FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Silverware clattered against fine porcelain plates in a contest of who could disrupt the oppressive silence the least. The long dinner table in a spartan dining room had space for twenty but seats for only six and tonight for the first time in what must have been years, they were all filled. Three guests dined there for the first time, familiar in appearance but complete strangers.

Eldest daughter Evangeline sat at the far end of the table and paid them no mind, no curiosity nor conversation for these sisters she had never before met. The vixen's icey glare was unrelenting toward their older patron, seated opposite her.

Zarron the Life Wizard. Head of the household. Twisted father figure. Estranged fiancé. Seller of children.

Early that afternoon, he unexpectedly appeared in the house after what must have been months away, arriving by the usual means of magical teleportation. The steward of the house, younger brother Duayne excitedly announced his arrival and Evangeline rushed in to find him.

Usually he would be with his stallion bodyguard but this time he brought three visitors instead: all teenage vixens. Their similar appearances and their impractically-abundant bosoms confirmed they were sisters of Evangeline and products of Zarron's two decade long operation of selling Portia Vasiljev's vitro children.

"Nice to see you Eva. You look well." Zarron greeted her coldly. "Meet Branka, Zentalia and Tabitha. They are family.”

Family was a word seldom said in the house. Every resident outside the wizard and his bodyguard were related by blood as were the countless foxes sold off as products for profit over the years. Some shared the same donor for a father but the dinner gathering was just another reminder that blood alone did not make for a family.

The few like Evangeline who had grown up with Zarron had in common that they were outliers. The rest of their legion of biological sisters and brothers existed at the whims of wealthy customers, ordered as designer children for high end adoptions or other property and bred and altered for fates like service and slavery.

Those he kept in his home had their roles too: security and maintenance for the boys. Two houseboys and twelve identical, half-wolf brothers for security. The two eldest daughters were the closest to what might resemble a family. Sisters who grew up in one another's company, both with destinies to stand beside and behind Zarron as grown women: second daughter Anastasia was made to be his magical apprentice while Evangeline's upon adulthood, was to be his wife.

In all of their cases, raising was handled by nannies and training came from hired tutors. Only Anastasia was tutored by Zarron himself and she'd gotten the most of his time over the years, perhaps to the neglect of the rest of them.

"We'll all be eating here tonight so cook us something nice.”

Eva stood dumbfounded. “You had the best chefs in the land to train me. I don’t know how to make anything that isn't 'nice.'”

“Something extra special then,” he patted her shoulder and led the three visiting sisters to his laboratory.

"No tour?" one of the young vixen asked while looking around the room, an oddly-pink furred vixen.

"No time," Zarron replied. "We need to get to work."

Now at the shared dinner table, Evangeline had dressed for the occasion in an elegant gown she made herself, that covered her shoulders to her knees in a slender, flattering form. She was as skilled a seamstress as a cook, though the roasted game hen with a side of potatoes and rare broccolini on her plate remained untouched.

Zarron eventually broke the tense silence, finally acknowledging Evangeline's glare.

“This is very good. Thank you, Evangeline.”

Of course it was good. Eva had spent hours in the kitchen, making a mess cursing their patron as she made his favorite meal.

She said nothing in return but averted her eyes to the small, weighty corpse of the bird on her plate. Her knuckles tensed around her knife as her attention returned to him.

The robed raccoon appeared more worn-down than a year ago. His fur was older and drier, and the flesh beneath it betrayed further neglect. Previously unkempt, now it was saggy and fat. His age exceeded his appearance as long as any of the rest of them had been alive but now, his body looked to have caught up ten years in the past one.

To Evangeline's left sat Duayne, a brother made for the sole purpose of cleaning and maintaining the house. The rest of the seats were occupied by the new vixen arrivals. Two of them looked to be wizards from the fanciful, silk robes they wore, just like Anastasia had.

All three wore towel-sized napkins tied around their collars, the same as the sisters had been made to eat since developing as teenagers. The tremendous size of their chests were burdensome to civilized eating, filling the gap to the dinner table where normal-proportioned people might be able to lean in. Zarron insisted the plates and bowls stayed set down as a matter of manners, which meant the napkins rarely remained clean by the end of a meal.

After the racoon barely introduced them when they first arrived, Duayne suggested they look them up in his ledger. Zarron logged every child he ever bred and sold including to whom and for what purpose, so they would be in the records.

The pink-furred vixen sat the closest in the raccoon's orbit. Near Evangeline's age, her name was Branka. She was noisy with her silverware as she ate, unaware or uncaring of the tension in the room. A half-red fox, her fur was bright and unusually pink, with sharp, blue eyes and thick, wavy and wild, auburn hair to her waist. The brilliant purple robe on her matched what Anastasia often wore, almost exactly. It could have been one of hers except it fit her and nothing tailored for Ana would fit anyone else properly.

It was not all she had in common with her. From the ledger, Eva and Duayne learned Branka was commissioned by a married couple of Evoker Wizards, a boar and an otter in the eastern country of Sternfallreich. They requested a child with remarkable intelligence to be their apprentice and had almost certainly raised her as a wizard as well.

Branka was the least bothered of the three to be there, not shy at all and even flirtatious with the much older raccoon. She had the boldness and charisma of someone raised outside isolation which made her all the more of a threat, although Zarron remained cold in his responses to her. Did he bother to tell her he was engaged to Evangeline? Were they still engaged?

Eva glared at the pink vixen but if she noticed, she didn’t acknowledge.

The second robed sister was named Zentalia, a bit younger than the other two. Aloof and not particularly interested in any of them, she showed a few flashes of irritation with Zarron herself.

The ledger confirmed she was born and bred to be a Life Wizard, not a commission but one of Zarron's own projects, just like Eva and Duayne. She’d been sent off as an infant and raised at the Magic Academy in the Central Islands, with her school of specialty assigned at birth.

She was in the middle of a block of siblings with similar entries and fated to specialize in one school of magic. Most of them, including Zentalia shared “Donor Number One: Anonymous Arctic Fox” as a biological father just like Anastasia and Evangeline, making them full sisters.

The third vixen hadn’t said a word at all, keeping her head and eyes low. Tabitha was crossbred with a rabbit and her sleek, vulpine face was capped with lapine ears that hung back along her thick, walnut hair. Her clothes were plain, a skirt and an ill-fitted blouse that struggled to contain a chest even larger than the already obscene family average.

The other two bore over endowed chests like Evangeline and their mother did but Tabitha could almost fill out one of Anastasia's robes. She carried her breasts awkwardly and they filled her lap as she sat upright and crushed against the table.

The ledger entry for Tabitha was similar to Zentalia's, with no buyer but Zarron.

Remarkably, the book noted her as an "omni-breeder" but did not elaborate on what that meant, leaving them to speculate she might be biologically able to breed with different species. Even raccoons like Zarron.

After some time scowling at her, it seemed Evangeline found the rabbit-eared vixen too pitiful for her ire. If she wasn’t completely broken as a person, she had no interest in speaking in their presence.

And so Evangeline refocused on the raccoon across the table: her maker and estranged fiance.

She didn't notice Duayne watching her hand, knuckles bulging as she clenched the knife. His attention darted from her to their master, as if calculating if she might somehow manage to stab him from so far away.

With the nudge of his foot, she cleared her throat and remembered to breathe. She set the knife down.

“So Zarron! We were starting to wonder if you'd ever come back,” she said, trying to keep her voice polite. “To what do we owe the honor of this rare family reunion?”

Only Branka and Zentalia looked up as she spoke.

Zarron huffed, his frustration immediate. “I told you. We’re working.” With a huff, he cut an oversized bite with a loud scrape of his knife and stuffed it into his mouth.

He'd led the vixens went straight to the breeding lab after their arrival and Eva followed them until he closed and locked the door behind him. The spells of silence ensured no hint that their activities would escape.

"Did you? You haven't told me much of anything." She forced her tone to be genial. He didn't reply, his mouth full of food.

"Tabitha, was it?" Evangeline turned her attention to the half-rabbit who jumped in her seat, terrified to be acknowledged at all. The half-rabbit said nothing, only looking between them with wide eyes.

"The ledger says you're an omni-breeder," Eva continued. "What does that mean?"

Tabitha's eyes sprung wider still and she looked to Zarron.

"It was an experiment," Zarron grumbled, his bite not entirely finished. "I wanted to see if I could make a womb and eggs compatible with a broader variety of father species. Perhaps only canines, perhaps all carnivores. Perhaps any mammal. I'm certain it worked to some degree but it's an extremely complicated and silly endeavor and one without any real, practical purpose to a buyer. Magic must be interwoven through her own eggs as her zygote developed, which is a lot more complicated than flipping a few switches after fertilization like most of the hybrids. Even if she birthed twenty different cubs of twenty different species in her lifetime, it wouldn't be worth the effort it took to make her. Making hybrids to breed with just one or two species is much, much more sensible in almost every case."

Eva nodded slowly.

"Odd of you to take an interest in my work. It's usually above your head."

"You forget that I was present for a lifetime of conversations about magic and your whole fox breeding business. I may not be gifted enough to perform it myself but it's long been a topic of discussion between you and..."

Zarron's eyes cocked with a fire behind them.

Evangeline bit her mouth and paused, holding his gaze. She forced a smile. After a long, silent standoff she looked over the half-rabbit, appraising her again before speaking.

"So... you have two apprentices now. Or is it three? Tabitha is also here to help?"

"Yes," his glare held on a moment longer before returning his attention to his plate.

Tabitha's skittish eyes followed Eva then away to her plate the moment she returned eye contact. She took a quick bite of her dinner, eating around the hen.

“It must get crowded in the lab. Where’s Darren? You don’t need a bodyguard anymore?”

“It’s a quick trip. The teleportation spells don’t agree with his stomach.”

Eva leaned in, resting her chin on her folded hands as her chest bulged against the table. “What are you working on now?”

“Same thing we’re always working on: breeding, studying and selling our own siblings,” Zentalia said, meeting Eva's eyes. She filled her mouth with a small bite, oblivious to Zarron’s glare. "Surely he's made enough foxes to disrupt a local population or two by now. And when they start pushing out babies..."

"None of this is Evangeline's business to know or for you to share," the raccoon growled.

“There are still things to study after all these years?” Evangeline sighed. “This is the important work that’s kept you away from home for so long? The same thing you’ve been doing in our basement for almost twenty years? Did you move the whole lab somewhere else?”

Zentalia glanced sideways to Zarron, her mouth full of a fresh bite. He was also chewing, looking down at his plate again.

"The lab is right where I left it. There are eggs in the incubator."

Eva tensed her fists. “This is the third time you've been back in the last year. You used to have people picking up every week!”

“I improved the process,” he grumbled. "The eggs we make here include delivery now. I give the buyer a dedicated seal scroll when they order and the egg teleports to their destination when the timer is done. Nobody has to come here anymore and I don't have to go back." He roughly cut a slice of hen and jammed it in his mouth.

"I think it's a bit reckless," Zentalia said right after he couldn't. "Fetuses are sensitive to magic and most people are too stupid to be trusted with a big egg appearing in their house."

Zarron scowled at her but Branka replied. "They know the exact date and time of delivery. All they have to do is lay the scroll with the seal on it perfectly flat and keep the space around it clear. If people are too stupid to do that, they're too stupid to raise a child."

"Exact time? As if most people have a clock in their home?" Zentalia planted her elbows on the table.

Branka turned up her muzzle. "I imagine most people paying a hundred thousand and up for a designer baby do, yes,"

Zentalia did not relent. "If it's so safe, why did he wait nineteen years to start doing it?"

"I waited far too long," Zarron cleared his throat then drank from his wine glass. "It's true teleportation is dangerous. Traditional transport is too. About fourteen years ago, a party transporting six infants disappeared just a few days after leaving the house in The Pale Lands. Nobody knows what happened but I assume bandits or cannibals got them. It's happened a few other times. Not all buyers are fit to make the journey." He dabbed the corners of his mouth and continued.

"The first girl I ever sold was on her way home when pirates sank the ship. At least Lord Truxton went down with it and he couldn't ask for his money back. It's a wonder more hasn't gone wrong.

"We haven't had any issues with the new system and it saves everyone a lot of time."

Eva set her knife down loudly on her plate. "So the eggs deliver themselves now. Wonderful. What about making them? How are you making new babies when you're never here?"

Zarron kept his hands on the table, utensils in hand but paused his eating. He looked over to Zentalia, who bit her lip.

"Where do you go?!" Evangeline finally burst. "Is there a third house you don't take us to? Did you get bored of playing with mother's eggs? Or did you finally use up the last of them?” Eva sat back and folded her arms over her bust. “Or maybe you just found something else to drown yourself in to not have to think about Anastasia running off.”

Zarron froze, quaking. His glare burned into her.

“Don’t say that name in my house.”

Evangeline took a grip on the edge of the table and pulled herself back in.“Why not? She was your apprentice. I was supposed to be your WIFE. I was the one you were supposed to give a big family of kits to.”

That got the attention of all three vixens. Branka managed to smirk again. Did she have any other expressions?

Zentalia covered her mouth before she spoke with a chuckle. "How many did you want?"

Eva ignored her, fixated on Zarron. “Is it them you’re drowning yourself in? Did it take two apprentices to fill Anastasia's shoes? And why this bimbo, if you're not trying to put a baby inside her?" she jabbed a finger to Tabitha. "She can't possibly be helpful in the lab with those enormous breasts."

Tabitha's eyes grew again, glossy in an instant.

"Are you going to marry one of them instead of me?”

Branka shifted in her seat, reeling in a hand that had been near the raccoon. Eva's eyes followed it as it retreated, her nostrils fuming.

Zarron kept control. He set down his cutlery and pushed his plate away.

“You nag and you nag and you wonder why we’re not married yet.”

Eva's fists pounded on the table. “Don't you blame me for any of this. You're a broken man. We’re not married because you loved Anastasia and you never loved me!”

Forks clattered on plates. The three vixens and Duayne darted their attention back and forth between them while the room itself seemed to hold its freeze.

Zarron breathed deep and deliberately, holding his silence and regaining his composure. He dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin before speaking again.

“What is it you want, Evangeline?"

Eva blinked, stunned for a moment. "You didn't raise us to want. You raised us to do as we were told."

"And clearly that didn't work for either of you," he sighed. "Do you want to leave here? Go look for a husband?”

She gave a long exhale. “I’m sure the world outside is the oyster of uneducated girls who look like we do, isn't it? I didn't get to learn magic like... my sister did. They’ll eat me right up out there, won’t they?”

A long silence followed, their eyes locked. In the periphery, Branka gave a solemn, shallow nod.

Evangeline spoke first. “You don’t need me anymore. Maybe you never did. Maybe you don’t need this place at all.”

“I still need this place.” Zarron closed his eyes and sighed. “There is demand for these children. Branka and Zentalia are my assistants now. Tabitha is helping.”

“Oh, she helps? Is she as good at carrying eggs around as Anastasia?”

“I told you not to say that name.” The anger snapped back in a moment then the raccoon pushed back from the table.

“It's time for us to go now. We’ve got work to do. Elsewhere.” He threw down his napkin. “You can thank your bitch sister for all of this. She had everything here. I’m surprised it wasn’t you who ran away.”

Eva gasped. Zarron winced and paused.

“That was too much," he said, eyes clenched, exhaling deeply. "Think about what you want to do, Evangeline. I can't change the past and I can't undo the harm your sister caused us but our old life is over. She ruined it for everyone. You should spend some time thinking about what you want. If you want to leave here, I'll allow it."

The room stood still for a long moment as they all waited. Eva sat with her eyes wide and wet, trembling to keep her composure. Her mouth moved as if trying to form words. If she was capable of speaking, she didn't.

“Fine," he said. "We can talk next time.”

Two of the other vixens watched her in silent pity. Branka gave a huff, rolling her eyes as she pushed out of her seat.

“We're leaving,” Zarron's gaze darted over the other sisters for acknowledgement. The half-rabbit hurried to her feet, the fear obvious where Zentalia took her time, meeting Zarron’s glare as she righted herself and removed the napkin tied around the back of her neck.

"You're lucky, Evangeline," the wizard said, glancing back. "I'd have been a terrible husband."

With that, he turned on a heel and walked out of the dining room, towards the house’s main teleport seal. The three vixens followed but only Branka with any eagerness. The last two turned back to Eva as they left, Zentalia with a shrug then Tabitha with a frown.

The double doors swung closed behind the four of them, leaving Evangeline and Duayne alone in the stunned silence of the room.

