The Life of Fear

by Educated Guess

Chapter 7: Lessons

The freedom in which I had so reveled was torn from me without so much as a moment’s notice. My life was no longer my own. It now belonged to my father, to my new teacher, and, as I gradually became aware, to the universe itself.

The first lesson that I learned was that there is a distinct and undeniable difference between learning, and being taught. To learn is to seek knowledge out - to feast upon that which sparks your appetites, and ignore that which you find to be not to your tastes. It is to wander a garden filled with beauty, be that with or without a guide, and to stop, whenever you wish, to smell the flowers around you.

But to be taught...

To be taught is to have knowledge forced upon you, thrust down your throat, drilled into your skull. To be taught by ponies the likes of Bellic and Dissimula is a fate that I would not wish upon the worst of my enemies - and being what I am, my enemies are many, and grave.

“So,” Phobos said on the first day of his lessons, sitting down next to a low, square table. “How do we begin with this... seering?”

“We don’t,” Dissimula called from an adjacent room. “Not yet.”

He blinked a few times as he tried to find any reason he was here if he was not here to learn. None came to mind.

“What?”

“Before I can teach you how to use the Sight, I must teach you the way in which it must be used.”

She came around the corner, floating a tome several times the size of her head in her rosy haze. The cover looked like it had once been dyed - perhaps even gilded - but now, the leather was cracked and worn, and nearly white from age. As it landed on the table before him, it made a sound like the door of a dungeon being slammed shut, trapping him beneath it.

“This,” she said, with something almost resembling reverence, “is the Legem Visus. It was written by Memini, and is the translation of the words that Faust and Edis themselves carved into the walls of the Legacy.”

“The Legacy?” He had never heard the name before.

“Is not your concern today. Today -” She flipped the book open to its first page. “- your concern is committing the first one-hundred Laws of Sight to memory. I will test you at sundown.”

Phobos’ jaw dropped - surely, she was joking? - but Dissimula’s half-hidden smile betrayed no more than it ever did.

“If you have any questions, I will be in my room.” And with that, she walked back through the archway, laid down on her pile of straw, pulled another book down from a shelf, and began to read.

Phobos stared at her for several moments, expecting - or, perhaps, simply hoping - that she would turn to look at him, laugh at his shocked expression, and admit to her joke. But her eyes did not so much as flicker from the pages before her, and eventually, Phobos resigned himself to his fate.

He looked down at the page, and began to read. His first thought was, Oh no - they each have explanations, too.

The First, and Foremost, which is to never be Forgot:

Ours is not to change, nor to prevent, nor to alter. Ours is to facilitate.

When you look into the unhappened, and a vision throws itself before you, this is not for the purpose of change. If the vision is peaceful, then let it be - such times are to be cherished. But, if the vision is disaster, then no matter the target, or the severity, or the pain it will cause, disaster must strike. All things, good and bad, have a Reason, and these Reasons form the Plan, and if the Plan is rewritten by the hooves of such as us, the consequences are disastrous. But the Plan must sometimes ask us for help, to assist in bringing about what must be, and such is our duty and our charge.

Phobos stopped for a moment, puzzled. So, the job of a seer was to change things... but only those things that would result in nothing changing?

The Second, on the Necessity for Secrecy:

Knowledge held by one is powerful. Knowledge held by many is impotent.

When you See, be as a watchful parent to your Sight. Keep your distance, but do not let it escape. Lead the pieces together, that they may bring about the necessary. Of the most importance is that you do not divulge the visions of your Sight to any but another who understands its Laws, and may help you achieve it properly - and as those Laws are themselves kept safe, this will only be to another who has Seen, or to the Keeper of the Legacy.

There was that word again - 'the Legacy.' And the Legacy had a 'Keeper'... he remembered Lexus mentioning Keepers before - perhaps the librarian would be able to tell him more. He glanced out the window, to the sun which was nowhere near setting, and sighed. Later. Much later.

The Third, on the Inheritance of the Sight...

A thought came to him. The other day, when he had woken in Dissimula’s chambers, he had been able to remember many things in perfect clarity. Instead of memorizing all of these rules, what was to stop him from simply reading through the book once, and then recalling the ones he needed?

“I’ll be able to tell,” Dissimula said.

Phobos jumped in surprise at the timeliness of her retort, and looked up from the tome. She had not so much as turned her head to look at him.

