The man boy's eyes are so cold; numbing, chilling, orbs of silver, glassy like a fish's, and there's something in them that makes her feel soft and vulnerable in all the wrong, horrible ways—makes her weak, as if her bones softened to putty and her muscles to liquefied jelly. Nym can't bear to look at him in the eye, to see the utter uncaring, can't handle the frigid, predatory stare—so she watches the ground, the curves of his body, ill with wanting to get away, sicked by her own childish decrepitude. Stay. This is what she was supposed to do: take it, swallow it, let it sit and taste her own flaws reflected onto her.

At his voice she cringes, flinches away, flexing sinuously in an arc of longing to flee the scene. It grates across her ears, chords across her heartstrings like a dull knife against calloused flesh, a gross and sickly sonata mirrored in the darkness of the night. It would be fitting that the moon winks out of existence then; that the world morphs from a place of adventure to one of danger hidden in every wrinkle, fold, of a child's beloved blanket. If she had the sense—lacked the self-discipline—or, perhaps, was a wiser woman, she would've fled then, taken to the creases which could happily hide her away from lethal creatures.
She didn't have it.

And his question snaps, cracks through the air, the lancing cat-o'-nine-tails headed towards her, a lick of deadly power planning to subjugate her to pain, agony, torture, humbling sensations of cruel and savage nature. Mother. Memories spring to the forefront of her cranium, illusive sensations and indescribable feelings, an incoherent swarm of confused recollections.

Milk, creamy, on her tongue; a hoof cracking against her shoulder; a nip on the spine; a kiss good-night; a low-sung lullaby, a chant for war; and Nymeria reels back, staggering away from the titanic keratins aimed towards her. They catch, collide, against her minuscule shoulders, a rain of unfair agony, and she whimpers, a plea, a moan, for mercy and forgivance. Whatever she has done wrong—whatever she has fucked up so thoroughly—she doesn't understand; and how can she? The concept of abuse merely to further one's own plans was yet foreign to her malleable mind, and the fact that her existence was the root of the conflict was far, far from her thoughts.

I don't want to tell you.
This stone-faced soldier was a mistake, a blot of ink hiding out important words in part of a story. It didn't make sense. He was—incompatible—with her limited view of the world. Whatever his need for her mother's name she was instinctively pitted against, prematurely disposed towards tight lips and a closed mouth. Confutatis had warned of the inevitable outcomes of the discovery of Nymeria as her daughter; had warned her of terrible things, the least being kidnap.

And so what she says in response is only: "Why?"