Duayne scooted his chair closer to his sister, reaching out to rest a hand on hers. “It’s going to be okay.”

Eva sat silent and trembling, her eyes glossy in a storm of emotion. She remained still until the crack of ozone in the next room confirmed a teleport spell had been cast.

After a heavy sigh, she started to speak but movement interrupted her. The door from the kitchen opened on its own. No one should have been in there.

The swinging door presented a wall of nine armed and armored half-wolves and half-brothers: the Duodecaplets. Three knelt in the front and three standing behind them leaned in, with the last three waiting in the rear, deftly coordinated so that the most of them might eavesdrop at once.

The kneeling Duos stood up and led the rest of them to pour into the room, weapons jingling and heavy boots clopping on the stone floors, then the large, dining room carpet. They split to line up in two rows to flank both sides of the table.

The closest one reached for her shoulder, pausing with a hovering hand before a soft nod gave him permission to touch her.

“Are you okay?”

“I… No, I’m not okay. It’s not like I wanted to marry Zarron and have a family with him but what else was I going to do with my life?”

“We know what that's like. We were raised and trained as soldiers but we are sentries at best, in this isolated place where nothing ever happens.”

“And the one mission we could…” A second one started.

“...and should…” a third added.

“...be undertaking is to recover our brothers that the Master gave away to that cat witch.” The first one finished the sentence.

Eva looked down at the hand on her shoulder. Had any of them touched her before?

“It seems without Anastasia, he’s trying to forget about this place and all of us along with it. I wonder if he’s fertilizing new eggs anymore.” Evangeline slouched in her seat and huffed a breath. “She really ruined all of this, didn’t she?”

Heads tilted curiously around her and she pulled herself back up by the edge of the table, gritting her teeth.

“Ana and mother. I’d like to find them both and smother them in their sleep.”

One of the Duos further down the line hesitated before speaking. “We don’t know if this is either of their faults.”

“Ana betrayed us. She betrayed us and she abandoned us.”

“All we have is Zarron’s version of the story,” the same Duo spoke.

“Of her and our mother,” another added.

“Why should we believe anything he tells us?” a third asked.

“I saw our mother with our brother, Joseph! He was inside her and she loved it. I saw them with my own eyes. Disgusting!”

“You weren’t there when Anastasia teleported away. And all that happened when he and that cat witch were messing with our brothers. Something doesn't add up.”

“Ana's gone and she didn’t come back. He’s gone because of her.”

The Duos exchanged looks amongst themselves. Another one stepped closer to Evangeline. “We could go too. Find our sister. Find our brothers.”

“How long would it take him to notice?” one said.

“He’s away for months at a time,” another added.

Eva signed and leaned into the table, planting her elbows on it. She rubbed her muzzle, beneath her eyes. “You nine, sure. You can fight. You can make a living fighting or as bodyguards. What am I going to do? I haven’t learned anything about surviving outside these walls and I’m not sure I want to. I just wanted a family. A husband. Some children to love and need me. That’s the best I could hope for with the cards Zarron dealt. I’d be fine if I was a wizard like my bitch sister.” Her words dripped with resentment.

“We can protect you. Both of you.”

“You can find a husband and make a family.”

She sighed and rubbed her head. “I don’t know what I want. I never thought I had any choice.”

“Then perhaps it’s time we all start deciding for ourselves. There’s no sense in waiting around here anymore.”

Duayne's attention moved between his nine older, half brothers and his sister, eyes widening. He slowly started to nod.

Another Duo spoke up. “What if we break the teleport seal? Like mother did in the Pale Lands?”

“Stop Zarron from coming back,” another affirmed.

“There were multiple seals hidden in the Pale Lands House,” Evangeline uncovered her face.

“And they broke them all.”

“Because Joseph knew where they all were!” Duayne jumped in. “It was his job to maintain them and it’s mine to maintain the ones here. I know where they are.”

“What if we broke every last one of them and prevent him from ever returning?”

“The man can still walk, brother. ”

Another Duo spoke. “What if we dumped out the armory on the platform and they teleported right into a pile of swords and spears?”

“Keep a fire burning on each one of them?”

“Our sisters with him are innocent, as far as we know,” a Duo countered.

"I'm not so sure," Eva said.

“We aren’t powerless, Evangeline. And he’s betrayed every one of us.”

She perked up at their duplicitous musings. Palms laid flat on the table and she sat upright in her chair, looking up at the two ranks of elite soldiers before her. They watched her and waited.

“And what do we do after this great betrayal? The man is basically our father.”

“You were planning on staying here your whole life?” One of them asked.

Eva blinked and canted her head, “I suppose I did.”

“We could take over the family business?”

“You’ve heard his customers balk at the prices. Even if we sell his current inventory, he charges a ransom for every single one,” another added.

“If you want to stay here, you'd at least be free and rich.”

"Or not sell them and have a family?" Duayne suggested. "Be a mother without having to be a wife to him."

Drumming fingers on the table, she looked back to him then her nine, half-wolf brothers. All eyes were on her. Why were they waiting? The Duos could do anything they wanted. Did they see their eldest sister as their leader now?

Evangeline cleared her throat. “If we break the seals, he can get back here by conventional means. It may take years but we’d be living in fear and he’ll eventually come back and kill us all. Whatever we do, he needs to not see it coming."

“If we’re going to take over the business, we can’t just kill Zarron. If we keep him alive, we could keep producing and selling.”

”Unless Branka or Zentalia know how,” Duayne eagerly added.

She nodded. “Yes but we can’t assume. We need to neutralize them. Mother had something that stopped magic and Ana mentioned another substance. Aspen? Regi-something?”

Another Duo spoke up. “I wonder if there's some in the library? Or the lab?”

Eva rubbed her chin. “Let’s start in the lab. I wonder if we can figure out how it all works. Do you think we could make more? He’s so lazy, he’s probably automated most of the process by now.”

Duayne was the first one out of his seat. “Would that make you happy, Evangeline? Revenge on Zarron? Taking over for him?”

“I think stopping him would be a good start. We can think about family after.”

“You have a family,” Duayne took her arm in both hands and stepped up to her. “We just weren't allowed to act like it.”

A Duo cleared his throat. “Zarron wasn’t going to be able to give you a child, you know. Not in the natural way.”

Eva nodded and dipped her muzzle. “Obviously. It was the best I was going to get.”

“You can be a mother. But you need another fox for a father.”

Several of the Duos shifted nervously, looking to their bolder brother, pointedly watching her.

She looked at him for a long moment and squinted slightly before she glanced at Duayne then back. Her gaze darted down the line of them, nine strapping, young men who also happened to be her brothers.

Half-brothers.

“Let’s go to the laboratory. See what we can learn about all of this baby breeding business.”

She pushed out of the table and stood, walking purposefully from the room, the ten brothers falling in behind her. With a shove, the double doors to the Main Hall swung open , doors swinging gently back and forth, settling in to close.

The room stood quiet and empty at the door after the sounds of footsteps faded into the distance. A gurgle broke the silence, the restless rumble of a hungry stomach. There were half-finished meals for six but Eva’s sat untouched.

Her chair lifted and pulled far out with a squeak, animated on its own. It creaked while the cushion sank with the deep imprint of a broad, bare rump. The chair lifted again, a quick scoot forward before Eva's half-empty wine glass abruptly fell forward, clanging on the table cloth and spilling its contents.

Anastasia Pridemoon, betrayer of Zarron and second daughter of his line of royal-blooded fox proliferation appeared in the chair, wearing nothing but her thick fur, both arms outstretched in a failed attempt to catch the glass.

The force behind its fall was her own rolling wall of gigantomastic flesh, tremendously cumbersome breasts that rolled a half foot over the table while simultaneously filling her lap and pouring over the armrests of her seat. Even crushed in, she couldn't reach far past them and her panicked reach had failed to stop the glass from falling, thus breaking the spell that concealed her.

The only version of an Invisibility spell she knew was a primitive, runic magic that allowed no possessions to come along, including clothes. She’d used it occasionally as a teenager for sating various curiosities but it was a magic she learned without Zarron's permission. Since escaping a year ago, she might’ve spent more time invisible and naked than not. She'd grown quite comfortable with it now.

Wine spilled onto the table, the extent of which her view of was blocked by her own body. She scooted back quickly, half-standing before she waved her outstretched finger and muttered a nonsense word. A bolt of frost shot from her finger and instantly froze the puddle.

Frozen in posture herself, she looked to the door. After a long moment confirmed no one was alerted, she pushed aside Eva's plate and place setting. Carefully, she rolled her chest onto the cleared space then brought her weight down to crush them enough to reach the tipped over glass and frozen wine. Delicately, she righted the glass before trying to pry the wine ice off the tabletop but it stuck in the fabric of the tablecloth.

Eyes darted to Eva's dinner impatiently as she reached for her fork and used it to pry at the edge of the puddle until part of the ice broke. It came up in several shards, which she placed in the upright wine glass. After a quick survey of the scene, she pushed it further away.

Anastasia glanced to the door once more before taking her seat and pulling herself in with more care, now being able to see the extent of her own body. With the volume between her face and the table filled again with ballooning breasts, she moved close enough to feel pressure but not pain. Beyond that, the plate sat out of reach.

With a deep inhale and a wince, she leaned in further to grab it before leaning back to a more comfortable position. The compression on her chest that pushed it out in all directions also stabilized it and she set the plate down on the elevated shelf of her bosom. She eased in closer then back out, adjusting the position that made the curve of mastic mass flat enough to balance the plate. Her nose was close enough to smell it now, the food thankfully still warm. She salivated at the thought of snatching it right off the plate with her jaws.

That would be uncouth though and neither Zarron nor her mother, Portia were permissive of barbaric dining. She took the fork and a knife and attacked Eva’s neglected dinner with as much expedience as civility would allow. It was the first time in days she had the opportunity to sit and dine.

The interloping vixen lived on whatever water, bread and other scraps stolen from the kitchen but hadn’t had a full meal since her covert return to the Manor, close to a week ago. She was here to learn how close Zarron was to tracking them down.

Ana was surprised to find the raccoon missing upon her arrival. Sneaking around for that first day, she looked for him all over the house but it became obvious enough when she found Eva and the Duos that they were all unsupervised.

Late that first night, she teleported back to the inn where her mother waited. She explained that if she was to wait for his return, it may be some time. Portia reluctantly agreed for her to stay as long as needed to get the job done but made her promise only to wait: not to pursue him. She would keep renting the room and keep a teleport seal clear for Ana's eventual, safe return. There was another rescue in the area she would carry out alone. Ana agreed to return weekly and check in, if Zarron did not return.

The primary goal of the risky mission was to find out how much Zarron knew and steal every magical means he might have of finding them. Ana had thought of all the ways Zarron might track them down for a year now and as they discussed it, her mother began to share her paranoia in the four months since their reunion.

If they couldn’t defeat Zarron, they could at least stop him from ever finding them and perhaps, steal back her eggs and put an end to the sales and enslavement of any more of her sisters and brothers.

The secondary objective was to steal any spell books that might help undo the soul-stealing magic that Ana witnessed the feline wizard, Madam Marmalade use on the three Duodecaplets she took with her.

Besides them, the sorceress had five other brothers of hers with what she assumed would be the same fate so their recovery plan moved up in priority. It would only be a complete success, if she found a way to restore the Duos to their former selves.

Anastasia eavesdropped on the remaining nine Duodecaplets talking their three absent brothers and bit her tongue not to tell them the full extent of what the sorceress did. Listening to their resentment, a new possibility became clear: they were primed to turn on Zarron.

The Duos kept their conspiracy rumblings to themselves until tonight. They considered the sale of their brothers a betrayal but stopped short of retaliating against him. Now Eva knew. Her anger could be the perfect catalyst.

After Anastasia returned to the Manor the first night, she’d gone directly to the library. There, she filled a magical sack with anything and everything that might scry on or otherwise locate her, her mother or any of the brothers and sisters they rescued. Some spells might help find siblings in need of help and perhaps Madame Marmalade too but the primary goal was to make sure Zarron would never find them again.

After a thorough sweep of the Scrying and Divination sections, she went looking for anything on the forbidden school of Soul Magic: what Marmalade used on the Duos. For that, she dug into his hidden collection of dark magic tomes she wasn't supposed to know he had. In it, she found and took three books that sounded promising.

She also rifled through his stash of spell components, taking the most valuable gems. Some she might use as intended but they’d also go towards funding her and her mother’s endeavors.

That was all within the first hours of her return. Afterward, she stashed the bag behind a large planter near the Main Hall Teleport Seal with a concealment enchantment on it, where she could quickly grab it on her way out.

In the early hours of the morning she went for his copy of the Ledger next, the book where every child bred and sold was logged in detail. It was all memorized from before she fled but her information was a year out of date now.

It was in its usual place, near the front door of the house. She read through the recent pages, mentalling noting less than thirty new names added since her escape. After completing the transactions in progress before she fled, Zarron slowed down production dramatically.

With the list committed to memory and everything else taken care of, she had now had to wait. She slept in a far corner of the library but in the day, stayed in the common areas to eavesdrop on brothers and sisters while waiting for Zarron’s return.

Anastasia considered often how she might reintroduce herself to the family or if that was a good idea at all. Her old room was ransacked and defiled with obscenities, obviously by her sister. Their relationship had never been equal or even very good and she was well aware of her privileged position to be learning magic instead of cooking, gardening and housekeeping. Eva wasn’t as smart as her though and wouldn't have been able to be a mage if she’d tried.

Waiting for Zarron and having overheard the Duos conspiratorial rumblings, she needed to gauge where Evangeline's emotions were now that a year passed. Tonight made that unfortunately clear.

Her sister spent most of her days doing domestic tasks. Tending the green house gardens where they grew food, reading, cooking sewing dresses of a fashion that took a turn for the darker, like the black gown she wore tonight.

Evangeline also cooked and cleaned up around the house. The constant sighs and the lazy way in which she moved spoke to her mental state. Ana knew if she revealed herself to her sister and didn’t win her over, it would ruin any chance of spying on Zarron and would make her escape more complicated.

Everything she just said to the Duos justified that decision.

Duayne seemed the one most unaffected by the changes, spending the time between his custodial duties, either trying to cheer up Eva or playing games with their massive, dim-witted, inbred brother Stone.

Ana spent some of the past week with Stone as well, watching the towering brute spend hours alone, staring at the wall when Duayne wasn’t tasking him with manual labor. She’d always hoped there was more behind those eyes and he demonstrated before he had a heart. Whatever was missing left him perhaps too simple to understand his situation.

It was an unfortunate admission that to bring him along without the rest of them to help, would be a liability. With her gone, Duayne remained his only friend and a better one than she had been. Separating the two of them would be cruel.

After everyone went to bed, she would read in the Soul Magic books for a short while, then find a corner to recline in and sleep sitting up in a dark corner of the library. She couldn’t risk giving form to a blanket but her uncommonly thick fur was enough.

Anastasia finished the leftover meal but it wasn't enough. Standing, she scanned the table for the next most untouched plate: Tabitha’s. She hurried over to it and scooted herself into her seat, then picked up the plate and set it on her chest. The fork clattered as she readied it and she glanced back to the door again to be sure no one had heard.

When Zarron arrived earlier today, she tried to follow them to the lab but the locked door kept her out as effectively as Eva. What were they doing inside? Why were these three daughters with him?

Zentalia was a Life Wizard and made complete sense as a new apprentice to Zarron. Anastasia hadn't focused on any one particular school of magic and relied on the library more than Zarron to learn advanced magic so Zentalia was theoretically better suited for the job.

Eva and Duayne only knew what the Ledger told them but Ana remembered as a toddler when Zarron created Zentalia. She was one of a dedicated batch he called “The Prodigies.”

Bred to be especially-intelligent like herself, there were two for each school of legal magic and Zarron sent them to magic academies to be raised, with an agreement that he would someday take one of them back. None specialized in any of the forbidden schools like Mind or Soul Magic, that she could try to track down for help with the missing Duos.

Branka was a more curious choice. Months younger than Ana and adopted by Evoker wizard parents, she was likely brought up on her parent's path. Her parents had paid full price for her and there was no indication in her original order that she was may return to Zarron's service. Something had changed.

Evangeline was right to question Tabitha's presence but the jealousy was likely unfounded. Zarron had a cold but strangely respectful relationship with the daughters he created, even the one he made to be his future wife. It was unlikely that changed whether he loved either or neither of them.