“I was young once too, you know.” She smirked, and flipped to the next page in her own book.

Phobos hung his head. It was going to be a long day.

---

“What is she teaching you up there?” Bellic growled the next day, gazing up at the Turris.

“So far?” Phobos sighed in no small amount of frustration. “She hasn’t taught me anything. She’s just making me memorize an entire book, page by page.”

His father looked back in surprise. “No magic?”

“Not so much as lifting a speck of dust.”

“Hrm. Leaving it to me then, is she? All the better.” Several small stones floated over from the edges of the arena, bathed in Bellic’s red aura. They began circling the warmaster slowly, like small moons orbiting a malevolent star. “We’ll start with basic defense.”

Before Phobos had time to ask “what do I do first”, a rock separated itself from the belt and streaked towards him, striking him squarely in the forehead.

“Ow!” He staggered backwards, and rubbed the spot gingerly. “What was that for?”

“For you to catch, of course,” Bellic said, floating another rock up casually. Phobos barely managed to hop out of the way as the stone whizzed past where his hoof had been.

“What are you doing?”

“As if I have the time to train you properly.”

Rock after rock flew around Phobos’ dancing hooves, thudding on dirt, pinging on stone, and occasionally, whapping against fur and flesh. He was amazed he wasn’t being hit by more, but he supposed he had playtime with his brothers to thank for that.

“If I had had it my way, you would have been training since birth, like your brothers!” Bellic yelled. “But, since Dissimula and her thrice-damned necklace interfered, we have your entire life to catch up on.”

“And how much - ow! - how much time do you expect to fit it into?”

“As little...”

Ping.

“As...”

Thud.

“Possible!”

Crack.

One of the stones hit Phobos’ knee, and he gasped as a lance of pain shot up his leg. His hoof spasmed outward, caught against the dirt floor of the Assembly Hall, and sent him tumbling onto his back.

For a moment, the sounds of flying rocks ceased, and Phobos though that, perhaps, his father had some small amount of concern for his well-being after all. But when he looked up, he saw a new volley of stones being prepared, and couldn’t help but whimper.

As the assault began anew, Phobos covered his head with his hooves and curled into a ball. Every pebble hit its mark, stinging and cracking against bone and skin. He tried briefly to shield himself with his wings, but the impacts felt even more painful against feathers and phalanges.

“Do something!” Bellic bellowed, never ceasing the pelting. “Are you just going to lie there all day? Catch them! Block them! DO SOMETHING!”

Do what? What could he do? He had never used magic before in his life - at least, not without blacking out.

But something has used your magic for you.

Of course. The necklace.

Phobos squeezed his eyes even tighter shut, and tried to ignore the pangs and stings of the barrage. He thought back to that night at the lake, and tried to remember the way that the power had flowed out of him - the paths it had taken, the parts inside of him that had squeezed, and torqued, and burst. As he imagined it, energy began flowing up towards his horn - a tingling sensation, as though his veins were filled with scuttling ants. His head began pounding, accompanying his racing heart with its own pulsing, irregular rhythm. When it felt like his skull was about to split open, he grunted, and pushed.

The power burst forth from him in a mighty wave, knocking a few stone out of the air, and sending the ones scattered on the ground around him flying. His muscles clenched and spasmed, and he gasped, both in pain and ecstatic excitement. He had done it! He had done... well, something!

Slowly, he lifted his hooves from his eyes, and found his father staring at him intently.

“Well done,” Bellic said. He floated another rock up from the ground, and grinned menacingly. “Again.”

---

“Thirty-seven,” Dissimula prodded, pacing a circle around him.

“Uh... ‘Do not act on the implications of a sight,’” Phobos recited hesitantly. “‘Act only on its meaning.’”

She nodded. “Good. Six.”

“‘A few words in the right place can carry more strength than a hundred armies.’”

“‘Eighteen.’”

“‘All you see must come to pass, but... but not all that comes to pass will you see.’”

“Ninety-four.”

“Uh... um...” Ninety-four... what was ninety-four? ‘There’... ‘There will’... or did it start with a ‘When’?

Dissimula’s hoofsteps ceased somewhere behind him. Phobos could almost feel her rosy eyes drilling into the back of his skull. When she spoke, her voice sounded cold - almost alien.

