Chapter 671: Mending Bonds
Chapter 671: Mending Bonds
Nadia eventually pulled out her phone and began snapping pictures.
Not to leak to the media, but to send to Korra, who she knew would treasure the sight almost as much as she did.
Nuri, meanwhile, had fresh news to share.
“I also made a new best friend recently! Her name is Maria! She’s my best, best friend! She’s so strong and so cool, and even though she doesn’t have any official blessing, she’s never scared of anything!”
Her voice bubbled with enthusiasm. “We should all be friends together!”
Astrid’s eye twitched.
‘The vixen. The actual vixen who’s always slinking around Mika!’
Nuri noticed Astrid’s expression and paused.
“What? Is that bad? Do you not like Maria, Astrid?”
“Not at all.” Astrid said, her voice perfectly pleasant. “I was just wondering, now that you have a new best friend…” A mischievous glint entered her eyes. “Who do you prefer? Me? Or Maria?”
Nuri’s face went through approximately seventeen expressions in three seconds.
“I—um—well—Maria is—but you’re—I can’t—that’s not fair, Astrid! You can’t make me choose between friends! It’s not right!”
Her eyes welled up again. “I love you both! Why are you making this so hard?!”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Astrid laughed and pulled Nuri back into her arms. “I was just teasing you. You don’t have to choose. I’m just happy my little Nuri is making proper friends again. And I can’t wait for all three of us to go on a date together!”
“Astrid!~” Nuri’s wings began fluttering so fast they blurred. “I looove you! I love you so much!”
“Do you love me…” Astrid teased. “..or my tails?”
“I love all of you!”
“I love you too, Nuri!” Astrid chuckled warmly. “Your horns! Your little tail! That adorable face of your! Every single part!”
—
The afternoon passed in a golden haze after that.
Nuri refused to let the momentum die, dragging her two companions from enclosure to enclosure with relentless, joyful tyranny.
At each one, they repeated their ritual: listen to the animal, imitate its sound, and try, with all their might, to communicate.
Some animals were easy. The chimps hoots were simple. The parrots squawks were catchy.
Others were harder. At one exhibit, a bizarre creature with a face like a folded accordion produced a noise that sounded like a dying bagpipe.
Nuri tried, failed, and collapsed in a giggling heap. Astrid tried, and produced something that made everyone around them wince.
Then Nadia opened her mouth and, to everyone’s absolute shock, produced the sound flawlessly, note for impossible note.
“Kooooooo!”
The accordion-beast cocked its head, clearly impressed, and answered her.
“Kooooooo!”
Nuri bounced on her heels. “Auntie Nadia! How did you do that?!”
Nadia’s cheeks flushed a faint rose. “There’s a rhythm to it. Listen—it’s a three-part call, but the last note slides upward. You just have to soften your throat and let the air catch differently.”
“Show me again! Show me!”
And so Nadia spent the next twenty minutes teaching a dragon princess and her own estranged daughter to grunt like a dying bagpipe, until all three of them were producing the ridiculous noise in perfect unison.
“Kooooooo!”
“Kooooooo!”
“Kooooooo!”
It wasn’t just with this one animal, as Nadia seemed to be talented at imitating most of the animals in the zoo and Astrid felt as if she had to say something about it.
“M-Mom.” She said shyly. “You’re really good at this.”
Nadia felt warmth bloom in her chest as she muttered out, “Y-You’re a quick learner yourself.”
They held each other’s gaze for a moment longer than before.
The awkwardness was still there, a thin shell waiting to crack, but it was cracking. Slowly. Bit by bit.
—
At the reptile house, they discovered that Astrid’s voice attracted the male Crested Sun-Lizards, who puffed out their colorful throat frills in response to her calls. Nadia’s deeper tones, meanwhile, drew the attention of every female in the enclosure.
“Look!” Nuri pointed. “Astrid gets the boys, and Auntie Nadia gets the girls! You’re both so popular!”
—
At the Twilight Grotto, Nadia explained the biology of the Vesper Stag without once glancing at the information plaque—its native habitat in the Shadowed Glades, its diet of phosphorescent moss, the way its antlers pulsed with light to communicate across vast distances.
Nuri listened with rapt attention, her mouth slightly open.
“You know everything, Auntie Nadia! How do you know everything?!”
“I approved the import permits.” Nadia said, almost sheepishly. “I made a point of learning about every species that passed through my office.”
“That’s so cool.” Astrid murmured.
Nadia turned to her, surprised. “Y-You think so?”
“Of course!” Astrid met her eyes. “You care about every single creature. Even the ones nobody else thinks about. That’s…” She hesitated. “That’s always been one of the things I admire most about you.”
The earth beneath them trembled slightly.
“Auntie Nadia!” Nuri grabbed her arm. “The ground is shaking! Are you doing that?!”
Nadia coughed. “My apologies. I was just…moved.”
“Moved by what?”
Nadia looked at her daughter, while Astrid’s tails began to wag, all seven of them and she couldn’t stop them.
—
The zoo, of course, was a public place. And three impossibly beautiful women glorking at birds did not, as a rule, go unnoticed.
By evening, the footage had exploded.
A video of the trio, the dragon princess, fox princess, and the emotionless Ice Queen of the Battle Angels glorking had spread across every network in the human world, then beyond.
