The jackal god was not a visitor anyone expected in the palace that day. The Queen was only about 8 months into her pregnancy, and in the middle of audiences with her eldest son, when she'd made an odd noise coupled with a grimace her ladies recognized all too well.
Caesarion had immediately called for the halt of the audiences and gotten up and helped her to her feet, sending one of the guards off to alert his father and everyone else necessary. They took her to her rooms, Olympos trailing after them with some vague grumbling about her being too old for having children in his opinion and that she should have been more careful. She laughed faintly and told him he was ridiculous, she'd already given birth six times and she was well aware of what she was doing.
Caesar had arrived not long after they'd gotten her settled, and he spent a little while in the room with her before the midwives all arrived and chased him out. She'd chuckled about how funny it was that the great Caesar was being chased out of his own wife's bedroom by a flock of women, before wincing and gripping Iras' hand as she felt another contraction hitting her.
It was only a handful of hours before a baby's cry was heard and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Shortly after Charmain came outside, followed by Iras with a small bundle in her arms. After everything that had happened with Caesarion, Cleopatra had decided to defer to Roman custom of having the children brought to their father so he could acknowledge them as his right away.
"You have another son Caesar" she said, smiling and handing the little boy to him.The proud father immediately took the child in his arms, holding him up and grinning at everyone present shouting that he had another son. In the background, a smirking Antony elbowed Lucius Vorenus and said "I told you so, you owe me", which caused Victoria to roll her eyes and sigh loudly at him as she too walked out of the room.
Amidst the joviality and congratulations, and the other children crowing around to see their new sibling, almost no one noticed Olympos coming out of the room. That is until his voice could be heard over the din shouting for Charmain, Iras, and Victoria to get inside and now.
It caused an almost immediate silence in the room, and the three women hurried inside. Caesar paled and handed the baby off to Aurelia, quickly darting inside after the others. Everyone outside stood silent and still, the hush only broken by the occasional whimper from the newborn baby being held and shushed by his elder sister.
After the longest ten minutes of anyone's life, a horribly pale and visibly disturbed Iras came out and asked for Caesarion. He went nearly as pale as his father had, but immediately went inside too. If the atmosphere had been heavy before, it was even worse now. No one was saying a word, even the youngest of the children were subdued and utterly silent, listening for any sounds coming from inside the room.
Soon a noise came from inside the room, a horrible combination of a scream and a cry that caused shivers to run down the spines of everyone there. They had never heard a sound so terrible in all their lives and the older of the crowd knew what it meant. The younger children almost instinctively started to sob, perhaps not knowing exactly what had happened but sensing something terrible had happened all the same.
Then Egypt's only remaining female Ptolemy turned and buried her face in her husband's chest, still cradling her newest little brother in her arms as he started wailing as louder than anyone thought it possible for a newborn to cry.