“‘There will be those who stand in the way of your Sight, and would bring it to ruin, whether by action or ignorance. If, and when, these individuals appear, and they cannot be distracted or persuaded away -’”

“‘...they must not be suffered to live,’” Phobos murmured darkly. He shivered as the words left his mouth. There were only a few ponies left that could bring anything to ‘ruin’, and he couldn’t imagine himself killing any of them.

“I know it seems terrible to consider,” Dissimula said, coming around to look him in the eye. “But it will most likely never come to pass. The last time a seer needed to remove an obstacle to the Plan was almost a thousand years ago, when Heus killed Salebra.”

“‘Obstacle’?” Phobos spat. “Those ‘obstacles’ are ponies. How can you talk about them that way?”

Dissimula was unperturbed. “I understand your concern - I once thought the same thing. But soon, you will come to understand that there are some things which are more important than lives.”

---

“Today,” Bellic said, “we will be working on offensive magic.”

Phobos breathed a sigh of relief. For once, a session where he wouldn’t be having things thrown at his face.

“Have you been practicing, like I asked?”

“Yeah, of course,” Phobos said half-truthfully - he had certainly been practicing, but not in the way his father had asked.

“Good.”

Bellic lifted up a large rock with his magic, but instead of throwing it at his son like usual, he floated it over towards the center of the arena, and held it there, hovering in place.

“Show me.”

Here goes, thought Phobos nervously.

He closed his eyes, and concentrated. It was actually fairly easy - albeit, very tiring - to create pure bursts of magic, like he had on his first day of ‘training’. The difficult part was focusing those bursts down into beams that could be aimed and targeted. “Shields are well and good,” his father had said, “but they are of little use if you cannot also retaliate.”

Phobos took a few deep breaths, and with each breath in, drew a little bit of magic up to the base of his horn. Aeros had told him that it was very important to learn to control the flow of his power, and not simply break the floodgates open - because once you had opened those gates all the way, it was difficult to close them again until most of the magic within was gone.

When he thought he had enough for several shots, he held his breath, opened his eyes, and fired.

The edge of the rock sizzled smokily.

“Hm,” grunted Bellic, sounding less than pleased. “A decent beam form, at least. Again.”

Phobos shifted slightly to the left and fired again. This time, the beam hit directly in the center of the rock, breaking off a few small bits of gravel.

“Good.” The rock retreated several feet. “Again.”

With every hit Phobos landed, the target grew farther and farther away, but his accuracy, surprisingly even to himself, remained about the same. It was less about directing the beam to a certain point, and more about pointing the beam in a certain direction - less the jab of a spear, and more the nocking of an arrow. Phobos felt a bit giddy as bolt after bolt struck the distant stone. He was catching up on his years so quickly - faster, he was sure, than even his father had anticipated.

“From the left!” Bellic suddenly yelled.

Distracted, Phobos turned right to look at Bellic quizzically, just before the part of his brain responsible for anticipating danger figured out that there was probably something coming from the left. By the time he had whipped his head back around, it was too late, and the stealthy pebble struck him soundly on the nose.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Bellic said shortly. The stone target quickly floated back to where it had been at the start of the lesson. “From the beginning.”

---

“What are the three aspects of the Sight?” Dissimula asked, once more pacing around him.

“Foresight, latsight, and hindsight,” Phobos recited.

“Which is the most difficult?”

“Foresight.”

“Which is?”

“The seeing ahead, of things yet to come.”

“Why is it most difficult?”

“Because seeing the unformed future is like seeing the statue within a stone. It is an art more than a science, and like any art, the inspiration and ability can ebb and wane unless properly disciplined.”

“Good. What, then, is next?”

“Latsight.”

“What is it?”

“The seeing to the side, of things which are now, but not here.”

“Why does it come next?”

“Because all things see - air, stone, and beasts. To see elsewhere than you are is simply to cast your sight abroad and see through another’s eyes.”

“What, then, is the last?”

“Hindsight. The seeing of that which has already come to pass.”

“And why is it last?”

“Because reading words that have already been written is no great test of ability.”

Dissimula finally stopped, turned, and smiled.

“Very good, Phobos. You recite almost as well as I did at your age.”

Phobos sighed in exasperation.

“So, now that I know all of the Laws of the Sight, and all of the different ways it can be used, when am I actually going to learn to use it?”

Dissimula raised one eyebrow critically.

“Impatience does not become you,” she said, looking him up and down. “However, your point is sound. We shall begin with your next lesson.”

