Chapter 36: Tainted Seed

[The Technician].

The bell chimes twice. Based on the ring I know it is the Queen who wants me. Since it is the Queen who needs my services, then I must appear as her Technician.

Stretching, I take my smallest form, that of a scruffy human teen with large eyes and tightly curled hair. Braiding it down, I put on the protective inner covering before stepping into the oversized mechanical suit that makes up the Technician's outer form. It is more like a shell of a larger dragon than an actual "suit" giving me the girth and height of a much bigger individual. I hate wearing this rig, but I can't let them know who I am. Especially her. She has yet to see my true face and she never will.

My true identity is the one secret I have left.

And it needs to remain a secret, from everyone, even those I may think I can trust. Because if anyone knew, that would be the end of this charade. All of my charades. I would lose the freedom to move around the palace freely like I do, to listen and learn and gather information. I would lose my power.

I'm not ready to give that up. Not until I've set things right.

Until then, I must bear this discomfort.

The Technician was hatched out of necessity.

I came to the castle a slave. Young, trapped, and almost useless. I wasn't born into slavery, but Segudus didn't care. He wanted my mind and my unique mixed heritage to experiment upon. He wasn't expecting me to know my way out of the containment pods. After I escaped, I lived in the underbelly of the castle, hiding from Segundus and anyone else who might do me harm.

Unfortunately, he brought in someone else far more clever, someone who was a close match to my intelligence. His younger brother, Tritus.

To give him the credit he is due, Tritus didn't know who or what I was when Segundus had him create his little mousetrap. The trap had two parts. The bait and the containment. The bait was easy enough--they left the door open only to trap me at the exit, using the old tunnels as a way to keep me from leaving.

The containment was trickier.

This suit was developed to keep me in human form while also making sure I could be useful to Segundus. The suit itself is like a containment pod in the form of a large drake, with arm and leg extensions connected to a torso-like cage and topped with a helm to both hide my appearance and to change the way I see the world--with a very limited scope. The collar Tritus had developed to transport dangerous criminals was the basis of the connecting rings that hold the helm in place. While in this suit I cannot take my true form, although I learned over time that there are ways to work around that as long as you only shift small parts of my body, like my fingernails or my eyes.

Tritus wasn't there when I was forced into the suit. I'm not sure he would have done anything, to be honest. He was so deeply afraid of Segundus that he would have offered up his own family in exchange for a moment of peace.

Some think that is exactly what he did when Juliana disappeared.

But I saw how upset he was when he came to Segundus begging him to help find her. He would do anything to get her back. Which is why he didn't question him when he was asked to do this little favor for him.

Later he would learn that Segundus was the one to trap Juliana and hold her captive. But that wouldn't come until much later. Not that it would matter. I think he mentioned her sometimes to appease his own guilt and to give him an excuse for his evils, but I watched as one by one he created unique ways to enslave the very people who shared a heritage with his favorite child.

I watched as he learned how to control the Sun Dragons.

And when he discovered how to use their eggs as power.

And when he found new ways to breed them. I watched and I took notes.

And now I use those very same techniques to keep the would-be-queen of Luxandra visibly with child so that nobody in the kingdom would suspect the truth--The last of Prince Segundus died only weeks after his demise.

In desperation, sensing that her clutch was in danger, Eleanora sent out a call for a healer specializing in hatching healthy clutches. I had been free of the palace for months and was enjoying my time away but I still craved my sweet revenge against Segundus for all the sins he made me commit in his name for his personal glory.

It only felt fitting that I used some of what I learned to destroy all that was left of him.

So I spread rumors of my prowess as a healer and my loyalty to Segundus, making sure that word of my existence landed in her ears through the words and hands of those she knew and trusted.

And it worked. She sent for me across the continent and I became her new physician by helping her maintain her clutch for one more week.

But then something happened.

While visiting her husband's preserved corpse, she slipped down the stone steps.

The queen will go on believing for the rest of her life that it was because of some failure of hers, something that she didn't do properly that she lost the royal heirs.