Discussing it one night with her mother, Portia theorized the raccoon needed to keep emotional distance or he might start to sympathize with the children he sold as products. They'd bred a number of hybrid fox-raccoons over the years but Zarron always used a sperm donor despite having unlimited access to his own. It seemed unlikely from their time together that he would ever develop aspirations of fatherhood. At least not while still selling children.

An omni-breeder was a marvel of magic that no other Life Wizard was capable of, Zarron had explained. In Tabitha’s case, he did it just to see if it was possible and how much it might be worth.

The miracle of her existence and capabilities turned out to not be in high demand. He sold only a few since for very specialized fates but he enjoyed the challenge of the work, moreso in more recent years.

After being born, Tabitha was studied for a short time before she was sent off, on-loan to an Institute of Domestic Labor. She would be a professional housekeeper and cook, which meant Zarron likely kept her around to take care of him. In that way, she might also be Eva's replacement.

Perhaps more interesting, the study of an omni-breeder once physically mature would be interesting to a scholar of Life Magic and also to herself. No one could really know the extent of her breeding compatibility without testing. If that was why, he wouldn't have needed to wait so long. Of course, the last year changed a lot of things for all of them and Zarron might have changed his plans too.

The raccoon wizard made no secret that some of his secrets he would not share with her, despite her apprentice status and burning curiosity. He was away from home often enough that he could easily be up to other projects. Perhaps he'd been working with all of them for several years already, somewhere else. It wouldn't be his first lie to her.

Always curious, she hadn't been suspicious of the time he spent away. He was an important wizard with other wizardly business. The duplicity Zarron was capable of only became obvious to her when she watched him give up three of the Duodecaplets to Madam Marmalade, body and soul.

Her interest in what exactly it was threatened to devour her thoughts but she needed to get moving. Her mother would be worried, most of her mission objectives were already accomplished.

Anastasia stood with a wince, from overeating on an emaciated stomach. Hands steadied herself on the dining room table for a moment as her top-heaviness settled. She looked down at the expansive shelf of flesh that blocked her view of the rest of her stomach, legs, feet and the ground below her, re-confirming she was visible again.

Watching the door, she considered the possible outcomes of Eva and the Duodecaplets' treachery.

She would take back her mother’s eggs tonight but it would be easy for him to source more from any of the other daughters if not stopped. But she could take them and so she would. They belonged to her mother.

Stopping Zarron was the only way to end all of this and it made sense to throw in with her sister and the Duos against him. Surely Eva wouldn't continue selling off their own family if they won. Even if they did, without him or Zentalia there'd only be a limited number of fertilized eggs to sell before they ran out.

Ana considered again to reveal herself and intervene but she’d seen this week that the Duodecaplets would side with her sister in any conflict.

Eva might not see past her anger long enough to listen. It didn’t make sense to her, that she was so quick to believe the things Zarron said about their mother and presumably, about her now too. So much trust in someone she despised but her sister often let emotions win over logic. Any attempt to reason with her could have the Duos attack her on sight and she had no ideal magic for dealing with their numbers at once. At least not in a way that wouldn't kill them.

The vixen leaned on the dinner table, staring into the plate when it clicked: if she helped her half-brothers find the Espum, it would show them she wasn’t hostile. With it, they could neutralize Zarron however they saw fit. He trusted them all too much to ever see it coming.

This hadn't been the mission as planned but it was an opportunity to do more: stop the operation and take care of their former master for good.

If the nine of them and Eva could defeat Zarron and Zentalia while Ana and their mother could recover and restore the three lost Duos, they’d have a peace offering. They’d win over the other nine long enough for them to explain the truth. All would be forgiven and they could be one, enormous and undivided family.

With Zarron out of the way, his Manor could easily shelter more than a hundred people. It would be a leap forward in the impending housing crisis they were creating with the rescue of every sold-off sibling.

Anastasia allowed herself a smile. It was perfect. She had to make sure her brothers and sister prevailed while her mother and her defeated Madame Marmalade.

After cleaning up her muzzle with a napkin, she pushed clear of the dining room table. The Espum was in the library, safe and secure with the most valuable and dangerous spell components.

Ana hurried out of the room stopping to check the door, then rushed up the stairs as best she could for her build. Going up was always easier than going down.

Down the hallway and into the library, she went straight to the Espum. It was exactly where she remembered it: inside a dust-covered, rune-scribed lead box. It took a bit of magic to open it which revealed a glass jar full of clear, stabilizing gelatin. Suspended in it was a vial of orange powder.

After a moment of hesitation, she took the jar with a wince. Espum was untraceable by any sense but taste but she already felt weaker for its presence. Perhaps it was just in her head.

Giving this and its instructions to Eva, Duayne and the nine Duodecaplets and letting them surprise Zarron with it, was no less a betrayal than putting a knife in his back herself.

Without his magic, would they murder him? Did he deserve that for all he’d done? She couldn't guarantee any outcome; Eva and the Duos would decide. For all their skill and training, the Duos had not killed before and she hoped they would find another appropriate punishment. If he couldn't speak or move his hands he'd be effectively disarmed even after the espum wore off.

Was there any other way to safely suppress a wizard of his power than death?

Without Zarron, Anastasia would know nothing of magic. She wouldn’t have access to a library as vast as his to become the wizard she was today. Everything her sister feared about the outside world was doubly true for herself and her especially freakish proportions.

Unlike her sister, Ana didn’t need to speculate about it: she’d experienced the cruelty of being sexualized, mocked and harassed for her appearance, both with and without her mother present.

It wasn't easy at first or even still but in the months she spent traveling alone to catch up to her mother, she learned on her own to refute it with supreme confidence in her magical prowess and at times, the magic itself. Without Zarron's mentorship, she'd have been helpless.

On the other hand, without Zarron she wouldn’t exist at all. All of them were Zarron’s doing and from the brothers and sisters she’d met so far, she'd been among the most fortunate.

Some siblings had been taken into happy families with loving parents, wealthy enough to afford their prices but for every one of them, there were many, many more who had been sold to cold-blooded masters, abusers, slavers and profiteers.

In the months since she’d left Stusport with her mother, they’d saved siblings bought to be breeders, whores, servants, slaves, soldiers and gladiators. Her sister Marina was already a working whore when Portia and Anya found her. Recently rescued brothers had been forced to take blood for profit.

Whether Evangeline’s accusation of his love for her was meritless, whatever passed for kindness from Zarron was privilege and favoritism, not compassion. He chose to keep her but he also chose to sell off her kin in legions, without regard to their fates.

She could put a stop to all of it. She would put a stop to all of it.

Zarron deserved whatever fate Eva and the Duodecaplets would decide.

Ana hurried over to his desk and set the vial within a jar on it, right in the middle where it wouldn't be overlooked. Now she had only had to let one of them know what to look for.

Then she grabbed a block of charcoal from his desk and drew the familiar, magical runes she used to hide herself again: Invisibility and Silence. Both had been in heavy use since fleeing the house but especially since reconnecting with her mother. She’d gotten fast and good at it but still needed a mirror to consistently draw the one on her back.

“Shondula!”

The runes flared and she disappeared from sight.

“"Vitulas!"

A clap confirmed she was silent.

Her mouth smacked, the ozone flavor of magic before it passed to dryness. Magic did that when using too much, too fast. She’d spent eight days invisible already.

Anastasia stopped at the doors of the library and turned back with a sigh. If everything went according to plan, she might be back someday. It might not go according to plan.

She’d looted the library as thoroughly as one enchanted sack would allow her to carry but there was so much more knowledge in here to learn. Hundreds of years of gathering books containing lifetime's worth of knowledge, Zarron reminded her often as she grew up. She was lucky to have ever had access and she held that thought as she backed out, pulling the doors closed until they sealed shut in front of her.

Anastasia hoped it was not for the last time.

Anastasia Pridemoon hurried to the wide, master staircase from the library, two floors above the breeding laboratory. Reaching it, she took the railing in both hands and pressed her back to the wall before easing herself down.

She was used to not seeing her own feet since age fourteen and within another year, her chest had grown so much that she had to navigate stairs by feel alone: one careful step to plant her heel into the crook of each step. Then another, minding her balance and always hanging on for support.

In those earlier years of learning to navigate with her bulky and unbalanced adult figure, she'd fallen down these very stairs five times and several times asked if she could move her bedroom to the basement. Zarron dismissed the request.

"You're going to need to learn how to carry those things. Might as well start now," he'd said.

The past year on the road had improved her fitness from the sedentary life she'd lived before. Her calves and thighs had grown noticeably as had the firmness of her butt and stomach. Only touch, mirrors and her mother's observations made her aware of the change.

From her own vantage, there wasn't much to her body beyond her shoulders, arms and the tremendous, dominant mass of her bosom.

No amount of exercise would ever compensate for how top heavy she was and even while invisible, she was every bit as careful as when she couldn't see four or five steps ahead. The sloshing of her chest was often at the mercy of unpredictable inertia and stairs would never fail to present a challenge.

Her mother didn't care for the Invisibility spell but for Anastasia, it meant being aware of much more of the world around her, a massive blindspot created by the grotesque extremes of her proportions. It also meant not being noticed, called out or approached in public for a freakish figure she had no other means to hide.

Arriving at the ground floor, she squeezed her elbows to half-restrain her bosom and briskly walked towards the basement lab. When closed, its entrance was concealed from casual inspection but Eva and the Duos left it wide open.

She could hear them echoing from the top of the basement stairs. These ones were more dangerous still: twice as long thanks to the depth of the basement and entirely straight, so any fall would continue for quite some time. She'd only fallen down them once.

She descended them with the same caution and care, with back to the wall and both hands clutching the railing. Upon her save arrival at the bottom, she approached the doorway of the lab.

The familiar space wasn’t grand nor sophisticated in appearance, at least not for the scale of its output but it was quite full of tanks, pools and the supporting infrastructure of the operation of creating new babies from eggs and sperm without a mother or father present.

The room was an oval and a bit over one hundred twenty feet, end to end with a fifty foot ceiling. In the center were two above-ground pools of equal, forty foot diameters. They rose three feet from the ground as an extension of its stone, embossed with all manner of runes: Life magic on the left, Elemental on the right.

Only the life magic pool was filled with liquid: a pink, warm and gooey, nutrient-rich bath of Zarron’s crafting for the eggs to grow in. Two of the duodecaplets stood beside it, guessing what it did and how it worked.

Surrounding the two pools were a number of structures carts and cabinets, support systems for the incubation process. There were also workstations, carts and cabinets laid out in order of operations, for the actual creation of a new child.

The most impressive structure was centered between and behind the tanks, a wooden lattice that framed two twenty five feet tall and eight foot wide, parallel glass tanks, each with a capacity of nearly twenty five hundred gallons. They were the fluid reserve which renewed the wet pool as its exposed surface was consumed or evaporated.

Zarron used to never let it get below the halfway mark but now it was closer to a quarter-full, a testament to his recent neglect.

Those two tanks were fed by a separate bank of nine more bronze vats that lined the back wall of the room near the ceiling, each of them twenty feet tall and ten feet in diameter. Around them were two levels of cat walks.

The upper was near the ceiling and gave access their lids to check and refill them. The lower catwalk was for maintainance, output valve adjustment and inspection. It also connected to the two tanks by the incubator, providing a walking bridge and hanging beneath it, the nine lines that gravity fed them.

Between them and the floor were ladders with guide railings she’d climbed many times to refill ingredients. Zarron had added additional safety precautions a few years before, once a younger Anastasia’s bust grew too prominent to safely climb.

The contents were hidden except for a porthole every quarter to see when one was getting low.

The contents of each tank were a different color and viscosity of oil, extract or other fluid from virile, hearty and regenerative flora and fauna. None of it was particularly obscure or scarce by Zarron’s design but some were challenging to get in large quantities. Sometimes they'd have to venture out to collect more ingredients but it was less often over the years. He’d established supplier relations for almost all of it over the last two decades, even a delivery of the essence of Axolotl every few years. That was the rarest and priciest ingredient.

Dwarfed by the tanks and their multi-colored contents, a workstation was at the bottom of it making the whole thing resemble a giant, rainbow pipe organ. The ingredients fed into valves with dials that had been balanced many years ago to create the perfect cocktail of a nutrient bath.

One of the Duos was on the lower catwalk, examining one of the portholes. “Is this blood?” he tapped on the glass.

Dolphin blood, to be precise.

Next to the mixing station was a wheeled cart with an attached seat. It had yet another liquid container the size of a small wine cask, a slightly different mix of the fluid for the eggs to be fertilized in.

Sandwiching the cask were shelves, containing rows of broad-based, porcelain bowls. They were sized and shaped to be a steady foundation for an embryo to grow from a speck in a dish to an egg big enough to carry a five to fifteen pound infant and the accompanying amniotic fluid and yolk sac. Each bowl would be filled about half full of liquid before being moved the next and final workstation.

A fourth Duo was inspecting the cask with a particular curiosity for the liquid inside. He’d be fine if he drank it, if he could keep it down with its slimy texture and wretched taste. The curse of her iron trap memory was remembering all the stupid things she’d tried as a curious, little girl, including tasting every liquid in this room when Zarron's back was turned.

A broad and deep, rune-scribed cabinet stood near the mixing station, slightly out of the way. The runes were of ice magic and they kept the contents perfectly preserved for decades. Inside was over five hundred vessels of sperm from different donors, mostly small jars from a single ejaculation but a few of the early donors had larger containers like the early, grey wolf donor who'd been father to the Duodecaplets, the gladiator triplets and many others since. Much of it was collected in the first few years, before she was born or as an infant but Zarron would travel for months at a time to scout for prime specimens and pay them handsomely in gold and sometimes a whore to help. That first timber wolf he'd described as a particularly massive and deadly warrior, so much larger and stronger than average that it would more than offset that he was cross-breeding them with a fox.

The last step of the process was the Conception Station, positioned between the cart and the nutrient pool. It's most prominent element was a large optical device, a sophisticated series of tubes, lenses and focus dials, like one might stargaze with, but aimed down. It made things impossibly small to see with the naked eye, plainly visible. Anastasia had looked through it many times before.

There was room for hand movements on either side of the workspace itself and around them, an array of five magic wands, mounted on gears with two axes of adjustment, all aimed down. One was of Healing, one of Fortitude, one of Polymorph, one of Repulsion and an odd, one-off that Zarron had created for this process. He called it “The Wand of Egg.”

The first four wands had additional tips attached to them and dials on them, allowing their intensity to be adjusted.

To conceive a new child, he would place a single, unfertilized egg in the bowl then inject semen from the desired donor. Submerged in a thin layer of the nutrient fluid, the sperm had far better success ratios than in utero. Very small samples could be used and a single donor ejaculation could potentially be used hundreds of times.

Once fertilized, the egg was also more resilient in the nutrient bath. If there were any challenges to it's growth in the first hour, the dampened Wand of Healing would be used to keep it alive. In an hour, The Wand of Fortitude would be fired at it, all but guaranteeing its survival going forward.

The Wand of Repulsion was for splitting fertilized embryos to make twins, triplets or quadruplets like he often did or one remarkable time, the Duodecaplets. Split eggs would get hit again with the Fortitude and Healing wands, and again if split more than once. They had a slightly higher fail rate after splitting more than two times, so sextuplets were the safe limit he settled into after initial experimentation. When they would divide an egg in three then each of those in two, survival rate of all six was nearly 100%.

They’d discussed at length over the years if splitting twice degraded their quality or intelligence. Zarron was sure it did and wouldn’t risk splitting any high value child more than once. Ana was less confident it made a difference.

Seven years ago, Zarron had begun making more triplets in an effort to conserve eggs, worrying about the day he would run out of Portia’s. Around five years ago his concern passed rather suddenly.

"I did the math and realized I've got eggs to last me for decades. I was worried about nothing," he explained at the time and never discussed it again.

Ana was also good at math. Better than Zarron. The nutrient pool could hold fifty eggs at a time and they needed six months to grow before being moved to the incubator, where they needed two more months before hatching. A six-month cycle out of the nine month long year meant Zarron could make at most, one hundred and fifty new children every two years or seven hundred and fifty per decade.

What none of them knew were exactly how many eggs there were. Hundreds of thousands was a guess based on size of an egg divided by the volume of their jar. Even if it were only one hundred thousand eggs, they would last over one hundred and thirty three years at full production. It was strange that he would have worried at all, though Zarron was sure to live quite a bit longer than that. She'd learned by then when to stop asking questions.

She had however asked in an unrelated and earlier conversation why were Portia's eggs so valuable. Why couldn't he use another, related donor, like her or Evangeline?

