He sleepily watches her expression change as he speaks, admiring in his own subtle ways how she listens and lets the words sink in; to the naïve boy, this is a true sign that this woman has a good head on her shoulders, and so his smile becomes all the more dreamy the longer she swallows his logical rebuttals. If he could only know how dark and dismal the thoughts he was filling her head with were, he would surely stop – but to the pessimistic and doubtful child of two former leaders, it was not unusual to frown so often while pondering the mysticisms of the universe. His life, after all, hung on the precipice of two very different ideals. He worried some days that his face would become stuck in the droll and mildly pained mask of thought that he seemed trapped within since arriving to Helovia.

If you asked the boy, who would honestly answer that yes, he was to be wicked for all his days, if only for having some of the thoughts he’d had in his short life.

Except for this moment, this one where he was smiling and a pretty girl was listening to him and accepting his company. It was not that Semira and Mirage had not been pretty – but one was a forbidden fruit, an object to be observed from afar (how would Adalwulf react to that one, anyway? He bites back a chuckle at the thought), and the other, to be perfectly humble and honest, scared the daylights out of him. He didn’t expect the black queen to fall out of the sky and murder him, of course, but that only added to her aura of power – she would pull him out before all the eyes she could gather, and there pin him with the red beads of his sin for all the gathered faces to witnesses.

Did Mirage eat people while in that golden body? He suppresses a shudder that threatens to take his lethargic muscles. Perhaps not eat, but surely burn them alive – as if that is anymore pleasant of a thought.

”I wonder what makes one strive for evil,” she says, and he takes a moment to think about the inquiry, ears splayed in thought and mouth once again bent into a ponderous line. He is pulled back out of his wondering as her second question meets him, however, his grin sloppy and almost misplaced on his face as he shakes his head in rebuttal. "Yes I sle…" he begins, but hesitates as he finds her eyes and instantly feels his knees groan (perhaps audibly); unbidden, a sigh escapes his lips, "no. I didn’t sleep. I was quite worried that you…"

He glances upwards at the boughs of the branches nervously, blue eyes looking across the canopy in utter self annoyance that he cannot understand what in hell is going on with his insides at this moment. "…that you had hurt yourself." Clearing his throat nervously and taking a pace backward to align himself with the path that would lead them to the nearest campfire, he offers Kahlua his shoulder to lean upon as they make the walk, should she want it. "I need lessons you know," he has logically decided, though realizes that it sounds rather cold now that it is out on the open air, and he quickly modifies his words with a hasty compliment, "and you are by far the finest craftswoman in World’s Edge."