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You laughingly greet Cub Check and start gently pretending to eat them. They shriek and laugh and tell you your teeth tickle.
Holly has never felt good enough. Her two littermate sisters were born with extra blessings, where she was not even blessed with minimal fertility to experience the joys of motherhood. The lionesses tell her she is blessed because she never has to experience the discomfort and pain of birth, but all Holly feels is another spot of emptiness.
All she wants is a few pretty cubs, a handsome king, and a content life, but she knows she'll never have that.
She doesn't see her worth, though Tiagren, who isn't her father, makes sure to tell her daily how good she is, how smart, kind, caring, and amazing she is; how she blesses the pride by existing. She will help care for the cubs of the pride, a job not many want or enjoy, should she choose to stay once she comes of age.
But where would she go? She asks herself this silent question daily. Who would want an infertile lioness.
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"You're pregnant," the bat tells her as he takes his ear away from her belly. "Two of them, though I can't tell you lions or nesses."
"What?!" Holly asks astounded. "That can't be. I'm infertile. It's got to be some kind of growth or parasite or--"
"Oh, yes, it's a parasite alright. A pair of them. Lionesses like to make nests and coddle them and call them cute, which I guess they are for the first few weeks until all they do is cry."
"I take it you don't have offspring?" Belshazzar asked, eyes lovingly glued to Holly as she got to her feet.
"Nope. Don't want any. Other species offspring are bad enough," he said matter-of-factly.
"How can that be? The snakes said-"
"The snakes are never wrong. On your last visit, did you happen to chew on some berries? Was the following heat more intense than any you'd ever had?" Holly nodded. "The snakes had gotten in some new herbs and berries to make new medications. It seems one of these berries may have temporarily increased some hormone that allowed you a very low possibility of getting pregnant."
"You're going to be a mother, Holly," a voice, soft as an ostrich feather, whispered directly into her ear. She looked around for the voice, but found no one there outside of her king and the bat.
"Bel, I-" she started, before Belshazzar chuckled.
"Goddess is never far from Her lions. She may not show Herself, but She rarely contains Her excitement for long."
The voice had been... Goddess? And She'd spoken directly to Holly? Tears poured from the lioness's eyes, tears of happiness at this unexpected, but wanted, blessing.
"I'm going to be the best mommy you could ever want," she said as she gently rubbed her still smooth belly.
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You ask Holly if she wants to join in the play tussling, but she politely shakes her head no, for she is quite content just watching.
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