I have no herd. I find it easier that way. A wan smile spreads across the behemoth's jaws at his compatriot's words. Oh, he knows that feeling so well. How long had he avoided the confines of a herd for the sanctity of his own freedom? How often had he shirked invites, abandoned friends, all because he loved his outcast life so damn much? For over three years, it has simply been him and his dragons. Save for his mother and sister, anybody flitting into his life had been temporary, hardly remarkable. He relied on himself to survive, and nobody else.

It hadn't been an easy life, by any stretch of the imagination. For a prey animal like a horse, surviving alone takes considerable guile and good fortune, and lesser men would have crumbled long ago. Instead, Volterra thrives on the challenges that roguehood offered him. He learned to sleep with one eye open, always watching for opportunistic predators or any other assailants. His dragons had been a considerable help, with their sharp senses and aerial prowess, but he likes to think that he could still have managed even without them.

Nostalgia grips him like a vice, and not for the first time, freedom calls out to him. He could just leave. Like this man before him, he could stay an outcast. Live by his own rules, his own laws, his own timelines. Answer to nobody but himself.

But he can't. He owes Sikeax more than that; he owes himself more than that. He was born to rule, and he cannot rule nothingness.

"I was like you, for many years." In the back of his mind, he wonders why he's admitting this much to a complete stranger. It is not like Volterra to willingly share emotions, but the words simply flood out of him. "It is a hard life to give up. Enjoy it while you can - you never know when fate will intervene and alter your path to something you never expected." He never thought he would live in the Throat; he always had his eyes on the Falls. He never thought he would serve beneath a woman, and certainly not a former lover. He never thought he would follow at all, come to think of it - he just assumed he would march onto a throne, despite having no prior experience.

How wrong he was.

The man speaks again, a passionate defense of his decision to live alone. Volterra raises an eyebrow, interested by the point that the older stallion puts across. "That is a rather cynical viewpoint," he rumbles. It is not a criticism - no, there's genuine interest in the goliath's thunderous tones. "I would be inclined to agree with you, except I find that certain types of loyalty can benefit rather than hinder. Loyalty given freely is worthless, but when it is earned....it has its uses." And that is deep, by Volterra's standards.