s fault.”

“Alright, let’s not start pointing fingers here,” Celestia said sternly.

“No, no, no,” Luna growled, pointing a finger in Celestia’s face. “If there’s anyone to blame for the utter disgrace that boy ended up being, it’s his mother. She threatened to have him sent away to the Northlands when I told her that Richter was going to be put through the same training regime that all of us except her went through. She threw a tantrum, ran to mommy to beg her not to let scary Aunt Luna murder her baby boy. You remember it as well as I do, but for some stupid reason you sided with her on it and fundamentally agreed to neuter the last surviving male of our species.”

“Now you know it wasn’t-”

“Bullshit!” Luna snarled. “You were too busy making sure that your precious pink princess didn’t start bawling her eyes out to think more than three days ahead. Richter has had none of the training he was supposed to, the training that I spent nine months planning out from the day he was conceived, whether he was a boy or girl. Training that would’ve taught him how to be able to kill a bear by the time he was six, training that would’ve moulded his mind to be able to think and act under the worst conditions, to control himself and his magic by the time he was ten, and training that would’ve put him on the path to become as strong as you and I, possibly even more so. But what happened instead?”

Celestia didn’t answer.

“I asked you a fucking question,” Luna snarled. “And the answer is: You let Cadance have her way. You let her raise a spoilt brat that cries and stomps his feet whenever anything didn’t go his way, someone who can just run to Mommy and ask her to make it stop, you let her raise a child with no drive to succeed or improve in his life, you let her raise a child that grew up to be someone that quits the second anything becomes too difficult, someone who grew up to have no strength in mind or body, and someone who grew up to be the biggest disgrace our race has ever birthed. He was supposed to be the next Crown Prince of the Alicorn, and instead? Instead you allowed your daughter to turn him into a court jester, Celestia. She ruined that boy. And you stood by her every step of the fucking way.”

Celestia stared at her sister with pure rage in her eyes, something I’d never seen before in her face. The two were about one word away from trying to kill each other, with both of them more than prepared to block and riposte if it came to a fight. Several seconds passed in their vicious staredown before a much calmer look returned to Celestia’s face, sighing defeatedly and nodding her head.

“You’re right,” she conceded.

“As I always was, sister,” Luna nodded, crossing her arms. “But that doesn’t matter now. I can’t yell at you or Cadance to fix Richter. His personality is set in stone and we can’t change that now. He’s not gonna get access to his magic without becoming something too dangerous to let live. We’d have to kill him within a week before the darkness took him over.”

“So we have to focus on other routes,” Celestia agreed. “Focus on his combat training and his mutations. Let them give him some kind of edge to the opponents he fights.”

“And then when real trouble shows up…” Luna sighed. “We wrap him in paper and tuck him somewhere safe. Just like Cadance always wanted.”

“Don’t be mad at her, Luna,” Celestia said. “If it was your child-”

“If it was my child I would’ve looked past my petty fears and done what was right,” Luna responded, giving Celestia no time to finish her sentence. “Or have you forgotten the thousands of newborns that have been entrusted to me to raise and train by myself? Through my methods? And those same children that make up the upper echelon of the Equestrian Military? The same people we go to when we need to protect foreign rulers and dignitaries and send off on missions that would kill normal men and women?”

“And how many children didn’t survive your training?” Celestia asked in response. “How many died in their trials? Froze to death on snow missions? Drowned in swamps during bayou training? How many were mauled to death by wild animals or tortured by demonic forces? How many failed, Luna? How many did you let die?”

“Richter would’ve survived,” Luna said, ignoring the question completely.

“We don’t know that,” Celestia said.

“I know that,” Luna snapped. “I saw the spark he had in him once. Right before your daughter snuffed it out.”

“So what are you going to do then?” Celestia asked.

“When we’re all done here,” Luna answered. “I’m taking the boy. He’s coming with me to Falketurm.”

“No he isn’t,” Celestia said, eyes lit up in horror. “There’s no way Cadance will allow you-”

“To be fair, I’m sick and tired of listening to what Cadance does and doesn’t want,” Luna snarled. “By the power of my crown, I’m overruling her jurisdiction when it comes to Richter. I’ll fill the official forms in later.”

“And what if I were to do the same to you, sister?” Celestia asked angrily. “What would you do then? Kidnap him?”

“Sister. Listen to yourself,” Luna said in a much calmer tone. “You are willing to split our family down the middle simply to keep your daughter happy? What about Richter? What about the grandchild your daughter failed to raise as one of us? You’ve heard from me what he’s been through. The boy has died here against an enemy Svea was able to defeat in a matter of punches. He was nearly killed by a cousin he didn’t know he had while I was able to defeat him in a matter of moments. Richter cannot stand on his own two feet because his mother took them from him in case he’d fall over and hurt himself. He has spent his entire life wrapped in the arms of his mother and is now unprepared to face the life he will have to live. I can save him from that, but only if you agree to let me.”

Celestia was silent for a moment, pressing her hands to the side of her head as her inner turmoil exploded deep within, her being forced to make a decision that would split the family apart one way or another. Several moments passed by as Celestia was torn near to the point of tears, seemingly stiffening at Luna’s soft hand on her shoulder as she stared into her eyes.

“Let me save him, sister,” Luna begged. “We’ve already lost too many children in this family. Do not let this one suffer the same fate.”

“...” Celestia tried to speak, but was unable to form a sentence at first, her eyes welling with tears as she stared into her sister’s. “I… I…”

Unwilling to hear the answer, I turned around and left. I had made a choice in my own moment that I was going to do this myself. I was going to steal the papers from the Town Hall myself as some foolish gesture to prove something. Though whether it was to them, the world… or just to myself. Though if I was going to sneak into the Town Hall… my usual hunting attire wasn’t going to cut it. I needed something that focussed on another side of my training. I needed to drop the swords…

And put that hidden blade to use.