A white-eyed man opens it. "Good afternoon."

"Good afternoon." 

There is an obsidian woman in vampire form on the doorstep. She's carrying a large, sturdy basket, containing several soft cozy blankets, a couple of stuffed animals, and one shren egg.

It's actually kind of hard to tell an obsidian woman in vampire form from a vampire, and vampires are not a terribly uncommon sort of visitor to shren houses. But then there's the egg. He nods and holds out his arms for the basket. "Do you have a name picked out, would you like to leave a letter or anything?" She's trying to be nice about it, clearly, with the toys and the blankets.

"Lusiwina for a moonstone, Seshkafalesh for an obsidian." 

She passes him the egg basket very very carefully.

...those names have lines in them. "So we should expect you for a ceremony in a month, then?"

"A month and a week, we didn't wait until the last minute to bring her."

"A month and a week. Just you and your spouse?" The names are girls' names but it could be that the moonstone line would come from a mother-in-law.

"Yes. My wife. ...We might come for her sooner, if...neither of her clutchmates survive."

He's heard that before, but he just nods. "Do you want to come in or would you prefer not to?"

She steps inside. "Can I see? Where the eggs are." 

"This is the only egg at the moment but we have a dedicated room for them." It's not far from the entrance for exactly this reason, first door on the left. It opens to a light kick. It's got a rocking chair and a little table and a lamp and a padded floor. He puts the basket on the floor, under the window so the sunshine will hit it some of the time.

She steps forward, kneeling down to caress the egg one last time, then stands up and nods. "Thank you." 

"You're welcome. We'll look after her for you."

"Thank you," she says again, and then leaves. 

A week later there is another knock on the door. 

Ludei answers it. "Good morning."

"Good morning. My wife dropped off an egg last week--I was wondering if it had hatched yet." 

"I think she's just started trying, actually, if you'd like to watch."

"--Yes. Please."

Into the egg room, then. There's an adolescent blue girl sitting in the rocking chair keeping an eye on the egg; she shrinks a little when she sees Lavi.

"Hello," she says gently, but her eyes at no point move away from the egg once they alight on it. 

The blue girl turns into a pardalote and flutters out of the room.

"You may have time to call your wife," Ludei suggests.

She takes out a communication crystal and hits it. 

"Call my father and have him watch them," she says, without bothering with any niceties. "She's starting to hatch right now. The other two can go without us right there for that long."

Leelu shows up at the front door a couple of degrees later. 

Ludei shows her in.

She kneels next to her wife, by the egg, her hands clenched in her skirts. 

And eventually, after much rocking, a tiny moonstone head bursts out of the shell.

"Oh, hello," Lavi gasps softly. She reaches out to help her daughter the rest of the way out of her shell. 

Yes. Of course.

"This one will live. Even if neither of the others do--even if we can't bring her home to a living sister--" snuggles for baby "--she'll live." 

"We still might. We don't know--"

"We could get lucky. But one in three survivors is already lucky."

"When we decided to do this--I thought it would be easier not to get attached. Until." 

Yeah.

"This one will live." 

Nod nod. 

They don't stay long; there are two other babies at home, who they might have a much more limited time with. But Leelu does thank Ludei again and give him a large amount of money on the way out.

He's got a lot of practice at gratefully accepting donations from dragons.

And a few weeks after that, Laviwina shows up on his doorstep again, this time red-eyed with tears.

"You'll have to come in to get her, she can't go beyond the door."

"Understood. Thank you." She comes inside. She is trying very hard not to continue crying in front of him, and she's succeeding, but not so well he can't tell it's an effort.

The babies' room is airlocked; the second door won't open till the first closes. The window doesn't open. The place is fireproofed and there's a few older kids and one adult shren, a jade fellow, watching the swarm of babies, ranging from almost completely fine (hers, the tiniest, a moonstone) to - well, all the rest of them, screaming, crying, biting themselves, zonked out on potions -

The jade man flinches and goes back to discussing a picture book with a baby ruby; Ludei picks through the seething mass of baby shrens to collect Luci and hand her over.

Lavi cradles her. She--is horrified by the screaming babies, of course, but--she refuses to make that their problem. 

"Thank you," she says again, although he might have to read her lips to know that because she isn't going to raise her voice to be heard over the screaming. 

There weren't that many possible things she could be saying, so he can figure it out. "Of course. You're teleporting directly? Your home is registered as a shren location?"

"I will, yes. We built a house on the bottom of the world."

He blinks, and nods. "Ilen? What's there to know about Luci?"

"Oh, she's a sweetheart," says Ilen, who has not noticed that the ruby baby is clawing his arm. "She won't be the least bit of trouble. She likes the stuffed animals and the book about stars."

"Which book about stars?" so she can get a copy later. 

Ilen finds it under a twitching baby black shren and holds it up: Counting All The Stars.

"Thank you," she repeats again, and she teleports away. 

The two of them send the shren house money every month. Nowhere near as much as the initial lump sum, but reliable. 

They get anonymous-looking receipts from the Kep Trust which wouldn't raise eyebrows from any of their relatives who didn't go nosing around too hard.

Oh they don't speak to those relatives. Not that she's going to storm up to the shren house to say anything about it. 

Lavi is a witch; she sends the shren house a batch of any of the painkiller recipes she tries that seem like they help Luci, at all. 

They try stuff and report back!

She's not going to totally revolutionize the field in twenty years, or anything. But witchcraft is something she can do, and she can't just watch her daughter suffer and wail when she can do something. 

And Leelu--learns to hate. 

It's not as though she were an especially non-angry person before this. But with every scream, every sob of pain, every time the word shren digs its way into her brain as though it could ever mean more than the word daughter, her antipathy towards Draconic--towards the concept of dragonhood--deepens. What could possibly be siaddaki about dead babies? About abandoning your children? She encounters a woman who puts her nose in the air about the fact that Areelu brought her daughter home and only quick thinking on her wife's part in the form of literally teleporting Leelu away in time prevented her from being arrested for assault. 

She yearns, in the depths of her soul, to commit horrifying violence every time she says the word "shren" and a dragon reacts as though she was out of line. She doesn't. It wouldn't accomplish anything. But she wants. 

Eventually Luci learns to shift. Flying isn't everything it should be, for a white-group, but it makes the esu go away. Her temperament improves overnight, back to the sweet little girl Ilen told Laviwina about, so long ago. 

Lavi tells her daughter that story, eventually. 

Luci is twenty-nine when she mails Ilen a drawing she did, of her and what she imagines him to look like (at her level of drawing, the details are more or less irrelevant anyway) under a starry sky. 

Ludei has to send the return letter on Ilen's behalf, because Ilen panics if he contemplates anything outside the building too much, but it's a very sweet sentiment and the drawing is posted up high on the wall where it won't be set on fire.