Nymeria

- the raven casts the longest shadow -

Tükör arca snorts. One of Nymeria's brows arch upwards in polite disagreement; inwardly she bristles at the mare's dismissal. Even if her beliefs were different than Isopia's, it didn't mean they were stupid—did it? It was true that her family had never been a peaceful one, that blood had in many ways torn Volterra and her apart just as it had brought them together; but it was her blood, her mother's guidance, that ascribed to her the purpose she bore now. Family did matter, of that she was certain—even if one day she shed her brother's company he had still changed her in ways she might never fully realize.

You could say the same of friends, Lilómiel pointed out diplomatically. Everyone you meet, everyone you know... in some small way they leave a piece of themselves with you.

Nymeria wasn't certain if she believed that. There were many meetings she had simply discarded or disavowed as unimportant, many faces that she had been forced to forget in order to find room for the new ones. And it was true, if she had friends they might change her in the way Volterra forced her to: but she didn't have friends, the exception of Själ. All she had known in her life was her brother and her mother and Argen, when it came down to it.

It was an unpleasant realization.

There is a brief and weighty moment of uncomfortable tension when she finishes her monologue. In the following silence she feels decidedly vulnerable, as if by parting with so much honesty she'd left too much of herself exposed. Regardless of the ease in which she talked there was nothing easy about the complicated situation surrounding Volterra and herself. She had too many conflicting thoughts, fears, and worries. How could she describe both her jealousy and her revulsion, her ambition and her scorn, her lust and her hate? The purity—the naïveté—of her and Volterra's relationship had long since perverted.

Their meetings had been brief as they grown older, but it did not diminish the emotional weight behind their words and their actions.

And the last meeting... she sucked in a low and sharp breath. It was too clear for comfort: the colors glistening on Volterra's shoulders, the emptiness in his eyes, the rage and the fire that followed soon thereafter. She hadn't expected him to react as he did. She hadn't expected him to—to—to wage war against her, to throw himself against her and try his very best to break her. In the end she'd held her own: in the end they had parted. It would've been easier if she'd lost, she mused; or if he had lost.

Isopia smiled at her. It shakes Nymeria out of her thoughts. At first hesitantly, then enthusiastically, she returns it. In this their differences didn't matter; in the end, they both agreed that Volterra was in the wrong.

Or are you alone now in your mother's destiny?

I don't know. She had her conspiracies, her treacherous machinations and nefarious plots; some to which Volterra belonged, others to which he did not. Volterra—she'd meant to renounce him that day. (She hadn't tried to burn his balls off for nothing.) There was treason and there was ignorance and then there was what her brother had done, somewhere in between the two... but wasn't she complicit as well? It had not been her brother alone who had made mistakes. Surely she could've done better—she could've comforted him, soothed him, found the source of what made him so broken (how ironic that the source was standing here in front of her.) Looking at him she had known something was wrong and yet she'd gone ahead and attacked him anyways.

Excuses.
Didn't Isopia have a point?
How little it must mean to him, she'd said. Will you try and redirect his organs guide his decisions? (She had tried. She'd offered herself to him, her virginity the sacrificial lamb.)

"I will not be alone," she said, "even if we have parted ways, he will pursue our mother's goals as he was bred and raised to." (What a sad thing to say: Nymeria made it sound as if their destiny was set in stone, their fate already resolved.)

Hooded lashes sweep together; her lips twist, something soft and sad and scornful all at once. "I can't force him to be something he isn't. And honestly? I'm not going to waste my time teaching him how to control himself. I'm not his keeper."

He would only hold me back.

"If I may say so, tükör arca... you are different than anyone I've ever met." (Preferable company to many, that is.) Red eyes flicker up to gold. "I would like to know what you think. Can he be redeemed, or is he best left behind?"