I have no problem letting her believe those lies. She deserves every moment of that pain and heartbreak. And while I didn't help her fall down those stairs, I did make sure that the treatments I gave her would weaken her womb enough to make the eggs' connection especially fragile.

There was no way I was going to let those eggs hatch. Segundus may have had the beauty of a royal prince, but he had the mind of a true monster. Nothing good could come of his offspring, especially not with a drakaina like her as their mother. There was no good to be passed down. The usurper King and Queen's very souls are stained so ink-black that nothing bright could come from their lineage.

I believed with my whole heart I was doing the world a favor. I should have known that a drakaina like her would not give up so easily. She needed to have a royal clutch to keep her position and power. And she would do so, no matter who or what she needed to sacrifice to make that happen.

When she lost that first clutch, she demanded to be impregnated immediately. She had what remained of her husband placed into stasis, and I had no problem thawing him out enough to extract what remained of his tainted seed.

I didn't expect it to work. He was too damaged, too far gone, and the seed wasn't fresh.

To my amazement, it did work, or at least it did at first. But this clutch was so weak that I didn't need to do anything to hurry along the inevitable. The eggs soured within her, growing and then stopping, becoming septic inside of her until I could convince her that they were too far gone and that if she continued on this way she would die too.

She didn't care. She was determined to bear the next Body Royal.

So I did something I still regret--I reminded her that there was more than one descendant of Maximus Majere at her disposal: Primus.

This latest clutch should never have happened.

As soon as the idea was planted in her mind, it didn't take long for it to flower. Nothing would dissuade her, even the suggestion that she use one of her knights as a surrogate, seeing that they were all air dragons like her husband, and more easily passed off as his.

"That won't do," she insisted. "My children will not be common."

She wanted a strong clutch, so she demanded I extract Primus' seed. He had been unconscious for weeks, his mind broken after countless treatments and interrogations designed to get him to reveal all the secrets he knew about Luxandria that Maximus wanted to keep to himself. He didn't reveal anything. It was all for nothing, leaving him a weak shell of himself.

"At least," I remember thinking, "If this clutch were to survive, the father isn't of tainted stock. Their children might not be the monsters that they could be."

Or at least that is what I told myself to excuse what I did next.

I went into one of the old facilities and procured an extractor from the time before we integrated this technology into their containment tubes. The guards made sure that he was properly sedated before bringing him into the lab.

Primus came to himself halfway through the procedure and began to rage. He is a strong drake, even half-mad, and was more than I could handle alone. He attempted to rip off my arm along with the contraption extracting his seed. He almost succeeded until I used my real voice to subdue him long enough to have him properly sedated.

That was the first time I used the goggles on him. I swore that after Segudnus had used them on me so many times before I'd never use them on another soul.

When we were done, the Queen got what she wanted--a new clutch and a new puppet prince to control. As long as I kept using the goggles, Primus would be easy to manage.

That's when I knew I had taken things too far. That I had lost my focus.

Which is how I ended up in the Queen's bedchamber lying to her about the state of her body.

"Am I with clutch," her face is terrified. She knew that if she were pregnant with anything other than royal seed, her place would be lost, her power gone, and her legacy destroyed.

I wish she could see the sneer on my face as I shook my head. "No, my queen, you are just feeling discomfort from your previous clutch. Shall I fetch our latest sample to ensure..."

"Yes, I want to be with clutch immediately," she tenses. "We do not have any time to lose."

I call for the last of Prince Primus' sperm. There will be no other samples. I cannot extract it while he is in treatment.

It doesn't matter whose seed is used, the seed of a drake will strengthen the shells of the eggs while they are still forming.

And this clutch is a big one: Five eggs. Five perfectly common eggs.

"Thank you, Technician," she sobs as I finish. "You are a lifesaver."

I bow out of sight. When nobody is watching, I rush to my chambers, take off this suit, and clean myself of all the filth of my work.

Taking on my favorite guise, I let myself grow into my half-dragon form and go out to meet my mate.

He's waiting for me.