Confidence is infectious, and so too, is laughter. She grins at his laugh, at the way for a moment he comes to life instead of withers beneath its’ weight. He keeps chuckling, a child again, and she can see the boy beneath the man, the colt he perhaps once used to be. What would it have been like to grow up with him instead of Erebor, her stoic, impossible, infallible brother? Had Erebos been more like Korbin, her trickster skeleton of a baby brother? Perhaps some combination of the two, a mix of solider and prankster, just enough of each.

When he opens his eyes, she doesn’t say anything about the tears that curl in the corners of his eyes, leaving the knive sheathed for a moment. She had said enough, done enough, seen a glimmer of what he could be beneath the pain that cloaked him. Perhaps some of it had torn away, perhaps her words had tore enough pieces that he might find that strength again. The world would always be made of rubble. Nothing came together again, nothing because wondrous and triumphant by sheer happenstance. The best they can do is make castles out of the rubble, hold them up as long as they can.

Nothing lasts, not even them. Not even her, really.

“You already are enough. Well, you can be, if you act like it,” she says, flicking her tail in his general direction though her eyes watch the tomb that still traps his heart, something she cannot quite understand. Perhaps her mother ripped away some of Weaver’s heart with the Chamber’s power over the heart, a power that was once her mothers to command as Queen. “No one else will believe it if you don’t believe it yourself first.” She tries to understand him, tries to sympathize, but she finds herself grateful for the fact things have never hurt her like that. It’s a weakness she can’t afford, when she is already physically weak enough by sheer fact of her heritage.

He looks back to her with those determined, blue eyes (and ah, why does she notice just how blue they are?). “We have to be noticed,” she says, not knowing Helovia well enough to know how to do that here. It had been easier before, with eight kingdoms around, to make enemies of a few (most). “My mother took a kingdom from literal ash and rebuilt it. She started small – stealing horses, allowing raids, leaving behind marks of who’d been responsible. She ended large – a war with no purpose and no real end except fear. Those things are the wrong path here, but that’s why we have you – you know Helovia. I'm just useful for poking a sleeping bear.”

Helovia was too small, too different, for the grand schemes of her mother. The magic here is nothing compared to the magic there, to the wars that could be waged, to the clever dealings to get around barriers and magicians. But there as Gods here, where there were none before, and there’s a rather uncertain God lingering at the moment. Perhaps, if they are lucky, there’s something there.