Disregarding the quiet echo from Tingal as she announces her Godmother's name, her eyes focused instead on the specter of black and blood that stands a few lengths away from her. This isn't his future, it's hers. He doesn't have to follow her, but she knows he will, or at least will want to. She recalls the echoes from the past, the words he had spoken so intimately to her, proclaiming love for her so passionately. And what had she done, but step back and tremble with emotions so foreign to her? Sometimes she wished for solitude, the one friend she had enjoyed in her short life. But no, she could not escape to sort her thoughts. Even so she had denied him, and regardless he trails behind her while she tries to find the words to explain that she has no heart to love him with. Though it seemed the stag opposite her understood who she was, what she was. At least someone in this world did. A stranger knew her better than her own family, and it was a depressing, bitter thought. They did not deserve her lingering thoughts, nor the brief flicker of longing in her chest. This was for her, and she would not cast away her crown, her birth right, for the ones who had made her this way.

"I have no family bonds to mourn, if you are willing to extend your invitation to me you may consider myself at your call as of this very moment." There is a solid tone to her voice, a stubborn will that glows through her vocals. She will conquer, she will show them all she is no weakling, that they should not have laughed when she was down on bleeding knees bowing to their superiority. And now the bloodied mage does the same to her, crystal horns like daggers towards her throat, and out of instinct she tilts her own towards him, wary. It is a slower movement than his, keeping her eyes on the ones that lock upon her frame, silently questioning what he is doing. There is interest in her mismatched eyes, a thirst to know how to intimidate another with a mere movement as he did. She wants to latch her teeth to his throat and drink the knowledge from his blood, tear it away into her own body, feed upon his wisdom like a vampiric parasite.

"I can fight. I may be small, but I am no weakling, sir." It is a purr as it leaves her lips, but instead of seduction it is the subtle caress of a hunger to show him what she can do, is willing to do. And he asks, can you kill? And she snorts; crown is tossed high, no longer threatening but imperial, pure. "And murder? They have already killed what little of me I gave them, this world. Why should I care if they bleed at my feet? It is where they belong, after all I have done for them on my knees. And if I cannot, then I will learn. Glee is all I would feel to watch them sputter and die, choke on their own blood as they beg for mercy, because as they showed me none I shall do the same." A growl, a vibration of rage in a slim chest, a flash inside her eyes that mimics the insanity that flutters like a frantic bird in d'Artagnan's.

The world has narrowed to only her and the dark stallion of her heritage as he stands across from her. Tingal is silent as the grave. They are her inquisitions to answer, after all. "To lead and not follow is to have a weakness. How can you learn if you don't have a mentor that you follow?" Hotaru shrugs, simple and short, and watches the crimson cur opposite her. His nose wrinkles as he gazes at Tingal, and Hotaru flickered her gaze between the two, watching Tingal's expression sour. She considers her reply as she watches his face, feels the kiss of his tail against her side making the skin there jump at the unforeseen touch. But Tingal is already answering for himself, and Hotaru gives him a look meant only for his eyes. Do not do this to yourself. Do not do this for me. But it's not what she says. "Very well, he's made his decision." And if her eyes crinkle at the corners in restraint from screaming and pleading with Tingal to just leave and be safe, then the stranger will not be able to tell. He is merely that, after all, and does not know her tells as Tingal does.

Instead she turns to d'Artagnan once more, Tingal back in her peripherals, and her tongue forms the one title she's clung to all this time, the only one she hadn't cast off that her family had given her. "My name is Hotaru. May I ask yours sir?" Hopefully this would be the seal upon the fate she'd always wanted, and she was nearly vibrating with eager anticipation.

@[imi]