"Portia's blood is stronger than any of yours," he'd explained. "The only thing better than hers might be her mother's but the Queen of the Pale Lands is a bit less accessable to me than a headstrong runaway."

"And what about the Purebloods?"

He'd considered it for a moment. "It doesn't seem to be the same kind of strength and my Purebloods all seem to have problems. But it would be interesting..."

The Wand of Repulsion phase would be followed by additional rounds of Fortitude and Healing and that was the end of it for pure fox embyros. The process only took about twenty minutes.

Crossbred children were significantly more complicated and began with the Polymorph wand, dampened to give only enough magic to force compatibility without losing the essence of the fox egg. After the precisely time Polymorph right when the sperm broke through an incompatible egg, Zarron would spend two or three days on and off, bombarding it with the Healing wand and manual Regeneration spells, ensuring they would survive to viability.

A fifth Duo peeked into the eye piece. “I don’t see anything.” There was nothing in there to see and he wasn’t getting the angle of his head right to focus.

Somewhere during the process, Zarron would cast a simple cantrip of Fate. It was the simplest form of a “wish” spell that could tip a matter of chance one way or another. He would use it to predetermine the sex between male and female.

A nonbinary outcome was more involved with so many possible outcomes. It was requested seldomly enough, Anastasia had never learned exactly how he did it. Most of the intersex children had been born male or female then developed unexpectedly at puberty into something unexpected. All of them that she was aware of were inbred.

There was another technique he'd used on a few orders over the years as an experiment, that fertilizing a egg with two sperm would produce 'semi-identical twins' with some if not full hermaphroditic qualities but the outcomes weren't predictable.

The standard procedure when an order was requested to be intersex, was to alter the embyro towards that direction so he could guarantee exactly the bits the future owner did and did not want.

When the process was finished and with the eggs sure to survive, Zarron would cast two Timer spells on the bowl itself, after it would be carried by him or Anastasia to a one foot divet in the nutrient pool. A small rack held towels for drying off their legs after wading in it.

There were fifty such divots in both the wet and dry pool spaced five feet apart from each other for safety of not knocking into them on the way in or out.

For the majority of her youth, most of the divets were occupied by growing eggs and around the time Zarron started worrying about his supply, there was enough demand that he had to make a waiting list.

Now there were only eight visible, fertilized eggs in the nutrient pool as well as thirteen, empty looking bowls. New zygotes wouldn't be visible to the naked eye for some days and these would be the product of today's work.

In all her time in the lab, they'd never made so many in so little time. Now that Zarron was so seldomly there, it made sense that the orders would back up but to do so many since they'd arrived meant they'd been working especially fast and not performing any major alterations. Perhaps Zentalia and Branka were helping in parallel, otherwise they'd barely have time to fertilize that many.

The eight visible eggs were all the same coconut sized with an eggshell that was still soft, suggesting Zarron had done them all on the same, previous visit and from their size, it was about two months ago.

The eggs would sit in the warm, nutrient bath among their brothers and sisters, developing in a chemical simulation of their mother’s womb while the egg's shell grew and hardened until it contained a full-sized infant. At that point they were a foot and half tall, grow into its bowl as a stand.

That took six months after which the first timer spell made the base glow, announcing that the egg was ready to be moved into the heated incubator.

The moving of eggs from one pool to the other used to be Anastasia’s job until she was fourteen and dropped one of them. By then her chest had grown too much to be able to carry anything that large.

Zarron rushed to ensure it survived and forgave her faster than she did herself. After all, he’d made her this way. After that he commissioned an engineer to help him automate the process and now a purpose-built automaton would wake when the timer went off. It would wade into the nutrient pool and scoop up the egg, move it to a divet in the incubator before returning to its station.

The odd machine was named “EMA,” as a practical abbreviation for Egg Moving Automaton, both moved eggs and looked like an oversized one except made of metal and with legs. When activated, it opened up to expose a padded cradle, where it could pick up and protect an egg inside itself.

Zarron had let a younger and less cynical Evangeline paint large, round, friendly eyes on it.

“What is this… thing?” One of the Duos tapped EMA on its top, as tall as his waist in it’s idle, resting squat.

Eva looked back from where she stood at a wall of bookshelves, where Zarron kept the documentation from his research and experiments.

“He made a machine to move eggs when Anastasia’s tits got too big to do it for him.”

“Where does it take them? Just from there to there?”

Eva rolled her eyes and nodded. “It’s the dumbest thing I’ve seen Zarron do. It’s this completely overbuilt, magical machine and all it does is carry eggs about thirty feet? All because he doesn’t want to do it himself and I’m apparently so useless I can’t be trusted to haul fucking eggs around.”

“You’re not built for carrying something that size either,” one of the Duos said and she scowled. “He should’ve asked us.”

Another spoke, not minding his brother. “Is it sentient?”

“Gods, I hope not, for its sake. Its existence is even more pathetic than the rest of ours.”

Two more Duos stood at the open air incubator, where embryos would finish developing inside their now full-sized, hard-shelled egg. The incubator was build almost the same as the Wet Pool but with a cutout to step into it, no liquid contents and quite hot inside. It had the same spacing and divets, which she’d often seen at capacity. Now there were eleven eggs, which meant his second most recent return was between six and eight months ago.

Usually they'd be bare and dull brown but these eggs were freshly painted with runes and a seal, something sure to be part of the Zarron's new teleportation delivery system.

“When do you think they hatch?” one of them mused to his brother.

The second enchantment of the bowl itself would alert Zarron the moment the egg was ready, wherever he was in the world. That alarm was a fallback as such things were scheduled far in advance with the arrival of the buyers, especially in the case of adopting families. He was confident the initial imprinting on parents was important to developing a healthy connection and made sure those meetings were timed appropriately.

Anastasia was less confident about that. The raccoon's face was the first both her sister and her had seen and the one thing they seemed to agree on was the desire to stab him in the back.

The bookshelves where Eva, Duayne and the last of the Duos stood were an extensive library of notes and documentation of their experiments over the years. Sifting through books they grabbed at random, they looked every bit as confused as Ana expected they would be.

Not only was Zarron’s system of organization as chaotic as the Life Magic he practiced, but the simplest concepts of it and science would be over all of their heads. Duayne carried the Ledger with him. It was the only book here that would make sense to any of them.

The obvious curiosities of a laboratory kept their attention away from the whole reason any of it existed: The remainder of their mother's unfertilized eggs. Not quite hidden, just tucked in an unremarkable heated alcove and in a glass jar not much larger than a tankard of ale.

Zarron had never explained in detail how he extracted them from their mother, despite her asking on several occasions. If she knew that, she could run the entire operation on her own.

“Some old magic,” he would say. “It’s not a long process but it’s very complicated. Not as invasive as you’d think. And it was completely consensual.”

Her mother had told her side of the story and it mostly matched. While her memory had been scrambled by the wizard, Portia admitted that was something she’d have agreed to at the time, even moreso if it meant he would help her escape the life she was fleeing at the time.

Sometimes after a drink or two, her mother would question if that's how Zarron made her remember it and if he'd rewritten her whole personality to not want children. Ana assured her that would be impossible without a lobotomy but making someone forget a period of time or certain event was relatively easy. Her mother would muse, nod, take another drink then change the subject.

The jar of unfertilized, vulpine eggs was painted with duplicate and redundant runes that held their precious contents in permanent stasis, preventing their aging and decaying outside of her body. It's level lowered as Zarron used them over the years, faster than she would expect for her estimation of their size versus volume of the jar but there were all kinds of possible explanations for that.

It would be simple to steal, once she had the room to herself.

Until then, she waited. The Duodecaplets later joined in with the attempted research and all of their furious momentum was soon lost in boredom. Anastasia wasn’t in a hurry. She just had to wait for one of the Duos to get up and leave. They were synchornized in most things but the fullness of their bladders must be a variable.

“I’ll be right back,” one said after at least an hour. Was he the one who’d insinuated their biological compatibility with Eva? It was a challenge to tell them from one another with their identical uniforms and patterns, and without individual names. Zarron hadn’t put much effort in to strip them of their individuality but what little he had done, had worked wonders.

She hoped it meant there wouldn’t be any major divergence in ideals among them but was about to find out.

Anastasia followed her half-brother Duodecaplet out of the lab and upstairs to the ground floor, to the nearest of one of the large manor’s many water closets. She closed the distance between them with brisk walking after ascending the stairs and was close enough to him by the time it was obvious where he was going.

The house wasn’t public enough to bother with different genders but not familial enough for them to all be common. The one he went to, she’d never been in as it was only for servants and lower-status guests.

When he pushed in the door, she was three steps behind him. Any closer risked running into him.

Anastasia could give the door an extra nudge to clear it without becoming visible again as long as he didn’t look back and witness the door move on its own. He didn’t and she twirled the moment she passed through the threshold, smashing her chest into one wall then the other. She quickly reeled in her own tail around her waist and clutched it against her. With a look over her shoulder, she watched the door closed behind her.

A glance down confirmed the spell hadn’t broken.

These water closets were private and clean, kept spotless by low-level magics like the rest of the house but they were relatively spartan. The bathrooms attached to bedrooms and guest rooms were much more luxurious in space, materials and decor.

She waited by the door and pursed her lips, never intending to be this kind of voyeur.

The Duodecaplet stood at the toilet and relieved himself with his back to her, the length of the room between them. When finished, he turned back to the counter, in no hurry to put his sheathed cock away! It was like the brother's she’d seen so many months before: a wrist-thick tube of furred flesh containing the same familial abundance as the other males of their bloodline.

Her eyes latched to it, lingering for a moment. He approached the sink closing a dangerous distance to her. If she was going to reveal herself, now was the time.

“Duodecaplet!” she blurted out and he recoiled, taking several steps back and drew his blade from his hip in a smooth, honed reflex. His other hand joined his grip, brandishing it.

His eyes widened as she became visible then dropped like stones to her exposed breasts. None of them had ever seen her without clothes.

“Anastasia?!” His discipline didn’t let his gaze linger for long and he squared back into a fighting stance.

“We’re not going to fight. You know what I can do.”

He paused, blinking in thought. “Why are you here? Sneaking around, naked?” His brow crinkled. "Are you trying to seduce me?"

"What?! No!"

She presented her palms up and outward, as if the sorceress concealing a palm-sized weapon was somehow a concern of his when he knew she could turn him inside out.

“I’m here to talk.”

“Then talk.”

“I need to explain some things. First, what Zarron considers my betrayal, was not a betrayal of any of you. And you’re all in the middle of betraying him. Which is good. He betrayed you more than any of us. We have a common enemy.”

His eyes narrowed and the grip on his weapon tensed. She glared at it.

“Stop it. I want to help. But Eva would sic you all on me before she would listen.”

“You don’t think you could take all nine of us?”

“I know I could. But you wouldn't all survive. We’re not enemies, brother.”

He blinked and exhaled. “Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t plan it. I saw what Marmalade did to our brothers. Taking their souls. Zarron caught me spying. Forbidden magic. Things I wasn’t supposed to know. I had to think fast. I fled. I teleported away before he could punish me.”

“Where have you been?”

“I found our mother, east of here. And we’re liberating our siblingsthat Zarron sold into slavery. Most of what he told us about her were lies. She is a good person.”

“Even if I believed you, Eva won’t.”

“That’s why I’m here. With you. In the bathroom.” Her eyes fell to his cock again, hanging out of his pants. It was smaller now than his brother had been a year ago. He was afraid.

“We’re allies. We all have the same goals. All of us. Even Eva.”

“You don’t have that kind of credibility in this house. Not anymore. You should’ve come back.”

“For what? Zarron to kill me? Something worse?”

“He’s barely been here.”

“How could I have known that?” Her nostrils flared and her weight shifted. “It makes sense that for all your training, nobody taught you to question anything. You all trust Eva too much. Our sister is smart but she’s impulsive. Emotional. She has every right to hate him. We all do. But she’s wrong about mother and she’s wrong about me.”

He relaxed his posture and sheathed his sword. “What is it you want?”

Her eyes gestured to the sink. His brow crinkled before he obliged and washed his hands. “You were invisible with magic. You have to take off your clothes for that?”

She nodded. “I’ve been able to for years but no one knew. Zarron didn’t til that night.”

He went to tuck his maleness back in but stopped with his thumbs in the waistband of his pants. “Is that why this doesn’t bother you?”

“Why should that bother me?” Those words sounded less confident than her last. “I’ve seen them before. I don’t care.”

He narrowed his eyes and pursed her lips. “You’ve watched us?”

“The ritual that stole our brother’s soul: it was sex magic. With Madam Marmalade.”

He slipped his hands away from himself, leaving him exposed. He took another glance at her breasts and his cock was back to normal size, the red tip now poking out of its sheath.

“Why are you here? Be specific.”

“I came to make sure Zarron couldn’t find mother and I. That he cannot intervene with our rescues. One of those rescues will be the other three Duodecaplets. But none of us rescuing them will do any good if we cannot undo Marmalade’s magic. I needed certain spellbooks for that.”

His head dipped in a nod and his posture relaxing further. He considered for a moment before continuing. “She… mother, I mean: is it true about her and Joseph?”

“Yes but it was an accident.”

“How do you accidentally have sex?”

“Deliberate sex, not knowing he was hers She did not know she had offspring at all. Zarron lied about her abandoning us so we would hate her. She had no idea about any of this. Any of us.

“Now that she knows, all she does is rescue her children that need help. Our brothers and sisters, that Zarron sold. She gave up everything else to make sure we are all safe and free. I help her with it and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

She took a step forward and his eyes fell to the quake in her breasts. He tensed again.

“Duo, if I was going to hurt you, I wouldn’t need to be close. I wouldn’t need to be visible.” She paused and took another step. “I told you: we’re on the same side. We have the same goals: stop Zarron. Save our family.”

He was unmoved. “The only family the Duos have is each other.”

“Zarron decided that. You can decide otherwise.”

“None of that matters to us, until our three brothers are recovered.”

“Mother and I are going to recover them. I’m going to do my best to fix them.”

"So did Mother stop?"

Anastasia tilter he head. "Stop what?"

"Fucking Joseph."

She considered for a moment. "She did." That was technically true.

Sex with her son had been an awakening of pleasure she'd never thought possible, Portia had explained to her as they traveled. No lover had ever appreciated her as throughly as her own offspring. She struggled with the forbidden urge for the taboo act for months, seeking distractions then professional help to supress it. Nothing had worked.

Their mother found herself quarantined in a plague with another son, Jasper. He was one of the Purebloods who'd developed mind magic. With her desires impossible to hide from him, she admited to caving within minutes of them being alone.

Two depraved months later, she emerged having admitted and accepted that she no longer had any sexual desire outside of her mature sons and had created a set of rules she believed she could continue to do so ethically.

Since then, Ana had watched and masturbated while her mother had sex with four more of their rescued brothers including three of them at the same time. Portia had planned another rescue this week of a pair of half-rabbit breeder sons and was sure to have sex with them too.

Unfortunately for Joseph, he hadn't seen their mother since any of that.

The Duo relaxed his posture entirely this time and his eyes fell over her again, this time more appraisingly. There was more of his red tip peeking out of his sheath. “You look good without clothes. We’re only half-siblings, you know.”

Her eyes dropped to the change in his body. “Of course, I know. Different fathers. Still related.”

“Evageline has grown much closer with us since you’ve left. But you… you’re basically a stranger.”

Her eyes flitted to his. “How close?”

“Not as close as Mother and Joseph. Not yet. But she’s lonely. She wants a family. We could give her one. And with no one around to tug our leashes, we’ve gotten very, very horny.” He was swelling toward erection now. “Maybe if there weren’t nine of us…”

Anastasia considered the lure of her mother. Portia would eagerly fuck them all, and likely at the same time. But Eva wasn’t going to stop Zarron by herself. If they could neutralize his, Branka and Zentalia’s magic altogether, the Duodecaplets would overtake them with ease. She’d left the Espum out. Her sister would prepare Zarron’s next meal here, whenever that may be.

There was nothing more important they could do.

“Ever since you were a teenager, I’ve always wondered how you managed to function with breasts that big. Is that common out in the world? None of our guests have anything that compares to even Eva. ”

“None of us are common. I’ve never seen anything like our family.”

“That’s disappointing. We all quite like them. Growing up in a house with only two women, you became our standard for beauty.” He pushed off the counter and took a step toward her. “We were excited to hear about mother and Joseph because it meant maybe we had a chance with you and Eva. Not all of our inbred brothers and sisters are like Stone, are they?”

“No. I’ve only met one other. He was sound of mind, with only a minor physical impairment.”

