More foals arrive, and adults, too. It's quite the gathering, and the colt looks around to make mental notes about all of them. His gaze travels to the first boy that got here before him, the winged-and-horned monstrosity with the twin sister, and he's rather smug when Cheska calls him clever over the other kid. Already he has a healthy sense of masculinity and a desire for dominance over other boys, so he's rather pleased he's got one over on the first youngster, the one that is beaming like he got it right, which he so didn't.

Kids. So dumb.

The rest of the story continues, and the beastling listens with a keen ear. It is a story of greed - a story that could have been written about Volterra himself, when he looks deeper into the narrative. What did Mother call them, the tales with morals at the end? Fables. Like the boy who cried wolf, it is a cautionary tale against a certain emotion and alas, it is one the colt already suffers from. He is consumed by it, his desire for a dragon, his desire to own his sister, his desire to be the best at everything he puts his mind to. He wonders idly if he will be stripped of everything if he pushes too far, if he tries to take too much. If he does gain the magic he craves, the dragons he needs, will the gods punish his gluttony by taking everything away from him? He frowns thoughtfully, tail flickering against muscular young flanks as he ponders. Kindness and generosity strike him as two rather overrated emotions, found only in less developed creatures and preferably purged as soon as possible. Will he be kept from true greatness because of his lack of them? Will be be trapped forever as a raven, instead of spreading his wings as a dragon?

He is probably the only one of the foals gathered here that agrees with Raven - that thinks the great black bird was right to pursue everything, to follow his greed and screw the consequences, to take and take and take until he grew gorged on his own magnificence. Which is quite a damning indicament on the young behemoth's state of mind, and of the man he will become.

"Nice story, miss! Where did you hear it?" Did Raven tell her himself? He feels deeply sorry for the creature, losing all his gifts simply for pursuing what he wanted. The colt's attention is snatched by the arrival of another boy, the smallest and youngest yet, another pegasus. But wait, he seems to be lacking in something. A wing, because he has just one. "Who stole your wing?" he asks the other boy without preamble. There, there's that lack of kindness (and tact) he is rapidly becoming famed for. He does not mean to be cruel, as such, or to embarass the boy; he simply doesn't have a particularly developed filter between his brain and his mouth.