He's looking at her tail, and she notices that he has the boring normal-horse-tail of her mother. Quite useless, lacking the dexterity and beautiful flicky-ness of the gargoyle's own leonine limb, and she happily resumes the snakelike thrashing of it across the soil. He is different to anything she's seen before - she wishes Enyo were here, to examine him with her. That naked, skull-marked face, that bone-printed leg, that weird dull tail!

He is a he, as well, and the only he she has ever met until now is her father. She wonders if this he is as beautifully violent as her sire, if he reeks of sweat and musk and sex like the grey harpy-master does - she flares her nostrils, but smells only boy. Perhaps he is too young. Perhaps one day, he will command submission as Father does. Perhaps one day he will sire strong daughters and test them with his ire, turning his harpies on them to determine if they are worthy of life.

He is speaking, and the filly's consternation grows. Inferiority. Her pride, prickled, bids her chest to bulk and her fledgling muscles to ripple beneath her grey fur - she throws her head high, denying said inferiority, but the movement tugs on her throat and threatens her with the Cough. It bubbles upwards from her fragile little heart, and she has to bow her head to choke it back down, down, down. The gargoyle curses, dismayed at the fact the boy may now think she is bowing to him, and her cold grey eyes flash in disgust at her own weakness.

She would happily submit the other side of her face to the ministrations of Father's eagle if it removed the Thing from her stupid heart.

"Not inferior," is all the little goddess can sputter out, annoyed at her own inability to articulate anything deeper. She hunts for something else to say, but her attention is seized by his oh, his noticing of her scars; her jaws twist from disgust into a smirk, making the pink lines dance across her ruined face. "See? If I was inferior, I'd be dead." There is no doubt in her mind that a weaker soul would not have survived the sheer face-ripping agony that she'd suffered; she wonders if Father's other children will undergo the same test, to see if they are worthy of carrying his name on their shoulders.

She shakes her hideous head to his next question, not deigning it with a response, but when he insults Mother, her face shifts into an expression of palpable rage. Ker shrieks, her unique insight into Oizys' mind telling her that Bad Things are coming, that nobody must insult Mother or Father or Sister else they suffer the gargoyle's wrath; the eaglet, deciding she doesn't want to watch, turns and plunges her face back into the corpse with an ugly, bloody squelch.

"She does not," the girl manages to choke out, annoyed at herself for rising to it, but Mother's honour must be defended! He speaks again, and the filly turns her attention momentarily to the fawn - unlike him, she finds death fascinating, perhaps because she'd come so close to it herself. She wonders what it is, how it works, what it means. She wonders what happens afterwards; all she'd seen was endless blackness, and this is what she contemplates. Is that it? Does it all just go black? "What if something happens to make your insides fall out?" she questions, nastily. Her horns - glimmering, twisted, inferior horns - are, she's discovered, quite excellent for making insides become outsides. "Then you'd be smelly and gross, too." Not the best comeback in the world, but she is a child.