“Did our mother fuck him too?”

“She did.”

“Did you?”

“No. I don't do that.” Also technically true. She remembered the alkaline taste and force of Jasper's climax in her mouth, a surge of semen with volume enough to balloon her cheeks until they overflowed but she had not had sex with him.

"Why not?"

There wasn’t much space left between them now and half of the gap was filled with Anastasia’s breasts. She shook her head and lifted her eyes to his.

“If you stopped Zarron, I bet mother would fuck all of you.” That was all but guaranteed.

“All twelve?” He raised a brow and cracked a smile. “That’s an interesting idea but we don’t know mother. She must be quite old. That’s not appealing.”

Anastasia sighed and stepped forward, blindly reaching until she took a grip of his now full erection while looking him in the eyes. It was hot and slick against the pads of her fingers. With another step, the forearm-sized cock stabbed in between her breasts and disappeared to the hilt.

“Is this appealing?” Her chest was smashed into his yet her muzzle was still so far from his.

He nodded eagerly.

“Put your hands on my breasts.”

They practically slapped her, feeling their enormous, outer curves before squeezing them, his arms open wide to do so. Now she wouldn’t have to worry about him drawing a blade while she was off guard. Her hand began to stroke, the other coming to rest on his shoulder. She didn’t know what to do but saw enough of her mother in action: moved back and forth and he’ll eventually cum.

“Listen. this is important: you need ESPUM to stop Zarron. Eva had the name wrong. It’s an orange powder, sitting on a jar on Zarron’s desk. Feed it to him. Bake it in his food. Use the whole vial. Make sure Branka and Zentalia eat too. Tabitha is not a mage but it won’t hurt her or anyone else.

“It has a taste so tell her to mask it with some strong spices. It’s going to take some time to spread to their bloodstream so don’t make your move until dessert is served.”

“Poetic.”

“What?” she stopped stroking and tilted her head.

“Nothing. Go on. With both. Please.”

He closed his eyes with a shiver, opening them to stare at her breasts, hugging them like he might hug two people at once.

“Nipples. Touch them.”

Duo nodded and found a nipple with each hand, thick, short and hard. He gave them an ungentle squeeze and she gasped.

“You’re horny too. Let me fuck you.”

“No. Keep listening.”

“Fine. But stop with the hand. Let me fuck these giant tits.”

She swept her arms under her chest and squeezed them together, overflowing in all directions. His hands joined them in squeezing again, pulling her tighter around and against him. His hips bucked, his entire length consumed in the depth of her cleavage.

"Oh fuck," he hissed and closed his eyes.

“Now listen: Zentalia and Tabitha don’t seem to want to be there. You might convince them to turn on him. Branka seems closer but it could be an act. Don’t take chances either way: neutralize all the magic first. They all must eat it. Talk after. Understood?"

"Sure," he said, not taking his eyes off the globes of flesh he battered waves through with eager hips.

“You need to catch them all off guard. Then the nine of you come in. Restrain all three of them at the same time, three of you each. Arms, legs, mouth. Fingers even. Don’t let him gesture. Don’t let him speak. Don’t let him see. The Espum should last at least an hour. Wait for dessert!”

He nodded confirmation, with jaw slack and panting.

“Repeat all that back to me.”

He closed his eyes and she squeezed his shoulder. “Espum. Orange. On the library desk. Hide it with spice. Doesn’t take much. Make sure they all eat it.” He sucked in a breath through gritted teeth. He was close. “Wait for dessert, strike, restrain everyone. Grab my balls.”

“Good,” she gave a nod and obliged, finding them heavy and tight. “Feels like you’re almost…”

“HNNNNGGGGGHHHHHHH!”

He was wide-eyed as he rolled his head forward, stunned, while his hips bucked erratically against the soft, bulging wall of her chest. A moment later, a surge of semen flooded between her breasts and blasted her concealed sternum, gush after gush of teenage repression hidden in the tight valley of her cleavage until she felt it drippling down her stomach.

She watched his face through his orgasm, her jaw hanging slack, tongue licking over her lips, wishing he would grab her and kiss her like all of her brothers did when they fucked their mother. His eyes were closed and oblivious.

He thrusted a few more times, and jerked her closer by her shoulders, enough that the bulk of her breasts was trying to push her away. The tip of his cock emerged from her cleavage before a weak aftershock of a gush to fall on the top of them.

He held her there for a long moment, with a heavy, trembling sigh as he opened his eyes, a grin crawling across his muzzle as he saw her waiting face.

The handsome, half wolf released her shoulders and stepped back then steadied himself on the countertop, his flagging erection dribbling on the floor. She glanced away for a moment and cleared her throat.

“None of you can do anything in that lab, other than switch the eggs in the pool to the incubator. Do that when the bases glow. After that, all you can do is wait for them to hatch.” She paused and added. “They’re people, like us. Stop selling them. Take care of them for mother and I to return. Be better than him.”

He shrugged. “Eva seemed pretty certain…”

“Be better,” she repeated and waited for a nod to continue. “If she wants a family, she already has one in those eggs. She can take care of them."

"He said something about them teleporting automatically."

"They won't. I'll stop it. You'll have angry customers when deliveries don't arrive. It'll get Zarron back here faster."

He nodded.

"Get everyone to the library now. Find the Espum. If Zarron finds it first, you’re done. No chance. Be ready for whenever he returns. Hide it in the kitchen. He never goes in there.”

With a few deep breaths, he steadied himself then used both hands to reel his deflating erection back into his pants.

“I’ll go to the library now.”

“No! Lab first. Take them all with you. I told you, nothing to find in there. You can’t make kits without magic.”

“Can you?”

"Of course. But I never would."

He gave a crooked smile.“Thank you, sister,” he said, patting her shoulder as he passed her. “I always thought you were the uptight one.”

“You owe us. Mother and I. You’ll owe double when we come back with your brothers. Don’t forget that. We’ll be back to fix things with Eva. Don't say a word about this til then.”

“I’ll do my best. Goodbye Anastasia.”

He paused with his hand on the door to look back. “I like your haircut. It looks good short.”

She gave a huff of a laugh and a smile before he pulled the door and left.

Anastasia watched the door close before stepping over to the mirror. Looking at herself, her eyes followed the slow crawl of her brother’s ejaculate from the bottom of her cleavage through her thick, water-repellent fur. It drooled down her lower belly towards the flash of wet pink between her legs, demanding to no longer be ignored.

In the months since leaving Stusport with her mother, they’d been on fourteen checkin missions together, ten of which turned into rescues of seventeen more brothers and sisters. Of those, four were boys of appropriate age: a half-rabbit and half-wolf triplets. As Jasper predicted, none of them had any reluctance to have sex with their biological mother.

Ana watched from the safety of her Invisibility spell or pretending to sleep, masturbating quietly as she did. The sight and sounds of her mother’s ecstasy was eating away at her aversion to penetrative sex.

Zarron had not provided much of a sexual education to either her or her sister, which she realized in retrospect had probably been a good thing for girls raised by someone so villainous on so many other axes. What she knew before meeting her mother were from books and as a life wizard, Zarron had quite a few. She knew the science of sex and she'd felt the pangs of her hormones calling for her to mate but it had never quite clicked where it all went and how so much of someone else displacing her insides couldn't be painful. Especially with the size of her brothers' penises, which was most of her frame of reference and all somewhere around the size of her forearm. How could there be so much space inside her?

She'd watched her mother closely enough to see her belly bulge with the rhythm of one of them thrusting into her and her cries of bliss were sincere but some girlish mental image didn't click: how could being impaled and your insides displaced around another person feel good? Her only frame of reference was eating too much or needing to use the toilet, neither of which were pleasant associations. She'd built it up so much in her head that the idea turned her stomach to the threat of boiling over. That negative association was validated the first time she'd seen anyone have sex, witnessing her brother's soul being extracted through sex magic. She had in fact, thrown up then while falling backwards and triggered this whole series of events.

Now she'd been in the room with her mother enough times that she was coming around to the realization there was something she was missing. Someday, she would try it.

When feeling particularly bold and interested while invisible, she'd lean in just inches away from her brother's penis pistoning in and out of her mother, holding her breath to not alert either of them. Other times she'd gently touch her mother's rear, breasts or face to let her know she was there with her. All of it risked becoming visible but she loved the thrill of tempting it.

Unlike with Jasper, she decided to not get involved with the others and as far as they knew, it was a secret between the triplets and seperately the half-rabbit that they'd had sex with Portia.

Anastasia was a virgin and her mother assured her often that was her choice. She was quick to add that when the time came, it shouldn't be with one of her brothers. That was hard advice to take seriously coming from their incest-addicted mother but also when these were the men she was surrounded with. The idea of sex with a stranger was scarier than sex with her brothers at this point.

Her mother had explained why there was such a cultural stigma but Anastasia had long been an accomplice to the creation of inbred offspring in Zarron’s lab. The actual sex part was insignificant in comparison to creating new inbred lives, which she'd done many times.

Out in the world with her family sneaking around to have sex, she learned how strong and unquestionable the taboo was.

It made sense that people would be hesitant about inbreeding from the exaggerated stories they told, though she was less convinced than Zarron about all of the Purebloods being failures. It was one of the first moments she’d had the courage to debate him: she was 13 and one of her Pureblood sisters manifested unexplained abilities, not unlike Jasper’s ability to read thoughts. This sister was reported to move things with her mind alone and used it to move her buyer and future husband off a tower balcony. After that, he decided to stop breeding them altogether.

Anastasia argued they needed to learn more while Zarron insisted it was not worth it: latent mind magic wasn't "real" magic he would say. It was unpredictable, uncontrolable and dangerous and required no training or discipline. He couldn't risk selling children who could kill their masters. Thankfully, it was also so exceedingly rare that few in the world remembered it even existed. And yet in the Purebloods, it seemed it might be quite a bit more common.

She eventually conceded, seeing him get irritated at her resistance. He wasn’t used to being challenged but her obedience did not resolve her curiosity.

That night, she went to the lab and replaced the two most common arctic fox sperm donor samples with the “Pureblood”sample of her Uncle Bjorn and never spoke of it again. Since then, more than a hundred more of her brothers and sisters were inbred because of her direct action and no one else had any idea.

She’d decided there was no value in disclosing that to her mother unless it should become necessary.

Even if procreation within a blood line was dangerous, risk of pregnancy was easily thwarted with simple spells, salves, runes and potions. Without those there was still so much that two people could do with each other for pleasure and affection that wouldn’t make a child: oral, anal, hands, breasts. Why was touching, hugging and kissing family okay but sucking her brother’s cock while he lapped her labia wasn’t?

Every time she watched her mother, she was closer to wanting it and there was no doubt how it would happen someday and probably soon: it was only a question of which of her many brothers would be there when she was ready. Maybe without the rush, it could’ve been this Duodecaplet.

The bigger, stronger brothers like the half wolf Duos or the triplets they'd rescued were intimidating. All of her brothers regardless of stature were packing absolutely massive penises compared to Zarron or anatomy books but it was more that the big, strong ones could move and lift her. She wanted to stay in control. A smaller, weaker brother, like Jasper or Joseph was a more appealing ideal.

There was a hurry but she was unfocused, her blood racing with primal instinct. Their mother had warned her about working while distracted and that there was no shame in a quick break to relieve oneself.

She planted her hand on the counter and the other on her sex, two fingers pressing into her clitoris. She imagined what it would be like if he was still here standing behind her, caressing her before slipping himself inside her.

She looked down in the mirror and how deep he would be: at least to the top cradle of her pelvis, which the bottom of her breasts concealed.

Ana breathed heavily, staring in the mirror and touching faster. She considered if another Duo were to walk in right now. That would be it. She’d brace herself and beckon him. He’d bend her over the counter and fuck her hard until painting her insides with an incestuous seed.

Portia had confessed it was better with family, with the strong caveat that it'd be different for her. She didn't believe her and it didn't matter either way: when it happened, it would be with one of her brothers.

After the fact, her mother would be proud of her and be one more thing they could share. She thought back months ago, to the rescue of three half-wolf gladiators and her mother getting in the middle of them and taking all of them inside her at once. What a relief it would have been for her, if one of them could've taken Ana instead? She imagined bent over next to her mother, reaching out for her hand and smiling as their bodies both rocked with the eager loving of their family.

With weak knees and a whimper, she lifted her tail hopefully then her eyes caught the tremoring pool of semen on her breasts, her arctic fur too thick and oily to soak it up.

Her head snapped down to scoop most of it up in a single lick and she held his taste in her mouth as her frenzied fingers pushed to the edge, moaning in cheap ecstasy through gritted teeth.

The surge of release left her a heaving, panting mess. She leaned on the counter for support, her ballooning chest covering half of it as she stared in the mirror.

She’d get over her fear of sex soon enough and after that, she might be just as addicted as her mother. She hoped to be like her mother, the one person she could look up to in this world.

The vixen caught her breath and composed herself before straightening her back and lifting away her hands. Even fully upright, her breasts remained resting on the countertop, distorted at its bottom.

A shaky hand raised. She snapped her finger in an incantation and instantly phased to the back of the room: a low risk teleportation spell that only moved her a few feet. It was intended for phasing in combat but this simple version brought absolutely nothing with her, including any dirt, filth or foreign objects.

Her breasts dropped as they fell free with no counter to rest on, then wobbled and settled. The mess of semen fell in front of her, splashing on the countertop where it would be easier to clean. A cloud of fur, ready to shed also remained and its dingy toned reminded her she was overdue for a proper bath.

She smacked her mouth, the dryness accumulating as the ozone smell of magic dissipated. With an unsure wince, she stepped up to the sink and drank from it before cleaning up the puddle with a towel.

For the fur, she kicked the bigger clumps under the counter with bare feet. Someone might notice but she wasn’t the only one in the house who shed. She wouldn’t be here much longer and the Duo may not keep a secret from his brothers or from Eva. It didn’t matter, as long as they did what she said and stopped Zarron.

Stepping back again, she looked at herself in the mirror and realized she had no charcoal to draw new runes with. If the Duo succeeded in clearing them out of the library, she wouldn’t need to. It would only last until she started to take things which she had every intention of doing.

Anastasia went to the door and cracked it open peeking out into the great hall. There she waited, quite impatiently.

It wasn’t long before the others emerged from the lab. At least it seemed that way for the time Anastasia passed masturbating.

Eva was talking with her brothers, complaining to them about the organization and handwriting of his Zarron’s notes. He was disorganized but only other wizards had any chance to make any sense of them anyway.

One of the Duos was brazenly staring at her behind as she walked. Were they all so horny? How long would it be before that boiled over? Was it a risk to her plan? What could she do about it if it was?

Ana counted them off: Eva. Duayne at her side, like always. Nine Duos. She only recognized the one she’d talked to by his newfound swagger. They passed through the room. That was all of them.

The lab was empty.

Anastasia waited until all of their voices had faded away into the second floor and another long moment to be sure. She pushed through the door and hurried back towards the basement. Along the way she eyed the large planter nearest the teleportation seal, behind which her sack of stolen magic and components was still stashed.

As fast as she safely could, she descended the stairs again, through the doorway and straight for the jar preserving her mother’s unfertilized eggs. If the Duos failed, Zarron would resume production of more children and likely, Zentalia could too. The jar would also be the easiest thing to carry.

The lab itself was well-warded like the library but he had not gone back to exclude her from the exceptions. To be doubly-sure, she hunched forward and scanned for any new magical protections. There were none though it had Zarron’s residual trace on it, presumably from their work earlier in the day.

She reached out for the jar and eased her fingers around it. No traps. No wards. She picked it up.

Holding it aloft, she paused and allowed herself a heavy sigh, then inspected it. Was it that simple to put a stop to all of this? It was noticably less full than it was a year ago, odd for how few eggs were incubating. Perhaps in his rage or lack of focus over her departure, he had spilled some.

It didn’t matter now. She had it! A thousand or more remaining, potential siblings, spared from whatever fate Zarron’s buyers would decide.

She turned and walked to the incubator and the eleven, full-sized, rune-painted eggs in it.

She rubbed her cheek and considered the options. The eggs in the pool needed the nutrient fluid to survive. Once in the incubator, they relied on the uninterrupted heat at least until they were nearly ready. Some of them might be mature enough to save but there was no way to tell from the outside, without knowing when they were made. The newer ledger pages confirmed that three of them were older than the other eight and nearly ready to hatch but there was no way to see from the outside which was which.

Seeing through the shells however, would tell her.