Within hours, it had billions of views. Hundreds of millions of shares.
Memes spawned overnight. The discordant “Glork-Glork” became the year’s most-played sound effect.
People set their notification tones to Nadia’s voice, and some enterprising musician even produced a surprisingly catchy electronic remix of the three of them repeating the noise at escalating volumes!
—
In the enormous bed where the night before had been spent in ways that made the furniture blush, Fauna and Anya lay tangled together, utterly wrecked.
Neither of them had moved more than the distance between a pillow and a phone charger since sunrise.
But despite her exhaustion from Mika’s pounding, Fauna held up her phone, eyes bright with sleepy delight.
“Look at Astrid! Look at her go! Glork-Glork!” She dissolved into giggles, her mountainous chest heaving. “And Nuri—that adorable little menace—she got both of them doing it!”
Anya, glasses askew, peered at the screen with a faint, fond smile.
“So Nuri and Astrid are friends again. Took them long enough.” She flicked to another video and her eyebrows rose. “And Auntie Nadia actually laughed. I haven’t ever seen her laugh before.”
“Well get used to it, Anya, since my sister is changing!” Fauna said proudly. “She’s turning back to the Nadia of the past!”
—
In a training ground far to the north, the Maiden of War was doing squats with an entire hill balanced on her shoulders.
Her phone was propped against a rock nearby, and she was watching the viral video with a grin on her face.
“Ha!” Her voice boomed, perfectly steady despite the strain. “So the little fox finally grew a spine and made nice with her mother!” She completed three more squats, the hillwobbling, and grinned at the screen. “Good. About damn time. All that moping was getting on my nerves!”
—
In the sky, the Maiden of War’s daughter, the gremlin of the family was busy finishing the last of her duties. She glanced at a notification on her wrist-band, and a feral grin split her face.
“Finally! Auntie and Astrid have made up! And Nuri’s back in the fold!” She cackled, checking her schedule. “Ooh, my duties end in three days. Three days and I get to go home. And I can’t wait to see Mika again.”
She spun lazily in the air, hugging her torso.
“I can finally have Mika’s baby!”
—
At the sanctuary, the Maiden of Fate’s daughter sat in her wheelchair, watching the video on a large screen while a group of children gathered around her.
“What’s that, big sister?” One of them asked, pointing at the screen.
“What are they doing?”
“Why are they making those noises?”
The girl smiled, her blindfolded face somehow radiating warmth.
“It’s the sight of a mother, a dragon, and a fox finally remembering how to be happy together.”
The children didn’t understand most of it, but they understood joy. They giggled along with her, and she let them.
—
In her private realm, the Maiden of Fate herself watched the same footage
“Adorable.” She murmured to herself, and the word tasted strange and sweet on her tongue.
Then she saw the comments.
“NADIA IS BEST BATTLE ANGEL CONFIRMED”
“I would die for this dragon princess!”
“The fox tails though..”
“This is the content we deserve!”
She rolled her eyes so hard it nearly gave her a headache.
“That boy.” She muttered, closing her tablet. “That boy is going to corrupt this moment too, somehow. I know it. He’s already planning something.”
She stared at the blank screen of her tablet for a long moment.
Then she reopened it and watched the video one more time.
—
And finally in the master bedroom of the family home, Yelena and Charlotte were… occupied.
The Sword Maiden was on her knees at the foot of the bed, utterly naked, her incredible crimson hair spilling around her shoulders as she serviced Mika with the same flawless devotion she brought to everything else.
Her daughter Charlotte lay beneath her, equally bare, face buried against Mika’s thighs, tending to him with eager, reverent care.
It was, to put it mildly, not a scene suited to interruption.
Even so, Charlotte had found a moment to glance at her phone and reported the news to her mother with a mumble around her work: “Mmph—th’w…mh uh—Astrid and Nuri mh-waking up—” A pause, a breath, a shift. “And Auntie Nadia’s there too. She looks so happy, Mama!”
Yelena surfaced just enough to peer at the screen, her eyes widening.
“Well, I’ll be. Astrid actually did it. And Nadia’s smiling—I haven’t seen her smile like that since before the war.”
Her voice warmed with genuine pleasure.
“It’s about time that girl let herself be happy.”
She then looked up at Mika, who was also watching the footage on his own phone with a small, satisfied smile and asked, her lips brushing his length as she spoke:
“Was this your doing?”
Mika set the phone aside. “I gave a gentle push. The rest was all them.”
Mika’s hand tightened in her hair.
“But you, Yelena…I don’t want gentle pushes from you. I want everything.”
Yelena’s breath caught. She looked at his cock, then back up at his face.
“I want you to go all the way.” Mika said quietly. “Every inch.”
She didn’t hesitate. She opened her throat and took him until her nose pressed against his abdomen and her eyes watered with the strain.
Charlotte, not to be outdone, burrowed deeper, trailing her tongue over his heavy sac with devoted attention.
Mika leaned back, one hand in Yelena’s hair, the other resting on Charlotte’s head.
On the screen, his phone still played the video—Nuri dragging Astrid and Nadia toward the next enclosure, all three of them laughing, all three of them together.
His heart was full. His body was satisfied. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he was already planning the next move.
But for now, this was enough.
Illustrations have been posted in the comment section…Check them out!
Read Novel Full