I’m not sure if I could ever be truly in charge of anyone. Sure, I have a dream of one day being, you know, important, like my family, maybe start a tradition of being in charge, and good at it. However, that dream sort of begins to flutter and flicker when I really write myself into the story, stories where my kingdom falls into ruins while I wandered aimlessly without it, or the countless others of individuals I’d be forced to interact with – and likely piss off in some way.

I guess it’s why I was still out here, just me and Duir. I had no business ruling a damn thing when I was barely in control of myself. It was certainly why I hadn’t a single true purpose, really, other than to continue existing, day in, and day out.

There are worse things to live for, than yourself, and the horizon.

What does this Mountain That Knows live for? Mountains? Probably. What else though?

Whatever it is, I lose the trail of thought as she starts in about the Hidden Falls. Wet, and humid, the realm seems pretty, albeit swelteringly wrong; despite not having lived in the Basin for very long, its cool, mountainous seclusion has lingered with me as the definition of home. Who would want to live in a hellish desert, or a sweaty jungle, or a boring, misty wood, when there were endlessly branching caverns, rolling hillocks, and forested peaks to be conquered in the north?

"It sounds peaceful," is the tactful remark I choose, rather than the various, carefully hidden insults that threaten to bubble out of my mouth (no round two, please, lady beast), "perhaps it’s why they do nothing."

The remark is accompanied by a cheeky smile and short chuckle; it would be easy to get lazy with all that good grass swaying about your ankles all the time, with birds and cascading water to serenade you as you dined. Of all the stories handed down to me by my parents, those of the Falls seemed to be almost entirely about Midas, dead, or the Earth God (and you try being a God without having stories and legends told about you), and that was about it. She’d told him once of a group of literal crazies that had holed up there for a time, though they’d almost seemed to vanish entirely one week, and she had never seen them since. The rest had been scoffed remarks about fat asses, and hay-bellied weaklings, to use some of the nicer things she called them when she thought no one (important, anyway, a category I’ve never fit into for her) listened.

"I often felt, in the land of my birth, anyway," arrives my cordial attempt at conversation, that specific land left out, "that years of prosperity can be more damaging than they are beneficial, at least towards morale, and a responsible effort on behalf of each civilian. Why should one bother to guard, when there are twenty? Whey should I study, when there are others who know more than I ever will? Perhaps, these people think, they should just live off those who do, while they themselves live off that which others create."

My solutions to this trouble are… creative, to say the least. Many of them include fire, and other such horrors of nature. Can’t be lazy when your favorite meadow to sleep in is ablaze, after all! Somehow, however, I don’t take this painted, caped creature to be the sort to set her home alight, no matter what she felt of it, and change my train of thought to the Nightwalk, which had utilized regular military campaigns to keep their populace keen, and studious. Soldiers who often found their lives in the line of war trained, and scholars who were needed to learn of newly usurped cultures were set to recording these potentially lost tidbits. Everyone tried harder, if you were all going somewhere together.

Who, seriously, put that much effort into napping?

"It was all tedious," I decide on, an ear flicking back, as if in a “good riddance” salute to the past I had left behind, "probably part of why I’m out here. The wild does not allow one to become complacent."