Anastasia set down the jar on the edge of the incubator and took several steps away for safety. Teenage years spent in Zarron’s lab made her very aware how easily she knocked things off of countertops.

With a broad gesture of both hands that ended in her covering her eyes with her palms, she muttered ancient Words of Power to cast the spell "Sight Beyond." It was one she learned while she was younger but hadn't had much practical use for until she was helping her mother surveil locations before they would sneak in together.

"Sight Beyond" saw past the outer layers of things to reveal what was behind. It wasn't effective past thick stone and couldn't see beyond ferrous metals at all. For egg shells it was overkill but because it was a spell that manipulated light instead of actively projecting, it was a passive magic effect that would not endanger the fetuses.

She pulled her palms away and her eyes glowed with a golden yellow. It would work until she blinked again. Within the eggs as expected were eleven developing fetuses, eight of them the same, immature age of just over six months. The remaining three were also the same size as each other and from a different visit eight months ago, as they were almost fully mature

She stepped into the heat of the incubator and paced among the eggs, considering her options. The teleportation runes could be broken with a scratch of her fingernail. The paint on them was still fresh enough to smell. That would stop their delivery, at least until Zarron's next visit, which should be his final one.

Scanning over them she found the shortest path between them then moved from egg to egg, scratching a line in the paint of each to break the magic. A fizzle of ozone confirming each rune rendered inert. It was likely that an angry customer with a missed delivery might return before Zarron. Eva could handle that if it happened and if not, the Duos would. She finished the job.

It was hard to imagine any of them would allow more of their sisters and brothers to be sold off but she concluded it would be best to take the three mature ones with her for their safety. If only she could carry them. She still had an overstuffed bag to deal with.

With a heavy head, she looked down at her chest and sighed. It would be easier for anyone else to do what needed to be done.

With a scan of the room, she considered any kind of makeshift sack or sling but there were limited used for such things in a laboratory. Upstairs, there were linens she could fashion something out of but that would run the risk of crossing Eva and the Duos again. She had to work fast and get straight to the teleportation seal.

There were spells that might help her, to fortify the egg shells to be more resistant to dropping but fetuses were incredibly sensitive to magic. She might do permanent harm by trying. Levitating them was safe enough but only for one egg at a time and she'd need a hand free to guide the spell.

She'd have to do her best and carry one under each arm, though she hadn’t so much as picked one up since the accident. That left one more. For that, she turned to the Egg Moving Automaton.

“EMA, wake up.”

EMA rose from its seated squat to stand. Zarron hadn’t thought to remove her permissions for that either.

There were no other hints to the change in its status. No whirling gears of mechanical hum. It was perfectly silent and still, an uncanny facsimile of life.

Ana stepped over the youngest of the three, almost mature eggs.

“EMA, come to me.”

It wouldn’t listen to Eva, Duayne or any of the Duos: only Zarron and her, as long as it didn’t contradict him or his directives. Those weren’t weren’t very sophisticated. It was an armature animated by magic, the same as she might use to animate a broom to clean. And so, with the quiet, musical whirl of precision, clockwork gears, it walked to her.

“Hello EMA. Nice to see you again,” she patted its head and set a hand on top of the egg. “EMA, please pick up this egg.”

The tolerances of the automaton were so precise that its egg-shaped body looked solid and seamless but when called upon to open, several hairline cracks appeared with hard edges and right angles, reminding of its mechanical original.

Its top flipped back like a lid revealing its hollow, thickly padded interior. Next, its midsection opened as front, double doors that combined to make up most of its circumference. Open, it exposed metal forks upholstered in leather and standing upright, almost to the inside of where the lid had been. They lowered and locked into position, parallel with the ground.

EMA squared up to Anastasia’s unborn sibling and squatted, before rolling forward on tiny wheels until the forks were fully beneath the bowl it was tailor-fit to carry.

It tilted back, easing the egg and it's base to rest in its cushioned cradle before its front doors closed again, then its top hatch. The seams disappeared again, the organic egg enveloped and protected within the mechanical one.

Under her thick fur, Ana was starting to sweat in the heated space and would need to hurry before her hands got slippery. She went to the second egg and scooped it up in her arms, securing it against the bottoms of her breasts. Carefully, she waddled it over to the third and set it down.

Another sigh and she looked back to the jar of her mother’s eggs, still sitting on the edge of the pool. Did they even matter, other than depriving Zarron of them? Hard to say. She could shatter the jar and it'd be one less thing to carry.

That seemed wrong. They weren't technically alive but each was a potential future sister or brother. She walked over and grabbed it, then went back to stand between the eggs With a deep sigh, she twisted herself one way to looked down at one egg by her feet, then the other way, locating them mentally.

“Okay…” she mused aloud, her eyes darting over all the things she had to carry, feeling the sweat on her forehead and scalp accumulating.

First, she jammed the jar into the top of her cleavage to the lid where the sheer size of her breasts and the tension between them could support it. Next, she stepped between the eggs and squatted.

With her rump nearly on the ground, her spine upright and her knees trembling, she wrapped an arm around each one. She pulled them until they were nestled against the massive but mercifully pliant breast meat, pushing them up towards her muzzle and out over her arms, squeezing the jar tighter.

With a soft grunt, she stood back up. They were heavy but as secure as she could get them. It was time to go.

“EMA, follow me.”

Anastasia walked as fast as she safely could, turning sideways through the low gate into the incubator then straight for the exit. EMA wasn’t noisy as it moved, it’s whirling gears a soothing song but it weighed over two hundred pounds and its hard-soled footsteps were louder than the barefoot vixen. It kept up with her attempt to hurry pausing only when she reached the stairs and scooted up them with her back to the wall again.

The automaton followed, one step at a time.

At the top, she paused to listen. Silence. The library was upstairs. Her shoulders started to burn, each egg laden with a fetus and a few gallons of amniotic fluid.

She hurried straight for the house’s main Teleportation Seal, a twenty foot circle, big enough to safely receive a small group. In the center, she squated to the ground to release the eggs. With a deep sigh she stood and removed the jar from between her breasts then set it down in front of her, forming a triangle.

“EMA, wait here.”

This was an dangerous state to leave the seal in, the automaton several feet behind her inside it. Any incoming teleportations risked being merged with anything occupying the seal in a way that would be irreversible, disfiguring and very likely lethal to all involved lifeforms, hatched or otherwise. To leave it like this for even a moment was a violation of every safety protocol for an already, incredibly risky magic.

She hurried to the stashed sack of stolen books and materials, concealed near the seal It was bigger than her torso and she had to squat to lift it over her shoulder.

Wide eyes darted around the mezzanine level again. Still empty. She rushed to the circle with a less delicate waddle before setting it down between and slightly behind the eggs. The jar was next and she picked it up and pushed it back down into her cleavage then sat down on the bag.

In position, she placed a hand on each egg.

“EMA, step closer to me.”

It took one step, still a few feet from her.

“EMA, take two steps.”

It did, stopping shy of running into her breasts.

“EMA, take one more small step.”

It did not move. Of course it didn’t: colliding into anyone was forbidden by EMA’s instructions.

With a quick sigh, Anastasia leaned forward to close the gap, pushing the soft flesh of her bosom against the steel curve of the automaton's body, the permanent enchantment keeping its shell pleasantly warm. Teleportation required contact, not any specific touching. This would count.

She closed her eyes and focused on the teleport Sigil of her bedroom in The Pale Lands, far away from here.

The world turned white. Then black. A crack of reality bending that the Duos and Eva might hear. It didn't matter now. There was silence. The air was different. Dry. Cold. The ozone taste filled her mouth and nose with uncomfortable dryness. She tasted iron and licked over her teeth. It was a lot of magic in a short amount of time and teleportation was especially tolling on the body.

That didn't matter now. She opened her eyes with a sign of relief: she was back home, safe in The Pale Lands.

The bag, EMA, the jar and both eggs had all made the jump with her. She'd need to get them to a heat source soon. The fireplace downstairs would work but first, she would need clothes.

After all, there were children present.

Anastasia Pridemoon took a deep inhale and found some strange pleasure in the ozone smell of magic, even as the dryness it brought to her mouth was now burning her sinuses and the back of her throat.

She stood in the middle of a ten foot diameter teleport seal she had painted in her bedroom at Zarron’s second home in The Pale Lands, now a safehouse for a new wave of rescued children.

A year ago, Portia and Joseph had broken every seal that Zarron could use to return here. Teleportation without a seal was incredibly dangerous The location was so remote it would take enormous effort for him to travel there by conventional means and all for a house he had nothing left of value in and no reason to believe was occupied.

Portia, her mother had been difficult to convince but the house was self-sufficient, out of the way and concealed from most of the world. Ana cast spells to further fortify and hide it, from both the public but especially from the raccoon wizard who technically owned it. Certain runes and sigils she painted all over the inside and outside of the house made it near impossible to scry or track them. There were new teleport seals she’d painted as backups to this one, original ones known and usable only to her.

Once Anastasia was able to teleport to and from there with some assurance of safety, it became the perfect interim housing for the rescued children they were accumulating. Only recently did they receive word that Stusport had reopened. Jasper had extended the offer to shelter any of their family there but by then they were already using the Pale Land’s house.

Of course, this house could only support so many. The Duodecaplets had never been housed here so it had been at most Zarron, Eva, Joseph and herself plus a few nannies, tutors and servants when they were younger.

Now there were seventeen siblings of varying ages and she could hear the ruckus of them in the distance. After years of the tomb-like silence of her bedchambers in either of Zarron’s homes, it was odd but pleasant to have it sound lived in and alive.

The manor was built much larger than needed and with abundant supplies, dry storage and a sizable greenhouse. Food would become an issue before space did and they would be at capacity once there were twenty five mouths to feed.

Her and her mother were working their way towards Brummel, a town where Portia was hailed as a hero from some deeds when she was closer to Ana’s age. They’d hopefully take some of her family into their community.

Ana went to her wardrobe, reaching first for one of the many, duplicate purple house robes. Her hand hovered for a moment, reconsidering her choice.

She reached for one of her older, neglected robes her sister had once made for her: this one was black with a gold sash around the waist. Slipping it on, she checked herself in a full-height mirror, ensuring she was tucked in and decent. She straightened her hair then fluffed it out before going to the door.

Her mother had retrofitted it with slots to drop a heavy beam of wood into, allowing Ana to brace it from the inside. When locked, it could only be entered via teleportation. It was the safest teleport entrance to the whole house and they couldn’t chance any of the younger children running in at the wrong time and being spontaneously spliced with their older sister to the mutilation, irredeemable torment and probable death of them both.

She lifted the lock with a grunt then opened the door, out to the familiar stairwell. “ANASTASIA’S ROOM! KEEP OUT. RISK OF DEATH.” the exterior door read in months old red paint. She closed it behind her then went to the stairs, taking a grip on the railing for steadiness.

Ever since her mother told what had happened in the moments after they first met, she couldn’t ascend or descend the stairs of her childhood home without imagining her carrying her brother Joseph on her back and knotted in her rear, up all five floors to Zarron’s bedchambers.

The oldest sister of the newer rescuees slept there now, blissfully unaware that her mother and a son she'd never met had sex on her bed. It was only fair to give her the best room, as she’d fallen into the role of Mother to the rest of them or at least, the responsible one around the house while their actual mother and her were off on their missions.

Constance was her name. Being crossbred with a raccoon gave her unique fur patterns more than distinctive features. She could pass for an odd-colored or dyed fox but astute eyes might notice her muzzle was more blunt with ears shorter and more triangular. Not much younger than Anastasia, they found her working in a Clerk’s office in the city of White Port, safe, sound but doomed to a lifetime of boredom.

Even without a tragic situation to escape from or any adventuring-relevant skills, Constance was compelled by the story of their family and jumped at the chance to be part of something bigger. She maintained that it was the right decision, though with less confidence after three months of babysitting the ever-growing household.

“I feel like I’m doing more mothering than our mother!” she would half-joke but it was hard to argue against.

Descending the stairs, Anastasia could hear her siblings more clearly now and smell that it was dinner time, a much later and informal time than at Zarron’s, fitting for a house full of children and run by teenagers. Osvaldo, a half-rabbit they’d rescued was conveniently a trained, gourmet chef and naturally took over the task of preparing the family’s daily meals.

She took a deep breath as she neared the first floor. There were so many of them, it was still overwhelming. There’d never been a single, crowded room during her childhood and this one was entirely full of her blood relations.

All seventeen of them were here: Osvaldo was in the kitchen and Constance was setting the table. Around the fireplace were the younger children: the twin fox girls, Vita and Vox, rescued from slavery and their preteen, quadruplet sisters, Callista, Celestia, Caelia and Cordelia, all saved from a future as breeders. Jaka, a slave boy and Liana, bought by another brothel owner, were the youngest.

In all cases, they were recovered before they could meet their intended, dark fates beyond service and house work.

Back in the kitchen, Mihael, a young half-stallion was helping Osvaldo with the dishes. Also younger and spared from a fate as a breeder, he'd demonstrated an eagerness to help where ever he could.

Around a new, much longer dinner table that the older boys had made, they sat, discussing fighting strategies.

Marco, Matteo and Dante were half-wolf triplets trained as gladiators and old enough to have fought and killed in the arenas. They were natural mentors to the younger boys, especially the eleven year old Georgi and Petri. The twins were from the same wolf father as the triplets and the Duodecaplets and intended to be personal bodyguards to a powerful and unscrupulous merchant.

“Ana! You’re back!” The bustle of the room, already more loud and lively than she’d ever seen, erupted in joyful greetings and she was swarmed with hug after hug, a comforting closeness from a family that had only met each other over the last few months.

“I can’t stay long but I need help. Quickly.” The older siblings quieted the younger ones before she continued. “I have three more of our brothers and sisters upstairs but… they’re not born yet.”

“We’re adding actual babies now?” She noticed Constance’s face get more tired in an instant.

“They’re in eggs, like big bird eggs. Just like I was and all of you were.”

“Is everyone born in bird eggs?” Jaka the youngest asked, raising his hand.

“Don’t be stupid, Jaka,” one of the younger half-wolves nipped.

Matteo nudged him. “Don’t be rude to your brother, Petri.”

“Everyone here gets a pass on a bad education,” Constance added. “Most of you were raised by very bad people who were very bad teachers. We're going to fix that.”

Anastasia smiled before continuing. “There are two eggs in my bedroom. I need two of you to bring them down here. Put them near the fire. There’s also a heavy bag that I need moved to the library.”

“We get to go in your bedroom?” Cordelia, one of the preteen quadruplets asked. “I thought that was off limits.”

“It’s safe as long as I bring you in.”

“I’ll do it,” Mihael the half horse, was first to volunteer.

“Thank you, Mihael but they’re big. And heavy. Very, very fragile. It’s a better job for the grown-ups.”

“How did YOU get them here?” Petri asked.

“Carefully.”

“Her boobs are too big to carry anything,” Caelia, another quadruplet added, earning a glare from Constance. “So are yours!" Constance's fists dug into her hips but Caelia was undeterred.

"What? I’m going to have them too. Hopefully not as much as either of you,” she shouldered her way to the front of the crowd. “Might as well move stuff while I still can.”

After some coordination, the eggs were brought to the ground floor then two of the oldest boys spotted for the armless EMA’s surprisingly competent descent down the spiral stairs. Ana then led Dante, the third of the oldest to bring the heavy bag to the house’s much less impressive library. As he did, she stashed the jar of unfertilized eggs in the library safe.

Just as they finished, Osvaldo called out for dinner to be served.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” Anastasia yelled back. Dante lingered in the doorway.

“Hey Ana. Mother… is she coming back soon? To visit?” He and his brothers had a strange accent that flowed like a song. She’d never heard it from anyone else.

He played innocent well enough, not knowing she was invisible in the room when Portia had sex with all three of them. The adult half-wolves, potent, rippling with muscles and aroused by their mother’s appearance, reacted exactly as Jasper had predicted and had no qualms at all about diving into an eager foursome with their biological mother after the introduction and explanation. They hadn’t even left their bedchambers, under the arena where they’d been met.

The triplets had alternated between her hands, mouth and the sex they’d once been plucked from, skillfully driving their mother to bliss over and over again until all three found gushing relief and some perverse pleasure, in painting her cervix with their familial seed.

As professional warriors and local celebrities, they were mature and experienced in ways that Jasper was short of, and their strength and confidence in their lovemaking made the experience almost frighteningly rough but in a way their mother seemed to enjoy.

Anastasia decided to stay hidden but took great delight in watching three strapping wolves who were obvious brothers of the Duodecaplets, drive their mother to shameless bliss.

