The gap between them widened.

It was perhaps one thing - maybe even the only thing - that she and her father likely agreed about. Blood was irrelevant. It was why she didn't really speak (or think) about her mother, why her godly lineage seemed inconsequential. It was mere happenstance that she was born. There was nothing about her family in the way of pride, that ought to trickle down to her. She hadn't earned her blood, hadn't won it. It had merely be given, if that was even the right word, which now that she was thinking about it, it wasn't. She was a combination of DNA, or events and doings that occurred long before she was more than just a jumble of cells.

Why on earth should any of that matter?

If Volterra had shown her anything, it was how little blood mattered. Look at his father-less offspring, for example. He had created them by doing nothing more than giving into the wants of his flesh. It took only a few twitches of various muscles and voila. Life. It carried his blood, and yet he didn't know about it.

How could blood be everything, when it was so easy to come by?

Her mind quickly associated her current line of thinking with Verzes. Had that younger-Volterra only named the dragon because of his colour and because of the meaningless insistence of his mother?

Iso's ears flicked backwards slightly. So Nymeria too had been born for a purpose, just as she had.

I were raised to believe family comes before everything else.

At this, Isopia openly snorted. The sound might have indicated sarcastic amusement - and likely that's what the girl had intended - both none of that wicked glee that should have been in her gaze, made it there. Instead her eyes were still hard round circles of gold. Maybe Volterra put making family before everything else. That he was too stupid to realize that his acts of fuckery had family-related consequences was beginning to bother her more and more. Again, she stifled the urge to gaze towards the grave.

Did it even cross your mind that you put life inside of me? Were you too dull to think about it? Or was your dick attention grabbed so quickly that you just forgot?

What Nymeria says next does not surprise her in the least. She might have already guessed that about Volterra, and hearing that Nymeria was the same is only slightly elucidating. The Mountain rather thought Nymeria would only admit defeat if she was playing possum.  

In many ways he's an... animal. He's not like you and I, tükör arca-

Now it's Isopia's turn to feel unduly stung by her words. Isopia knew that Volterra was not like her ... but she was still grappling with that realization. She had seen him through rose-coloured glasses, or perhaps somewhere in her naive mind she had thought that she might be the one to change him. Or that possibly he would change her. In a very clear way, he had. Just not in the way she might have thought. And certainly not in the way that she had wanted. It was also impossible to hear the hungarian dialect from Nymeria's lips and not think of Volterra. They used different words of course, different names for the strange tribrid, but it didn't matter. It was him all over.

He only thinks with his dick.

The bluntness but apt truth of this snapped Isopia out of the cold recoil her mind had been experiencing, and for once she actually did smile. Her nostrils flared as she exhaled a breath of agreement.  

"And do you still care of family now that you see how little it must mean to him? Will you try and redirect which organs guide his decisions?  Or are you now alone in your mother's destiny?"

Part of her assumed Nymeria still held onto her familial values, and that assumption tugged slightly at Isopia's soul, suggesting that she ought to tell the dark mare about the dead body only feet away. It would have been her nephew. Does she not have a right to know? But another stronger part of Isopia answered deftly, No. No one has a right. And then, from another sullen corner of her mind, She would then know that I was another conquest. That I was stupid enough to allow him to-

But even this monologue couldn't be continued. It made warm sensations writhe within Isopia, sensations that she could no longer bear despite how pleasant they might initially seem, for they always brought her back to those moments on the mountain, and the fall that came after.