Glorious and cruel, the child is released into the shadow of the mountain like a rising sun after generations of darkness. He eases the heartache; She lets herself return to a state of profoundly pitiless contemplation and calls it hope. His soft golden sides soothe Her sorrows golden until She has nothing left to mourn.
Mother needed someone to love, and here he is, like the ancient days, like a song of the origin She had nearly forgotten.
He has inherited his father's beauty and arrogance. Sleeked in Beowulf's grandeur, both the genuine and the false, he moves through the harsh contours of the world as swiftly as warm summer wind, a scent of lambs and burning hair. His silhouette speaks dead languages; his smile is nostalgic and unkind.
"Your father is a great man," She reminds him, when his fiery pride has been fanned too high by the glamour of his reflection, and his scales or his fingers glitter against the dark arc of the cavern walls, tracing the shape that will someday be his constellation in the vaulted sky; and he laughs, the sound like a melody trapped in ice.
"Because of you," he replies, and looks at Her, the same way his father did.
The lust, however, is something he learned from Her, and he learned it without the shackles of conscience or restraint. All the girls he visits in dreams, all the jumbled recollections and torn membranes. If he meant to breed, She would insist that he court one of the rare ladies in the deep ocean chambers, blood running pure and cold.
If he meant to breed, She would not envy the little mortal darlings anything, anything at all, not a thing.
They inhabit the sealit cove, their silent haven for half a century, and this is only a fraction of the eternity they could spend together, twisting through a thousand earthly bodies and all the elemental transformations prophesized in his darkest heart's-blood. Someday he will be old, foundation-old, but always Her son, Her child.
"Mother," he whispers to the womb that held him. "Mother."
She could strike him from the palette of existence with an idle thought, but instead She strokes the long line of his throat and bestows Her kiss upon him, a fragile thing whispering nearby, shapeless among all the brilliant serpentforms scaling dark chambers and the familiar, barren abyss he has known since his childhood.
They drift in hollow spaces, sink below the surface and wait for a simultaneous moment of weakness in gods and men, confident that the moment will come. He spreads Her open with his sharp hipbones, learns to distinguish the taste of ocean salt from the flavour of Her flesh. Mantles his great golden wings to enfold Her when She wills it, a glory shroud and shield.
It occurs to Her as the subtle texture of his scales flow against and into Her body, the searing, liquid presence of a wyrm pressing through the perceived image of a mortal man: he is a good son.
"Mother, Mother," he says; and, with the word, his unkind smile. His devotion. "You and I will live forever."
She thinks of dear, stuttering, lost little Grendel for the first time in fifty years, and the men who have given sons to her and the ones who have taken them away.
A good son, but She does not allow Herself to believe in him.