Always strategizing, Portia ensured none of them knotted her so they could escape afterward. When her mother realized Anastasia was still invisible when they finished, she was clearly pleased that the four of them would have to sneak out without the help of magic. She still didn’t understand her mother’s aversion to doing things the easy way.

As they escaped, her mother explained they needed to keep their forbidden relations a secret. Hiding the recognizable and now missing gladiators out of sight is what sold Portia on the plan of keeping the family at Zarron’s old house, far, far away.

The same discretion and discussion had happened with Osvaldo. He didn’t know the triplets had also been with their mother and the triplets didn’t know about him. Those secrets were not sustainable in the long term but for now, the best her mother could come up with.

Anastasia frowned at her half-brother. “We’re so busy with the rescues. Soon.”

He smiled. “Sure, sure. Just… It's boring here. And lonely. We had no freedom to do what we wanted before and now we have all the freedom but nothing to do with it.”

Ana nodded. “I understand.”

“Constance, she talks about helping with the rescues. It sounds good, you know? Better than just sitting around here.”

“Please, be patient. We’ll figure it out,” she stepped in and pressed her breasts to his chest then her hands on his shoulders until she was nose to nose with him. His brows were high and surprised when she gave him a sharp, singular kiss on the mouth.

He opened his eyes. “Yes. Yes, of course. We’re not going anywhere but we would do more good out there than in here. We want to help. And we want to see mother again.”

“I know. Go. I’ll be down in a minute.” He turned, leaving her alone.

Anastasia emptied the bag carefully onto Zarron’s old desk to sort later. Most of it was just to keep out of his hands and all she needed to be researching in the near term were the three books on Soulcraft.

She pushed those back into the enchanted bag, which had shrunk back to a reasonable size once emptied. She scooped some of the gems and jewels, adding some to the bag but a few smaller ones in her robe pockets.

“Ana!” the preteen Caelia barked and she jumped. She’d snuck into the library silently and was clearly satisfied that she’d done so. “Osvaldo says your food is getting cold.”

After an annoyed sigh and a glare back to her smirking younger sister, she took the now much smaller bag to her room. Everything was set just off the teleport seal and she closed the door behind her and headed down the stairs with her usual care.

A quick double check of the eggs confirmed they were near the fireplace: not too close and not too far.

Anastasia then joined the odd, new and large family for a second dinner, only a partial serving at her request but a pitcher of water for her dry mouth. As they ate, she told how she’d taken the eggs and that soon, they would have three more brothers and sisters. Constance just kept shaking her head.

“Growing them in eggs mean that these three will be born more developed than naturally-birthed children. They won’t require nursing,” Ana explained and her sister sighed with relief. “Zarron designed the whole process to be low maintenance. He wouldn’t have been able to pull this off otherwise.”

“The boy’s name is Hanzo. The girls are Aysha and Rafa.”

“How will we know which girl is which?” Osvaldo the half-rabbit chef dabbed his mouth with a napkin.

“Does it even matter?” Caelia asked. “Didn’t Zarron name them?”

“Either him or the buyer,” Ana replied. “But they have names.”

“But they’re not born yet. They don’t know what their names are.”

Ana blinked, considering. “No. No, they don’t.”

“So can we give them new names?” Cordelia, another quadruplet said, exciting all of the younger children.

“Can we call one ‘Ham Sandwich?’” Callista laughed.

“What about something pretty and dignified? Like Elizabeth?” Isolde said, the next oldest female after Constance at age 13. Like Anya, she’d been bought to be someone’s future bride and rescued before that could happen.

“I want to name the boy ‘Doomslayer!'” Petri, one of the wolf twins rubbed his hands together.

“Why not one of the girls?” Caelia asked, sitting across from him. He recoiled, obviously kicked under the table.

“We can name one of the girls ‘Skullcrusher?’” Matteo, one of the older triplets shrugged.

“And the other one can be Blooddrinker!” Georgi, the other wolf twin added with a laugh.

“Perfect!” Caelia clapped.

Ana stammered a little as she cut in. “Rafa, Hanzo, Aysha," she pointed at them in a row. "We can't just change their names.”

“I think we can do whatever we want,” Constance leaned in with a shrug and a smile. “But all of those names are terrible. We’ll think of something.”

Ana considered for a long moment. “Fine. But Constance has final say.”

“Of course I do.”

“What about the egg with legs?” the youngest boy, Jaka asked.

“Egg legs?” Cordelia nudged her sister, Callista.

“L’eggs!” Callista replied with a laugh.

Ana flustered again. “It’s name is EMA. It stands for Egg Moving Automaton.”

“Its name is EGG MOVER?!”

“That’s so dumb!”

“No,” she shook her head. “It’s name is EMA. Not Egg Mover. “

Dante twisted in his seat to look it over, studying. “So, that’s all it does? Move eggs?”

“It’ll do anything I say. But it’s not built to do anything except move eggs.”

“How often did these eggs have to be moved?” Matteo mused, looking between his brothers.

“And how far did he need to move them?” Dante, his triplet added. “Why didn’t you just carry them?”

“We already established this!” Caelia pointed. “Her boobs are too big to carry things!”

Ana huffed. “It doesn’t matter. It lives here now. You can use it to help around the house. Just… be nice to it. Don’t play rough. Don’t abuse it. It would be impossible to fix EMA if it broke. I would be very disappointed. Very upset. EMA is not a toy. EMA is a friend. Does everyone understand?”

The table of foxes and fox-hybrids all nodded together. Conversations split off after that, with joking and laughter from the younger end of the table. Constance changed seats, squeezing in next to Anastasia.

“I know you’re not staying long but I wanted to talk to you about something.” She looked over at Dante, Matteo and Marco, who were all listening before she continued.

“Mom’s rescue plan: it makes sense if all of our brothers or sisters were still helpless children. But you’ve got three trained warriors sitting right there, going stir crazy. You’ve got me, who knows the ins and outs of city infrastructure and you've got over a thousand possible heists to pull off. That’s just the start of it. I studied the ledger while I was making copies of it, and I made a new list of which of our adult siblings might be able to help with rescues or with building out a larger, sustainable community!

“You’ve got over a hundred daughters and sons of ages good enough for most militaries, who were bought to be soldiers, archers, assassins, warriors and wizards, but also excavators, builders, engineers and other useful trades. If you prioritize a few more of the family who are better suited to childcare and other domestic skills, you can free up those of us who’d be more helpful to the mission, to come and assist. Then you can prioritize other older, more capable children, who can help to rescue even more.”

Constance shifted in her seat with restless energy.

“I know Mom spent a lot of time on the plan but this is simple math for compound results. It’s going to take forever to do it her way. Literally decades. You know how long that list is. She’s ticked off a little over thirty. In a year!”

Ana thought for a moment. “We’ve talked about this before. The way we do the missions doesn’t make sense with a big group. When we go in invisible, I don’t even need mother’s help.” She blinked after she said it. She cleared her throat and added. “She’s better at explaining than I am. The whole situation.”

Constance huffed. “I don’t mean as one big group but smaller parties of anyone willing and able to help. Like the triplets and I! We split up into parties of complementary skills, then match them up with rescues of an appropriate risk level. I know Mom didn’t have anyone with her yet who could hold their own until you came along, but you’re not the only capable one. And you’re not the only smart one.”

"Remember Anya and the fireball story?"

"I remember. Anya didn't know how to use a Fireball ring. Most people don't."

"Mother said Anya is also training at one of the premiere military academies in the world," Marco, the quietest of the triplets leaned in. "You're going to let her help when she comes back, aren't you?"

Ana watched Constance, tensing her jaw and considering.

“I know you're tough and you’re incredibly smart, Anastasia” Constance conceded. “Maybe the toughest and smartest of us all. But it’s a big family. Don’t underestimate us.”

“Are you saying the three of us aren’t smart?” Matteo half chuckled.

“Just you, Matteo,” Dante ribbed his triplet.

“We’re identical, brother!” he winked. “If I’m an idiot, so too must you be.”

Ana looked up, choosing her words. “I did a lot to prove myself to Mother. Prove I could stay safe on my own. I did stay safe on my own, for months. I didn’t give her a choice. You? I know you could help. I know you’re smart. I know you three can fight. Mother knows too.

“But she’s scared. For us. That something will happen. This is the first time I’ve gone on a mission alone. Even when I do all the work. Even when she slows me down. She’s scared to not be there to protect us.”

The change in Constance’s expression showed that some of Ana’s frustration had leaked out. Her sister leaned in.

“Mom’s plan will take decades, Anastasia. I understand she wants to protect us but she’s going to hurt a lot more of us by trying. Less family, rescued less often has a price too. Brothers are going to be sent off to war. Sisters are going to be forced into marriages and pregnancies. Some of them may not survive their fates. Others may choose not to endure them.”

Ana looked down to her dinner plate, barely touched after an appetite wasted on table scraps. They were right. Their mother wouldn’t like it.

Constance continued. “We have to go faster. This is how we go faster. If we do, we might actually be able to save them all. Think of all the ones that haven’t aged into the shitty part of their destinies yet. Isolde was going to marry a crooked politician. The quadruplets were going to be popping out babies in a few years.”

“I’ve killed three men in the pit since last year,” Marco confessed. "One of them was a father."

Constance put her hand on his and squeezed but her eyes were locked to Ana. “We don’t have the time that mother thinks we have. We have to go faster.”

All eyes were on Ana, including the younger ones who noticed the escalating intensity.

“Mathematically, you’re correct. Mom’s not a mathematical thinker. I’ll talk to her. You work on a more detailed plan. Real numbers. Projections. Presented simply. Maybe you can convince her yourself.“

Constance sighed and nodded.

Ana looked them over. “Give us some time. I’ll work on it.”

“Fine.”

“Good. I need to go.”

"Ana, is that blood?" Constance reached out and Ana recoiled. "The corner of your mouth."

She ran her tongue over her teeth and tasted iron. Too much magic too quickly was taking it's toll on her body. She only had one more to go for a while.

"I bit my tongue. I'm fine."

Constance frowned as Ana took a deep drink of water then she stood up from the crowded table, another common movement made into an ordeal for the sheer size of her chest. Upright, she wiped her muzzle with a napkin. “It was really good to see you all. I’m sorry I can’t stay. I’ll be back soon, with more brothers and sisters.”

“Rescue a nanny next. Or three,” Constance leaned back in her chair. “Before those hatch, please.”

“Take care of them. Give them names they’ll be proud of when they grow up,” Ana said, before hobbling over to EMA.

She waited for confirming nods before she turned her attention to the automaton.

“EMA: Rotate each egg in place one hundred and twenty degrees, every fifteen minutes until they hatch. Offset the time of each egg’s by five minutes from each other. Start now." The automaton stood. "And EMA: obey Constance. Do whatever she says.”

“How does it work?” her sister asked as the automaton set to the task of rotating the eggs.

“Say it’s name. Tell it what you want it to do. If it does nothing, it doesn’t understand or can’t do it. Easy.”

Ana came back to the dining area. Around the table, she made her rounds, giving each of her siblings a goodbye hug. With a wave, she headed up the stairs to her room.

Out of sight of the rest of them, she slumped. She enjoyed traveling with her mother and helping with the rescues but the rest of them were becoming family without her. She’d had brothers in Duayne, Joseph and Stone and a sister in Eva but there never was any sense of family.

Anastasia pulled herself up the stairs by the railing, dragging until she reached her room. She closed and locked the door behind her before going to her vanity mirror and checking her teeth. The bleeding wasn't bad. She'd be fine for one more teleport.

With a frown and a huff toward the door and her new family beyond it, she hefted the now manageable bag onto her shoulder. She stepped onto the seal and envisioned another seal in another place, far away to the south.

In an instant of static and ozone, the winter air of her bedchambers was gone, replaced with an atmosphere hot and damp.

The saliva she'd managed to regain at dinner was sucked dry from her mouth, like she’d filled her whole muzzle with crackers while her sinuses tingled with a deep scratching. She blinked to refocus as eyes that were bloodshot and burning, the small, bare wood room she stood in the corner of. Without rehydrating before any more spellcasting, her skin would be next, first with dandruff, then painful cracking.

The ozone smell of magic was almost instantly overpowered by the scent of musk and sex. The moaning, groaning, rhythmically creaking bed and the familiar sound of fur-muffled flesh slapping was predictable enough for the hour. The room being occupied meant she’d pulled off the rescue of twin breeders, half-rabbits Anton and Laszlo.

Her vision took a teasingly long time to return to clarity and she latched onto motion as it did. The bed on the far wall was swaying and protesting from the weight of three bodies in a thrusting, lop-sided sandwich, her ivory-furred, thick-figured mother impossible to miss in the middle.

Doubled against her back was a fit, marble gray young man, his face sleek and fox-like but with ears and a puff of a tail like a rabbit. He was rutting in shallow, rapid-succession and from the angle and the second body under her, he seemed to be taking her anally.

She couldn't see the one laying beneath her mother besides his legs and lapine ears but Anton and Laszlo were identical twins. His rolling hips managed to lift the other two.

Portia had planned the rescue of the prized-breeders while Ana was off on her mission. She tried to convince her mother to wait until they could go in invisible with magic but her mother insisted and had clearly succeeded.

Unsurprisingly, Jasper’s prediction continued to hold true: not one single teenage son had denied the advances of their gorgeous mother, sneaking into their bedrooms naked.

Once self-abusive and shameful about her initial, accidental act of incest with her son Joseph, Portia had now accepted what she used to call an addiction to the intense pleasure only sex with her blood relations could give her. Now she described it as "being affectionate with her family and making up for lost time." Counting this two, she'd bedded six more sons since leaving Jasper.

With her vision finally clear and sharp, she noticed the details of sweat-matted and cum-crusted fur on all three of them. The sheets were stained and the floor spotted, only her blocked off section off the room spared from sexual bedlam. All that plus a pile of dirty dishes by the door from room service suggested they’d been at this for several days.

Anastasia stood in the Teleport Seal she painted in the room’s far corner a week before. They had flipped over the second bed to fence it off from the rest of the room, ensuring the it would remain clear for Ana’s safe return.

Drinking in the scene of the three incestuous lovers, her mouth wanted to salivate and her sex tried to flood with the momentary thought of what her mother must be feeling to lose herself so completely.

They hadn't noticed her yet! She saw Portia take two of the gladiator sons at once and it raised so many more questions about what was happening inside her body that could feel so good.

Stepping to the side to be more out of their peripheral vision, she positioned herself until the trio was in full profile to her. With a bite of her lip and a shiver, she made the motions then covered her eyes, muttering the incantation she'd used to see through the eggs: "Sight Beyond."

Eyes opened, now golden with enchantments and she looked over the naked bodies in front. Sight Beyond would see fetuses within eggs, people behind walls, fur and flesh beneath clothes but on three naked lovers, a new, insightful and anatomical view was revealed. She could see inside her brothers' bodies and their blood surging from their racing hearts and air in and out of heaving lungs. But that was far less interesting than everything happening inside their mother. Her heart raced, breath huffed and the fat and glands of her breasts rocked but beneath them all, her brothers' predictably massive cocks sizes impaled her like a pair of forearms, squeezed against each other as they occupied so much of her pelvic brim.

The one behind her straightening the end of her intestines anally with his canine cock, the depths of his thrusts up past the crown of her pelvis and pushing aside the organs of her waspish core.

Hips alternated with the brother below, his sizable erection curved the other direction in his supine position. When one withdrew, the other pushed in straighten and and conform her vagina around him until her lower belly bulged slightly from the pointed tip behind it. Like a paraody of an anatomy book, everything fit. It made sense that the females of the family would be deeper as the males were so long.

Some things squished and others moved but from the the outside, there wasn't much effect besides the delighted howls of a mother fucked by two of her sons. Perhaps it wouldn't be so different as eating a full meal or drinking a lot of liquids? They fit inside her mother with an obvious pleasure. Mother was a few inches taller but they would probably fit in Ana too.

Her eyes started to burn and blur with dryness and she blinked, ending the spell.

They still hadn't noticed her. Her hand moved it's own with habit towards to sex but she wasn't invisible. She flattened it against her thigh and squeezed herself.

The son mounting Portia's backside took her hair in a makeshift ponytail before flattening his hips on her rump. She eased upright and backed up into him. With a tug, he turned her head to kiss her over her shoulder, hands slipping up to grope breasts that jostled with the sharp bucks of their thrusting.

As the kiss ended, Portia opened her eyes halfway, then wide as she noticed Anastasia, her face lighting up.

