Midnight After Midnight - Nanowrimo 2022

Chapter 9 - The Royal Heir

Carrying a child in her womb for nine whole months was every bit as hard as Adelaide had expected, particularly in her situation. It was not so much the physical process - although that bothered her very much as well - as it was how it connected to the choice she'd made. She'd left Simon forever with a pitiful excuse for an explanation, and when she birthed their child, she was supposed to return to him one last time, merely to leave him the child and nothing more.

Even that was going to be hard to achieve. First, she had to gain courage, and she'd never known herself to be much of a courageous person, thus even all the months she'd spent in a pregnant state wasn't enough time to prepare her for the deed. Then, she had to get out of the castle for a short while, which she had no idea how to do. Did she really have to sneak out, or would Lionel let her leave the premises just this once? Only time would tell.

After what seemed like an eternity, a while after she'd woken up on a random day of the last month that initially didn't appear to be at all different from any other, already having anticipated the day of birth with bated breath, she felt the baby aggressively attacking her from inside the womb, alerting everyone near her with mind-numbing screams of pain.

Mere minutes later, she was escorted to the nursery room, where other high-class newly turned vampires like her presumably did the same thing as she did. It was a miracle, she thought, that the weak and incomplete example of humanity was able to survive the mother's turn. She still hardly knew anything about vampires and thus had no idea how it was possible in the first place. What would her child look like when it came out? She'd have thought about all of those things a lot more if she hadn't been giving birth at the moment.

It was her first time giving birth! Even after all this time, even during the process, she was still incredulous about it. When she wasn't screaming in pain, she tried her best to carve the memory of the event into her mind. She'd never talked about it that much with anyone, but those she talked with always told her that, although those few hours were going to be full of anguish and fright, it would all pay off in the end, even with all the duties motherhood promised.

They'd also told her to wait for a little before her first intercourse, to wait until she matured, mostly to prevent an unwanted child from springing into her life like a phantom. When she first did it with Simon, a few months after the deaths of her parents, she remembered that she felt more mature due to the tragedy she'd experienced, covering any doubts she might've had about it with a thick coating of independence and nothing mattering. 

It lasted for a while, and she truly did remember becoming a little bit more blase about every decision she made, even if she didn't notice it most of the time. To some extent, she now regretted everything she'd done recently, which always lasted until it exhausted her. She'd found such a bothersome topic to think about as if giving birth wasn't painful enough on its own.

It was certainly a unique and vivid experience. The age she was doing it at, the species she was doing it as, the absence of two people she'd expected to come to see her for years, the vocal expression of her torment that scared all the crows away for the entire day, the battle between her and her body about whose ending she barely had any clue about, it all painted a most memorable image inside her mind. She was doing nothing but struggling and thinking heavy thoughts, anticipating the end with everything inside her on edge.

The process began in the late morning, and the night had already fallen when its end appeared to be approaching. Feeling a tremendous weight inside her, she gritted her teeth and clenched her fists, her breathing becoming unsteady and her face red at the difficulty of the ordeal. The elderly vampire nurse that had been sitting near her all day called the others for help, and two slightly younger ones came as soon as they heard.