---

“And you’re sure he won’t see us here?” Phobos whispered.

Aeros smiled, and winked confidently.

“He hasn’t found me here yet,” he whispered back. “The base of this tower is collapsed, so there’s no access from the ground, and there’s enough of the floor above us left to act as cover, but not enough to be worth checking more closely.”

Phobos glanced up at the precariously-balanced, half-rotted boards which criss-crossed above them. He wasn’t very confident in their ability as ‘cover’.

“What do you do when you’re hiding, anyway?”

“Uh... sleep, mostly. Sometimes I count the bricks in the wall.” Aeros pondered for a moment. “It can be a bit boring, come to think of it, but anything is better than time with Bellic.”

Phobos nodded in agreement - but then, like a phantom brought to life by the utterance of its name, a furious, booming voice came floating through the holes in the roof above.

“PHOBOS! I KNOW YOU’RE OUT HERE SOMEWHERE!”

The colt in question felt his heart jump up into his throat, and whimpered involuntarily. Aeros simply tilted his head to the side, and flicked one ear testingly.

“EVERY SECOND YOU HIDE FROM ME IS ANOTHER SET OF A HUNDRED ONE-WINGED PUSH-UPS!” came Bellic’s voice again, slightly louder than before.

“Sounds like he’s coming from the south-east,” Aeros murmured, unconcerned. “Good - we have maximum coverage that way. Lay down, and don’t move.”

Phobos flattened himself against the floor, and threw his hooves over his eyes. This had been a terrible idea! Why had he agreed to this? All he was accomplishing was getting himself in trouble!

“PHOBOS!”

The voice was getting closer. Phobos squeezed his eyes even tighter shut, and tried to ignore the panic and fear that ran about screaming in the back of his mind. He imagined himself disappearing - sinking into the floor, or turning into a pile of rubble, or losing his form and drifting away like dust on the wind. Anything, anything to keep Bellic from finding him. So fervent were his fantasies, he didn’t even notice when a slight trickle of magic squeezed itself out of his horn, and spread slowly over him.

“YOU CAN’T HIDE FOREVER!”

Seconds crawled by like hours. Slowly but surely, Bellic’s voice passed, grew quieter, and eventually, could not be heard at all.

“Yup,” said Aeros. “It’s basically like that. Long periods of boredom, punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Come on,” he grunted, standing up. “We should move before he makes a second... pass...” The airmaster looked around for a moment, confused. Then, hesitantly, he asked, “Phobos?”

“...Yeah?” Phobos responded, opening his eyes.

“...Where are you?”

Phobos looked up at his brother quizzically. “What are you talking about? I’m right here.”

“And where is that, exactly?” Aeros said, continuing to scrutinize the room.

“Here! Where I was before! What am I, invisible?”

“Are you?”

Phobos opened his mouth to retort, but stopped. ...Was he? Had his hysterical prayers actually worked, somehow? Now that he thought about it, he could feel some kind of energy surrounding himself, and could feel the flickering flame in his soul that was creating it. Gently, he pinched it out, and the field around him dissipated.

Aeros jumped in surprise as his brother appeared out of thin air, then smiled.

“Invisibility,” he said, sounding more than a little impressed. “Nice trick.”

---

“We shall begin with hindsight,” Dissimula said, sitting herself down in front of him. “I know you did it once, on the day we met, but that was unfocused - unpurposeful. You likely only saw slivers and fragments of a dozen different moments - focal points in your past that your mind latched on to. Correct?”

Phobos nodded. She always was.

“When you focus your hindsight, you can conjure up your entire past, and explore it at your leisure. It is different from remembering, because you see things from the outside. You need not even have been present - only nearby.”

He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

“Perhaps you were asleep at the time, or perhaps an event of importance happened a few rooms over. There is as much to see in your past as there is to see in your future, especially since the past is not plagued by the Law of Exclusion.”

Phobos nodded once more, mentally reciting despite himself. Twenty-three: All can know the past, but only one can know the future. The reason that seers began to lose their foresight when another seer was born was that any piece of future time that had been seen by another - or would need to be seen by another - could not be seen by any seer but that other. As the new seer began to See more, there would be less and less for the old seer to See, until eventually, the old seer would lose their foresight entirely.

“So,” said Dissimula, “let us begin. Close your eyes and think back, as before - but this time, do not go all the way. Hold yourself just outside your memories.”

