“I honestly expected you to be a small boy,” she says, and I feel a grimace mark my mouth at first – what did she expect, after two years?  I was only meant to be small and squeaky so long, after all, as was everyone.  But, she looks me over with something that I take to be approval, and within moments the initial discomfort at being compared to the child I was fades away into the man that I am presently – the sort who drinks in attention and is eager to reciprocate, especially in the case of old female friends.

I smile at her complement, enjoying that she thinks time has been good to me.  It hasn’t – at least beyond the gracious gifts of my handsome exterior, if you ask me - but that’s beside the point.  

"It’s remarkable, considering this lands penchant for seasonal disasters," I laugh, mostly because it seems to be true – I’ve only lived two years, and have already seen more than twice that number of disastrous occurrences.  Most of them, almost ironically, had been caused by the Gods themselves, the beings who were meant to protect us and their realms from such happenstances (unless I had mistook what a God was for). 

What she says next almost escapes me – for her creature belches forth a flurry of glossy feathers, tossing his murdered bird about for good measure.  Whatever embarrassment Sia feels, I miss; it is mostly because a chunk of bird flesh has landed smack against my chest, a couple of feathers still protruding from mangled, dimpled skin.  As when Volterra’s stupid ice lizard decided it was necessary to drop dead things on me, my reaction is less than kindly, or forgiving.  That she seems apologetic for him means very little in the wake of his uncouth rudeness, and rather than yelling at my friend, as I had the mostly strange hornless beast I’d met in the dark wood, I turn instead upon her insidious little heathen.

My tail curls behind me contemptuously as I take a step closer to the hideous two legged not-a-dragon from hell, my head lowered and ears pinned.  It is a motion which is aggravated only further when the horrid little thing splashes at Sia, and she does nothing.  The two paces of my hooves against the shallow and colorful water beneath me are savage, my golden eyes growing thinner with each approach…

And I’m stopped by the strange change which takes the devilish fiend she calls Hobgoblin – like a spill of black blood it morphs and wobbles in a flashing second, changing from wyvern to cat in the blink of an eye.  Arching in disconcertment as much as loathing at this point (I don’t like this changing beast at all, and would rather like to smash it if he wasn’t bonded to Sikeax), my neck pulls my hostile features up, hooves halting immediately beneath me, so that I am left glaring at the monster that besieges her back.

All the while she still does nothing to stop him, and instead she asks me questions as if he’s simply playing with her hair.  I find that my words have nothing to do with her inquiry at all when I find them, my voice suddenly much more harsh than it had been when we’d first initiated conversation while Hobgoblin dined.

"Why do you let him treat you that way?" I ask in return, not caring for pleasantries in the face of this cretin of a creature, "I’d smash his little morphic ass into the sand were he mine, bond be damned.  No animal deemed by the Gods as suitable for servitude should treat you as such."

I halfway hope the little shit tries to come at me like he does her – my mind gathers itself, focus collecting until I feel the hum and crackle of my magic in the base of my brain.

If he tries to strike me, I’ll slam his face into the ground with his own muscular responses – no matter what form he takes, I dare him.


[ OOC: Casually replies immediately. ;D ]