The carcass falls at the red's feet, and his gluttonous eyes light up. Volterra, suspecting a trap where the single-minded dragon cannot, gives Vérzés a mental nudge of warning. "I wouldn't." But the red, with his prize so tantalisingly close, reaches out his claws to try and snatch the carcass up and pull it close to him, greed radiating like an aura from his crimson form.

The young stud looks back to Tae. Never, she says, and he smiles a humourless, tight smile. He pictures himself at that tender age; inseperable from Nymeria, devoted to her. If some self-proclaimed wise stranger had tried to tell him that he would one day grow apart from her, he'd have kicked them in the face. Not a chance, he'd have spat. We're two sides of the same rock, we're stronger than you know, we're one soul in two bodies. And indeed, for a long time, that had been the case. They'd survived each other bonding to a dragon - and Volterra can vividly remember how jealous, how worried, he'd been when his sister's black hatched - they'd survived their mother being stolen when they were mere children, they'd survived the fact that they'd never had a father figure in their life and that their minds had been mouldable dough for the World Eater to indoctrinate.

And then the cracks had started to show.

He still can't quite recall how it happened. He just remembers that day at the Endless Blue, an argument bursting from the embers of nothing and rising, phoenixlike, into the most ill-tempered row they'd ever had. It had been over their mother's potential rescue, he thinks. Now...now they go weeks, months, without contact. Now he misses her like he'd miss his heart if it was ever ripped, still beating, from his chest. "You could say that." His tail lashes, bad-tempered, against his flanks, and in the tree the golden dragon tilts her proud head questioningly. She, unlike the red, doesn't know the days when he and Nymeria were inseperable - their divide began long before he found her egg, but escalated to a crescendo that fateful day when he fought wolves to claim her ovoid home as his own. "I have a twin sister. When I was your age, we were inseperable, and we both had delusions of grandeur. We thought we would grow old by each other's side and rule together, an empire at our hooves and the bones of our crushed enemies at our backs. How wrong we were." The set of his jaw is grim, harsh, tight beneath the skull he wears. Nymeria doesn't even know he's killed. She doesn't know that some creature tried to kill him until he got the better of them - time was, she'd have been right there beside him, spilling blood.

Those halcyon days are long gone. Nowadays, Nymeria schemes and plots without him, and he fights and kills without her. Whilst he is gaining experience on the battlefield and indulging his desires in any mare he can find, she is trying to overthrow their aunt for no discernible reason, and that's just the plots he knows of. "Now, I am lucky if I see her once a month. It'll be nigh on impossible to rule with her when we are as good as strangers." Bitterness clouds his voice and features. "Enjoy the closeness you have with your twin, girl. You never know when the Gods will conspire to snatch it away."