'Babies'.
The word bounced off the cold, dark walls of her mind, flat and terrifying, carrying no meaning she could truly grasp.
Eiravyne lay frozen beneath the heavy weight of his body, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
She didn't understand…couldn't.
Her adoptive mother had never spoken of the body's design.
There had been no sister interaction about this in her life, no female friends to whisper secrets in sunlit gardens, no books in the keep's libraries that detailed the mechanics of life.
She had been raised in a velvet vacuum, completely ignorant of the physical reality of how a child was made.
She had never known what it meant to be intimate with a man. She didn't even know that the word intimate belonged to the flesh.
All those quiet, shadowed moments with Urag, the shared warmth, the quiet touches in the dark during their years in Quastrax, she had never framed them as something intimate, sexual or forbidden.
