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As Reia confirmed, Emerie just sat there trying to process that.

Oh my god. She had a baby with a Duskwalker.She placed her hands on her cheeks while resting her elbows on the table to lean on them.How is that even possible?Her eyes darted to the corners of her lids to look at the woman.Look at her! She’s fucking tiny. How did he not break her in half with his cock?!

Either Ingram just had an unusually large cock for his kind, or something else was at work here.

She was less freaked out by the likelihood that all the women here had been sexually intimate with a Duskwalker, just like her, than she was about this new information. And, by the fact she had a second child who appeared to be hiding and asleep in the back of her shirt, it meant it had happened twice.

Unless... “Twins?” Emerie squeaked out.

“Nope,” Mayumi quickly rejected.

“Faunus has a breeding problem,” Reia chimed in, her expression mischievous. “Made obvious by the fact they’re about to have a third.”

“Doooon’t say it like that,” Mayumi groaned as she let her head fall back with a whine. Her cheeks had even reddened, which came across as odd, since her features previously appeared cold and unfeeling when she was relaxed.

“A third?” Emerie asked, her lips parting once more in shock. “You–you’re pregnant?”

No wonder Faunus had been angered by Ingram pushing her!

Faunus let out a shudder as his orbs flickered purple. He appeared to be holding back the emotional change as best he could. He was quick to place his hand upon Mayumi’s stomach before sliding it up to her side to grab her and drag her closer.

That, in itself, was enough of an answer.

Delora hid her giggle behind her fist, as Reia laughed – even when Orpheus’ orbs changed to a bright green in what Emerie knew was jealousy. Magnar, on the other hand, appeared unphased.

“Listen, when you’ve faced death like I have, you’re pretty excited to create life,” Faunus argued in his own defence.

Emerie eyed the golden crack on his skull, and something pinched at her chest. Then something that was said from earlier finally clicked within her mind. It was an answer to a question she’d always wanted to know but hadn’t wanted to press with Ingram in case she lost his trust by asking it.

“That’s how you die,” she rasped, her expression turning meek as if saying she discovered how to kill them out loud could bring her danger. “If your skulls are broken, you don’t come back.”

“Yes,” Magnar and Orpheus confirmed in unison.

“And he has already experienced it,” Orpheus continued. “Which is why he has the gold line in his skull. Mayumi and the spirit of the void brought him back.”

“Spirit of the void?” Emerie asked.

Ingram’s head perked up at that, his orbs turning bright yellow in joy. “We can use gold to bring another of our kind back?”

Ingram’s question overshadowed hers.

For some reason, Mayumi winced. “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

“Why not?” Ingram asked, tilting his head as the hue of his orb colour darkened instead.

“Because... it’d happened before a day passed from when I glued his skull back together, and Weldir, or, uh, the spirit of the void, needed to use my soul to help bring him to life.”

“Why are you here?” Orpheus asked, cutting to the chase. “Because, if it’s to bring back the bat-skulled Mavka, we don’t have answers for you. If we did, we would share them.”

“Oh,” Ingram murmured, his orbs swiftly switching to a deep blue.

He pointed his raven skull towards the timber floor, as if he didn’t want to look upon any of them under the weight of his grief and disappointment. Emerie hated that his shoulders and neck sagged in defeat.

“Aleron,” Emerie quickly interjected, causing the other Duskwalkers to direct their bony faces to her. She squirmed under the stare of so many orbs and eyes. “Stop calling him the bat-skulled Mavka. His name is Aleron.”

Emerie couldn’t handle them speaking of him in such a detached way, when it was obvious he meantso muchto Ingram. She wanted to give him life, and for him to be spoken of warmly, even in his absence – for Ingram’s sake.

“We didn’t know he had a name also,” Orpheus said, and she figured that was his way of apologising. “We thought you named Ingram.”