Chapter 5 - Carrying The Rival Pups

Lyra

The stranger's presence was utterly overwhelming, a force of nature that seemed to bend reality itself to his imposing will. As he stalked towards me, an aura of primal dominance radiated from his lupine form, clouding the air with heady pheromones that shook me to my core.

"What...what are you?" I whispered, heart thundering as that scorching emerald gaze pinned me in place.

A low rumbling growl built in the depths of his broad chest, the sound raising every hair on my body in visceral response. "I am Alpha," was his succinct, gravelly response.

Alpha.

The word detonated through my mind like a shockwave, countless instincts and ancient impulses encoded into the deepest strata of my being blazing to life in an unstoppable conflagration.

"An Alpha! A true alpha born to rule and dominate!" Ria's mind voice rang with a sense of reverence and awe I had never experienced.

"Can't you feel it, Lyra? The power emanating from him in cresting waves? His will is inexorable...his dominion over our own kind, absolute!"

I could indeed feel it, despite my human heritage leaving me largely shielded from the worst of our bestial instincts and imperatives.

It was as if the very air surrounding the alpha carried a scorching ionic charge, raising the fine hairs along my skin in waves of quivering static energy.

Every step he took seemed to resonate straight through my bone marrow, that piercing stare stripping away each layer of civility and reason until I was laid bare on a primordial level.

He wasn't simply baring his physical form - this being was displaying the full brunt of his unrestrained alpha nature, daring any within proximity to resist it's all-consuming gravity.

How had I missed it?

The aura of preternatural command encompassing his presence was surely the most potent in existence. I had stood in the light of mere alphas many times and never once felt so utterly dwarfed, negated and dominated with just the flexing of this titan's aura.

Something within locked onto his wavelength and would not be dislodged, leaving me paralyzed as he closed the remaining distance between us.

The scent of smoldering embers, leather and virile musk filled my senses to overwhelming excess. I tried to speak, to formulate any words or coherent thoughts, but every impulse was drowned out by the steady drumbeat of his impending proximity.

"Gabriel...Blackmoon," he intoned, the timbre of his resonating tones feeling more like a physical caress than mere linguistics. Each syllable seemed to lash me with scourging force, searing away any remaining vestiges of dubiety. "Alpha of the Blackmoon Pack and last vested survivor of the Primagen bloodline."

My lips parted wordlessly, an ardent believer's susurration building in my throat though no blasphemous entreaty would materialize. Ria's soul-deep awe blended with my own visceral bewilderment, the tangled strands of our shared psyche thrumming in perfect synchronicity to this being's incomparable wavelength.

"How...?" I finally managed in a hoarse rasp. "My pregnancy...you can sense—?"

A feral chuff of laughter rumbled through that barrel chest, the familiar sound transmuted into an eldritch resonance that sparked effervescent tingles across the exposed swells of my flesh.

"Because the child in your stomach is coagulated with my essence," Gabriel growled with brazen audacity.

"Born of my celestial fire and seeded in the forge of your womb. Mere scant traces of their emerging presence resonate across the realms like a cosmic symphony only I, their Alpha progenitor, can fully receive and interpret."

With each word he stalked in inexorable half-circles around my petrified form. My gaze sought to follow but found itself ensnared by this gravitational colossus so I could only swivel in place, caught in the tracery of his implacable orbit.

Gabriel paused behind me, the heat of his enormous frame seeming to eclipse my very existence in his penumbral shadow. "Do you understand the full weight of what you carry, little wolf?" he rumbled, the final endearment ghosting over the nape of my swanlike neck like smoldering brimstone. "The precious treasures gestating in your inner sanctum?"

Tears burned at the corners of my vision again, though the font from which they sprang had shifted. An unraveling sense of profound, almost primordial awe supplanted the previous despair and outrage.

His Pups," Ria breathed in unmasked wonder. "Our babies are pups of Primagen lineage...birthed from the celestial alpha fire of this magnificent brute himself!"

Some treacherous part of me shuddered in agreement with her proclamation, the rational components of my psyche spiraling amid the vertigo of these incomprehensible revelations.

I turned slowly to meet Gabriel's volcanic stare, our mismatched heights creating an acute contrast. "I...My pregnancy...you claim the children I carry....are your—?"

An earthquake tremor shook through the chamber in the weighty pause, a staccato burst of compressed atmosphere emanating from my rear as Gabriel took a knee behind me. One of his taloned hands snaked around my midriff, palming with reverent sensuality the slight swell of my womb where new life fluttered in terrified response to its sire's arrival.