"You made it!" she marveled but did not change positions.

The rabbit behind her looked over and yelped a cry of shock at the interloping sister. He jumped back and free of Portia, backpedaling away in the small room.

“Whawhaaaawhat’s happening!?” he shook his head, back against the door with his well-greased erection standing to his sternum. Below it were massive testicles, his sack tight around them, straining with the bulk of two melons. He was out-of-proportion like the women of the family and like herself, it was unlikely that the young man had any chance of ever running very far.

The other son’s face was still smothered by his mother’s prodigious chest.

“What happened?” he spoke, muffled by her fur and flesh. “Why’d you stop?”

Portia panted hard as she sat upright and winced as another presumably massive cock shifted deeper inside her. Her tail wagged now with room to move and her lifted chest freed the other rabbit-fox hybrid to look around before finding Anastasia.

“Come give me a hug, dear,” she beckoned.

Ana bent down to push the tipped over bed aside, then further down to break the teleport seal with a finger claw, ensuring it was inert. She set down the bag and stepped out of the corner and into her mother’s awkward embrace. Soft flesh collided, crushed and deflected as their arms fought all the mass of breasts between them, preventing the hug from being much more than hands.

“Boys, meet your sister Anastasia. I told you she’d be dropping in,” Portia squeezed her firmly, breasts ballooning out in all directions. “Ooooh, I can feel Laszlo getting harder!” she laughed.

“I didn’t think tits could get any bigger than mom’s!” the one on his back marveled at his up-close view.

“We couldn’t have gotten a different room!?” the boy against the door, apparently Anton looked to their mother, clutching his chest, wide-eyed with shock.

“Pay for an empty room for a week? Maybe a month? Just so Ana wouldn’t catch us fucking? That’s ridiculous. It’s nothing she hasn’t already seen and we’re on a budget. Now stop being a baby and get back here, Anton. We’re not done yet.” She gave a waggle of her rump before ruffling Anastasia’s short-cut hair.

“That took longer than I would’ve liked. But I’m glad you’re safe and I love the new robe. Everything went okay?” She shifted on her son, pushing a groan from him.

“Better than planned,” she nodded with a reserved smile. “And everyone in the house is fine.”

“Wonderful. Let’s catch up after I get another load or two out of these maniacs and you can tell me all about it. In the meantime, this is your brother, Laszlo,” she tugged the ears of the one she straddled, lifting his head to pull him face-first against her breasts.

With a euphoric grin, he offered a lazy wave. “Nice to meet you, Ana. Your tits are amazing.”

She slipped back and gave a genial curtsey.

“Hey, that’s my daughter, pervert! Eyes down here,” Portia leaned forward, draping a naked breast over his face, her own smile coy and labored. “And that little buttfucker is Anton. Who’s not currently doing a very good job of fucking my butt.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Ana dipped her head, stepping back to fetch the bag.

“You’d have been lucky to not interrupt, dear. These boys are insatiable.” There was more than satisfaction in Portia’s voice. There was pride. “I guess that’s why they were crossbred with rabbits!”

Anastasia lifted the bed back upright then slid it back into place to cover the broken seal, her half-brothers watching as she bent down to do so. She turned back to catch both of them staring at her rump.

“I’m thirsty. I’ll be downstairs. Nice to meet you two.”

“You… don’t want to stay?” Anton gave an innocent shrug, his hand stroking to restore what erection he’d lost.

"Ana's not a perverted freak like your mother is," Portia chuckled.

“Thanks but no," Ana spoke for herself. "Come down whenever you’re done, Mother.” She headed for the door and stepped into the sandals she left next to it a week before. She turned to Anton, who still blocked the door.

“I like how big your testicles are. You’re both out of proportion like me but boys. It’s nice,” She gave a curt smile then took him by the shoulders and slid him out of the way when he didn’t step aside on his own. She looked between him and the door, then back down to his endowments. With her free hand, she reached out to cup one testicle and lift it.

“Heavy!” She marveled and let it go.

The vixen opened the door before tucking her elbows to compress and protect the outsides of her enormous chest and especially, the robe around it. Squeezed to her narrowest, she stepped through the doorway then twirled to reel her tail through. With a wave, she closed the door behind her.

Anastasia walked down the hallway to the narrow stairs and down to the ground floor, angling herself carefully to not let the close walls pull her robe open. She learned long ago that many places outside The Pale Lands and Zarron's manor were build with narrower hallways and doors but was never quite used to squeezing through. At the bottom, the inn opened up into a lobby and a tavern just beyond.

“Ah, the younger Miss Pridemoon! I didn’t see you come in,” the warmly-dressed iguana at the front desk that had checked them in a week before greeted her. “I wasn’t sure you were still staying with us. We’ve had some noise complaints.”"About that. I need to rent another room for myself for one night. If I sleep in there, I'm going to wake up not a virgin."

The iguana blinked but his face was otherwise straight, easy to do with his more limited, reptilian facial muscles. "Of course. The one next to hers is available." He turned to the wall of hanging keys behind them and handed her one. "About the complaints..."

Anastasia lifted the magical bag, now more sack-sized onto the front desk and rifled through it. Her hand returned with a few jewels that she laid out on the table. She took a single, heavy diamond and offered it to him.

“We’re leaving in the morning. Is this enough to cover everything? Rooms and inconvenience?”

He swallowed, transfixed by the diamond but managed to appraise the rest of the pile. “One of those too should cover it. And you were never here.”

Ana canted her head. “But we were here.”

The iguana took the diamond, then plucked a more modest ruby with a dry chuckle. “I mean that I won’t tell anyone that you, your mother or either of those strange-looking young men were ever here. I figured you would prefer that.”

“Oh. Ok, yes. Good. Thank you.” She turned away and continued to the dining room.

“Come back any time!”

She found a booth in the corner, away from the door and discreet.

The first few inns she stayed in by herself while on her mother’s trail, she’d been foolish enough to sit at the bar. It piqued her curiosity to meet people out in the public and talk with strangers but came with some amount of anxiety. It got worse when she learned just how the world at large responded to her burdensome physique. In the best of circumstances, it would dominate the conversation and at worst, be a magnet for unwanted and aggressive attention.

Since puberty, she was aware that her bust was uncommonly large even for their bloodline but she mostly had Zarron’s word to go by. Comparison with her sister and female visitors had confirmed it long ago.

She started to hear it from house guests when she was a younger teenager when they visited the manor to pick up their sons and daughters.

“My daughter isn’t going to be that big, is she?! That’s way too big. It’s disgusting! She wouldn't even fit in my house.”

“Nono,” Zarron would assure them. “Anastasia is extraordinary. Evangeline is much more indicative of the normal size of my girls.”

“Oh thank the Gods. You had me terrified for a moment.”

Almost without fail, the conversation would happen as if she wasn’t present at all, let alone as a person with ears and feelings. She heard some variation of that with regularity from visitors and her sister soon realized it was something she could tease her for.

Evangeline was “average sized” for their family, comparable to their mother. Since her escape a year before, she learned even that was enormous relative to the general population. She was yet to meet anyone not related who compared to any of them, not even to the comparatively slender Marina unless they were also quite fat.

For most females, breasts were a negligible percentage of their total weight. Ten percent would be huge and troublesome. Eva, Constance and her mother were closer to fifteen or twenty percent, which made Portia’s adventuring prowess more impressive still. Marina was a little less. Anya a bit more.

With her own, cursed chest more than thirty percent of her total mass, the world confirmed it was not just an inconvenience but a deformity. She needed a mirror to see her lower body. Submerging fully in water was impossible for her natural buoyancy. Her back hurt often despite regular exercise

She went from the bustier of two busty sisters in the household to what many tens of men and women had called “the biggest tits they’d ever seen in their life” and by orders of magnitude. Just as many assumed it was a disease and more again, a curse. As a developing teenager she tried to stifle and reverse their relentless growth with magic but every attempt had failed.

Out in public, the eyes of strangers and crowds reminded her how she stood out.

At first, she didn’t mind the attention. It was good practice for her to socialize when she hadn't done much of it growing up but very soon she realized it was always and without fail, the same conversation.

People would ask how it happened. What was wrong with her or what wizard she crossed. They would inquire about her back, how she walked, if she knew what her feet looked like or if she only wore sandals because she couldn’t reach the laces of boots. The last part was a correct assumption, when she wore shoes at all.

Occasionally, someone would remark that she needed to lose weight, as if they missed the shape and nature of her bulk or that her breasts represented her overall health.

Some people would try to be respectful in their interactions but it was all but impossible they could avoid looking at her chest. Half the time the attempted civility was open pity.

She’d encountered many men who’d openly objectified her and some had offered her money just to see them. Several times, drunks in a tavern offered bribes to perform some novel, physical feat that would be difficult for her. When she found it not particularly degrading and the bribe significant, she had agreed to it.

Once she carried a mug of ale around a bar room, secured in her cleavage and pouring it into a man’s mouth without using her hands to get a room and meal for the night. That was early on, before she figured out she could make money with magic.

Predictably, she’d also been propositioned for sex but they were always fixated on the novelty of her body more than anything around her being attractive. She had to use a spell or cantrip a few times to react to an unsolicited grope, generally a strong electrical shock. One time it had erupted into her first bar fight.

Traveling now with her mother, the contrasts became more evident in the way people treated and reacted to them. It seemed that Portia’s chest was at the extreme end of what men desired. Her mother was considered sexy and feminine and they would often leer and hit on her, which she handled with practiced grace. Anastasia was beyond that, past that peak of desire and into a valley of novelty, pity and disgust.

Shy of an Invisibility spell that could hide her gear and her clothes, she did her best to disappear socially.

Even getting into a table at an inn was something that required a strategy but was something she was experienced in.

She set her bag down on the table and hunched forward to pull the books out, knowing how difficult it would be to maneuver once in the booth. Hugging her chest, she eased her way in, wincing as the edge of the table bisected the bulk of her breasts into hemispheres, while she flattened her spine against the back of the seat.

Sliding in with a sucking inhale, the soft but never malleable enough mass of her gargantuan endowments filling her lap nearly to her knees and pushing her elbows up and out, occupying most of the two-person bench.

Despite the squeeze, it was a relief to be sitting and the fire in her lower back demanded attention. All of the walking she was doing since leaving the Pale Lands was helping with the fitness of her body but she’d been on her feet often while hiding in Zarron’s home.

Portia taught her some exercises to build up the muscles of her core but there was so much weight to carry in any position other than laying on her side or upright with an incline enough for them to rest in her lap.

With a sigh, she straightened herself and gave a small squirm, aware of how the booth had her semi-trapped. She reached for the books and slid them in front of her, then set two of them back aside.

The remaining book was titled "Codex of Torment: Unraveling Curses and Soul-Binding Spells" and had a bookmark halfway through it, from her night time reading.

“Welcome back. Can I get you anything, dear?”

The barmaid, a middle-aged goat woman had appeared at the end of her table, her brow crinkled as she looked over the cover of the book. Subsequent interactions with the same people were usually nicer, once they'd gotten the conversation about her breasts out of the way.

“Hello. A pitcher of clean water.” She pushed a smile like her mother had taught her to do then turned back to the book, opening it up to where she left off.

The evening passed as Anastasia read on forbidden magic and drank two pitcher’s worth of water before her mouth could stay wet again

Eventually she was joined by her mother, wearing an oversized robe. Her hair was predictably messy and her fur couldn’t hide the glow and crust of sex. Nothing but a thorough bath would hide the smell.

“Are you busy, dear? Can I join you?”

Portia slid into the seat across from Ana with enviable ease, wincing as her rump found the thin cushion. With a wave to the barmaid, she called out “Ale please. Big glass.”

She turned to her daughter then and leaned in to whisper, her chest ballooning above the edge of the table. “Well? Tell me what happened! You said everyone is all safe?”

“Everyone is safe, yes. The house is chaotic with so many people. It was always so quiet for me. The older ones are teaching the younger ones. It seems like what a family is supposed to feel like but they all miss you. The older boys miss the sex. Constance is frazzled but holding it together. She’d rather be out here with us.”

“There’s barely a place for me out here, when we’re using your magic for all these rescues.”

“Because it works better. It’s clean and easy. We leave no trace we were there. Usually.”

Portia sighed and shrugged. “Well, it was fun to rescue Anton and Laszlo the old fashion way, even without all of my gear.”

“Constance wants to talk to you. She’s been looking at your plan and had some ideas.”

“I spent a lot of time on that plan.”

“Jasper helped, didn’t he?”

“He did.”

“Constance planned things for a living before she ran off with us.”

“Okay, what’s her plan?”

Ana paused. “You won’t like it. But it’s smart.”

Portia sighed. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow, on the road. We're less than two weeks from Brummel and have two more checkins on the way. Both older boys,” she grinned crookedly.

Ana restrained a tight smile and glanced back down to her book.

“What’s happening at Zarron's?”

The smile broadened as her mother recaptured her attention. “Zarron didn’t marry Eva and I don’t think he will. He’s spending most of his time somewhere else. They didn’t arrive until earlier today. That's what took so long.”

“Where could they be going?”

“I don’t know. Other than travel between the two houses, he didn’t leave often when we were young. When he did, we’d usually go with him. When we were teenagers, he brought us less frequently. I assume because of how we look. He might go for a week or two at a time every few months, plus some day trips. But he’s been gone for most of the year. Somewhere. Maybe multiple somewheres.

“He arrived with three daughters I’ve never met: two mages and a breeder. The mages must be there to help with the operation. The breeder? I don’t know why she would be there. Technically, she could have his child naturally."

“Do you think he would do that?”

Ana shook her head. “He's not a donor for any of the lab children. He was worried he might feel an attachment if he did. He never wanted kids of his own or else he would’ve made a crossbreed wife instead of Eva. He had plenty of time to.”

“How is Eva?”

“Mean. Bitter? But fine.” Ana shifted and leaned in excitedly. “It’s working out well. The Duos have been stewing ever since Zarron sold their brothers and Eva is hurt that he didn’t marry her. They’re going to turn on him, so I gave them some help: some anti-magic powder they can feed him and the other mages, long enough to overtake them. It's similar to your charm, but edible.”

Portia frowned. Her mother was never a fan of magic and had protected herself from it with a relagite charm that nullified spells and effects cast on her. But when they escaped Stusport under cover of invisibility, they could bring nothing with them, especially not a charm that would cancel the magic.

She had lamented it's loss enough in the four months since and with a sigh, continued. “Sounds dangerous. You patched things up with her?”

“No. Evangeline hates me because she thinks Zarron loved me instead of her. And that he made me a wizard and her a wife. The first part is silly. The second wasn’t my fault. We can win over the Duos if we save and fix the three Marmalade stole. That’s what these are for,” she patted the books she set aside. “When they're on our side, we’ll get her too.”

“I see,” Portia reached across the table to take her hand. “I'm sorry to hear about Eva but good work.”

Ana’s proud smile couldn’t help but grow. “Everything we talked about is done. Complete success.”

“Everything?”

“I took his best tracking and scrying spells, so he won’t find us. He tried. Eva and the Duos are going to take care of Zarron for us. I also took three kits that were close to hatching and left them with Constance. I saw the ledger so I have the information on everyone he’s sold in the last year. I can update your copy but I'll remember.”

She leaned in closer, whispering. “I took back your unfertilized eggs. They're in The Pale Lands now. Zarron can’t breed any more of your children. There are twenty-nine more fertilized eggs of different ages that I couldn’t bring with me. They're too early. After that, he’s out. If we can finish all this and get back there in less than two months, we can save them all.”

Portia blinked, sitting up straight as her ale arrived. “Well, that’s amazing. Tell me what happened.”

Ana recapped the details of her trip. Hiding for a week, spying on the Duos and her sister. The spells and books. Branka, Zentalia and Tabitha. Her impressions of all three of them. The dinner conversation and post-dinner treachery. The espum and the private meeting with her brother, minus the intimate parts. She knew that would upset her mother, how close she was to following her path.

“Anastasia, you never cease to amaze me. You really don’t need me for much of any of this,” she said with a sigh, her eyes falling to foam lingering around her empty, second ale.

“Thank you, mother,” Ana beamed. “I was surprised that it all worked out so well. It’s not done yet. Them stopping him, I mean. If they do what I told them, it will work. No more breeding and selling babies. No more Zarron. We’ll save the three duos, patching things up with them and Eva, and we can all focus on the rescues. I really didn’t think it would be that easy!”

Portia gave a breath of a laugh as she looked up at her daughter.

“Let’s hope so.”

THE END