Phobos didn’t think he understood, but did as he was told anyway. He let himself drift back - not trying to remember anything in particular, just letting his memories flow through him. Soon, he felt one trying to coalesce around him, and gently moved himself out of the way.

It felt as though a curtain had been torn away from his eyes - like he had emerged from the depths of a murky lake and could finally, for the first time in his life, breathe. He turned, and saw from whence he had emerged. His entire life was now laid out before him, a shimmering stream of silver threads that meandered its way through an endless blackness.

“Good,” Dissimula said, somehow knowing, as always, what was going on in his head. “What does it look like?”

“What?” he felt his mouth saying.

“Every seer Sees things differently. What does your timeline look like, to you?”

“A... a river. Sort of. Like a... river of strings.”

“A river. Interesting. And there are some parts that are brighter than others, correct?”

Phobos looked - indeed there were, and he told her so. The threads rose and fell, widened and contracted, and brightened and darkened as they twisted their way through the void. He floated himself towards one of these bright, bloated portions, and peered inside.

Phobos is making his way along the beach of the Ardenslacus, searching for something in the underbrush. The only light is from the lake itself - everything else is pitch-black, including the beast which is emerging from the treeline a hoofful of meters behind him, crawling slowly and stealthily closer.

Suddenly, his goal all but bites him in the hoof. There they are - the plants he has been searching for. He bends down, turns his head, and begins to chew at the base. The beast stops a jump away from its prey, swishes its tail menacingly, and leaps, claws shining in the lakelight. The gem on his necklace twinkles.

A burst of white explodes -

Phobos tore himself away, panting slightly. That was one moment that he was not particularly enthusiastic about reliving.

He swam backwards, searching for happier memories. As he did, he noticed a pattern among the strings. One of them - one that was, for the most part, in the center of the flow - was thicker than the others. He soon realized that that thicker strand represented him, and that the other strings were all the ponies he knew. When he first met them, their strands swooped in out of the aether. When they were away - like his brothers and father out hunting, or his mother and the sisters patrolling the border - their strands floated far away from his own. When he interacted with them, their strands crossed or wrapped around him.

He decided to push all the way back to the very beginning, and watched as all but six strings parted away and disappeared, leaving only him, his parents, Dissimula, Hippocrates, and, floating nearby but not yet touching, Sanarus. Past that point, his own line grew dimmer and dimmer, with Serena and Bellic’s spiraling around it, until it disappeared into nothingness.

Curious, he dove into the time before his birth, and found it strangely comforting - nothing but redness, warmth, and muffled noises. He could make out a deep, pulsing sound underneath the gurgling of the water, and realized that it was his mother’s heartbeat.

Well, if he ever needed somewhere to go and feel safe, now he knew exactly the place.

He moved forward to his birth, and watched the scene unfold. It was both oddly reassuring and entirely depressing to see that Bellic had loved him just as little then as he did now. As for himself, he had been told that his condition had been terrible, but he hadn’t ever imagined such a scrawny, malformed shape as he now saw. He shivered, unnerved, and moved on.

A few days after his birth, he found an odd dark patch in the strands, and peered inside. He quickly realized that it must have been the first time during his recovery that he had truly been asleep.

Hippocrates is sitting on the floor, his blue magic pulsing around his horn in time with his drooping eyelids. Before the doctor, in a swaddle of hay and cloth, lays his patient - a pale, sickly-looking foal that Phobos now recognizes as himself. The rest of the room is just as he remembered it - the table filled with herbs, the dilapidated torch brackets, and, most importantly, the snarky, juxtaposed son.

“How is he doing?” Sanarus asks, striding in with a covered platter held in his lime-green glow.

Hippocrates jerks himself awake, blinking rapidly.

“Barely any better than when he came out,” he murmurs, turning to eye his son’s cargo. “What’s that?”

“Flora thought you could use something a bit more filling than water.”

He pulls the cover off of the plate, revealing a light salad, a hunk of rough bread, and a wedge of cheese. Hippocrates’ stomach growls reflexively, and Sanarus chuckles, setting the arrangement down next to his father.

Hippocrates lifts the plate to his mouth and plunges ravenously into the salad, sending scraps of lettuce flying. Sanarus briefly lifts one eyebrow in disbelief, then shakes his head and begins gathering an assortment of herbs from the table. Eventually, Hippocrates surfaces from his meal to give a satisfied sigh, and notices his son’s activities.