"Precisely, little mother," he growled in a dark, earthy timbre brimming with possessive triumph. Every word seemed to saturate my core with scorching, alien vibrations I'd never before experienced.

"These nascent little pups are the heirs to my primordial majesty and you are a sanctified vessel from which they shall emerge into this decrepit world to rekindle the eternal celestial flame!"

I stared downwards, entranced by the sight of that enormous, corded extremity ensconcing my middle, sharpened talons splayed protectively across the taut skin stretched to accommodate my burden.

Ria verily roared in open ecstasy "Yes! Hail to the coming of the New Age—-!"

An ear splitting cacophony shattered the hypnotic tableau as the chamber's ruined entrance exploded once more, a heavily armored tactical squad of human enforcers pouring through with leveled assault rifles.

"Security! We are U.S. Marshals! Back away from her and show us your hands immediately!"

The shouting, raucous volley of demands penetrated the sacrosanct veil surrounding us like a bucket of acid hurled over sublime artwork.

Gabriel heaved an aggrieved snarl of displeasure, his immense frame seeming to swell until the chamber felt minuscule and utterly inadequate for containing his expanding aura.

"ENOUGH OF THIS RACKET!" he bellowed, the concussive force of those two words alone staggering several of the marshals and ruffling their riot shield formations like autumn leaves.

"You wretched humans dare interfere with me while I talk? How dare you, insects!" Emerald fury blasted across his bestial visage as his features distorted further, rank upon rank of fang and talon elongating with horrific crackling.

I reflexively cowered back against the wall, blind terror seizing control of my limbs in the face of this transformative tsunami.

Ria screamed in sickening trepidation, all sense of awe and veneration replaced by primal dread pulsing through the link we shared.

"Lyra, Lyra what's happening—-this can't be real, it's some kind of hallucination, a night terror!"

But I could feel the ambient pressure in the room wavering and distorting as gravitational forces themselves seemed to warp around Gabriel's apotheosis.

What emerged was no longer humanoid in any sense - a hulking mass of iridescent, draconic scales segmented by musculature of such preternatural density it appeared carved from stellar matter itself.

Bone-spurs and crystalline extrusions jutted in blasphemous geometries along its flanks and the nest of articulated limbs sprouting from the central trunk, each one bristling with blades of chuto glass and crueler curvilinear thorns.

Cresting the entire eldritch vision was a trio of elongated,snaking crania terminating in lamprey-esque maws yawning in replicated fetor a single pair of balefully shining emerald orbs dominated the centermost horror.

"Stand in defiance against your inevitable inheritors, and earn instant oblivion!"

.....

I had to escape, had to flee before that dominating force ensnared me once more. Fangs bared, I pivoted and sprinted for the exit, weaving through the maze of corridors with every ounce of preternatural swiftness.

Gabriel's thunderous roars shook the earth, growing muffled as I instinctively threaded towards freedom. Rending shrieks and collapsing debris marked his pursuit like rolling thunder nipping at my heels.

'Run!' Ria beseeched me as the exterior door exploded off its hinges, Gabriel's towering nightmare form lurching through with fangs extended.

"You carry my Heir, come back....you cannot defy fate!" his profane harmonics reverberated through my soul. "Embrace your rightful place or be captured!"

Screaming my defiance, I burst out into the night-shrouded streets, the reek of exhaust and squalor burning my panicked gasps for air.

Alleys and side-passages beckoned in a dizzying array, but I didn't slow, couldn't relent with that eldritch presence and its deranged intent pursuing me relentlessly.

Only when the medical facility shrank to a speck behind me did I finally veer down a winding side-street, chest heaving like a runaway bellows. The alley narrowed into a twisting maze of fire escapes and condemned tenements - perhaps somewhere to evade my cosmic stalker.

"Defile us, Lyra!" Ria roared in outrage, our Pack's ancestral pride blazin to furious life. "Never allow that demon's spawn to sully our hallowed womb!"

Revulsion in visceral waves accompanied her outcry, overriding all reason in a flash flood of primal rejection.

But it was swiftly tempered by an underlying flicker of uncertainty, a shred of incomprehensible awe at the magnitude of power and cosmic grandeur we had witnessed.

'Our pups,' she growled, echoing my own turmoil. 'Our sacred princes and princesses born of that vile union. We cannot allow the Blackmoons to corrupt them, to subjugate our legacy!'

The approach of bone-shaking footfalls jolted me fully awake.

With a guttural snarl, I struck out into the shadowed labyrinth, my strides fueled by a singular drive to preserve the innocents in my womb - no matter the unholy circumstances of their conception.