“What do you need those for?” he asks.

“Just a few final treatments for Ignus,” Sanarus replies flatly. “His muscles are back in one piece, but he’s still bed-ridden.”

“Hm,” Hippocrates grunts. “I wish I had agreed to let you handle the delivery. I’ll be at this for another week, at the rate it’s going.”

“Yeah, well,” Sanarus said shortly, turning to leave with his supplies. “I guess some of us just have to learn to live with our mistakes.”

He rushes out the door, leaving Hippocrates in a stunned silence. All at once, the doctor jumps to his hooves and dashes to the doorway.

“Sanarus!” he yells down the hallway.

Sanarus stops, and turns to look back at him.

“You weren’t a mistake, son.”

Sanarus gives another half-hearted laugh, then continues around the corner. “Sometimes, I’m not so sure.”

Phobos pulled himself out of the memory slowly, letting those final few words sink in. Now that he thought about it, he had no idea who Sanarus’ mother was - he had never heard anypony even mention her existence.

...Or had he?

He drove himself back forwards along the stream, stopping at a point just past his battle with the chimera, where a new thread joined the stream. Celestia's thread.

“I’ve... I’ve been told about you, and your sister.” Phobos points nervously over the trees, towards the starry symbol which matches the one on the flank of the pony before him.

“By whom?” Celestia asks.

“By my mother.” Celestia raises her eyebrow expectantly. “Serena,” he adds.

“Another Son of Peace?” She smiles, amused. “How many does that make now?”

“Three,” Phobos says.

Her head jerks ever-so-slightly backwards, as though the answer is some kind of slap in the face. But then, her eyes twinkle in remembrance, and she nods affirmatively.

“Of course,” she says.

This time, when he surfaced, it was with purpose and zeal. He sent himself spiraling away from the stream, back up towards his body, which still sat motionless in Dissimula’s chambers.

He had to know.

Phobos gasped for air as his conscious mind resumed control, then looked around wildly for his teacher. She had been sitting off to one side, reading, but now looked up at him, half-expectant and half-curious.

“Who is Sanarus’ mother?” he asked breathlessly.

Dissimula smiled at him knowingly. “Lexus wasn’t lying when he called you the fourth son on that day at the library, Phobos.”

The fourth son’s mind was reeling. “How did you...”

“I was watching you,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s the duty of a seer to watch over her heir.”

For a few moments, they simply stared at each other. Eventually, Phobos found his words again.

“...Does Bellic know?” he asked, hesitantly.

“...No,” she answered grimly. “And for all our sakes, it would be better if it remained that way.”

Comments

[Midnight Rambler]

Oh man, this is glorious. Strong and engaging characters, fascinating worldbuilding, gripping plot, immersive atmosphere... this fic gets everything right. 10/10. I especially love how you weave together the "small" story of a colt growing up in a tiny but (except for his father) friendly community, and the "big" story of dragons and Covens and OHSHIT THE WORLD IS GOING TO FALL APART.

Please, for all that is holy, tell me you haven't abandoned this story and there will be more chapters in the future.

[Educated Guess]

3667967
Abandoned? No. Definitely not. He wouldn't forgive me if I didn't finish his story.

I've just been... very busy, lately. Real life has gotten in the way of a lot of the things I've been wanting to do. Not to mention that new season canon has changed a few things, and those things are still figuring themselves out. Not major things, but still.

Rest assured, it will be done. Hopefully, soon. The world will fall apart, and there will be nothing he can do to stop it - not to say that he won't try.

Thank you for watching. I hope I won't disappoint you.

[Midnight Rambler]

3668876 Awesome. I find myself really caring about your characters – almost as much as I cared about the characters from my favourite books as a little kid. I want to know what happens to them and how their relationships develop. So I would have been heartbroken if this story had been an abandoned project.

It's great to hear it isn't! And by all means, take your time. I'm a very on-and-off writer myself (my updates can have a week between them, or several months) and a big believer in "better late than never".

[Yami Vizzini]

Wow! A lot of great world building here.
So, what, Bellic was off on some "hunting" trip for long enough that Sanarus could be brought to term? So who does Bellic (and the others?) think Sanarus's mom is? It's not like there's a big enough population to obscure this sort of thing.