The soft sighing of waves fills her ears and head as she watches him speak, words drawn out and telling her about how he’s from the mountains. Distant, faded memories paint within  her mind, of how the Steppe seemed so vast and deadly in the belly of a harsh Frostfall that chilled her to the bones, of how the mountains climbed into the sky and tore it wide open with their peaks til the ceiling of the world bled a display of lights that she wishes would happen in the Dragon’s Throat but never will. She doesn’t know if he’s from that far north, but any words of mountains is quick to bring those images to mind.
They also always bring a touch of sadness that dampens her happiness, because that’s what home is and home isn’t something she can fully reach again.
Hobgoblin is eavesdropping in on her though, viewing her memories as if this was a movie made just for him.
“Skullface snowchild too?”
I don’t think so.
She collects herself. There are better times for reminiscing and right now wasn’t one of those times.
Her eyes follow his eyes as they leave her. His dragons seem to be enjoying themselves more than anyone else, making a better meal out of the jellyfish than Hobgoblin had gotten. Curiosity draws lines and more intricate expressions across her features as she watches them. Jealousy is poking in her side. A new thing is learned for the future.
And as if he had ever taken any real interest in Volterra, Hobgoblin is gone, moving lazily through the masses in the general direction of the pair, morphing halfway into another body. She doesn’t watch. The sight of him doing so twists her gut as it does it so freely, sliding out his skin with bones melting, vessels fading and fluids seemingly vaporizing, only to emerge from the other side completely reborn, looking as if nothing happened other than the hairless patches on his front legs and chest from dragon fire. She wonders if it hurts him, but even if it did, he wouldn’t admit.
“Which mountains?” The idea of finding someone who was given such a brutal start in life peaks her. “Before I joined the Throat, the outcast band my mother and I were in lived in the North. In the ice caves.” She hasn’t brought up the Assassins to anyone in years. Some things are better left in the past when they were obviously not welcome in the time that they had existed, and it had seemed that now time had swallowed all of them.
All of them but her, the last remaining member of the short-lived, never loved, always hated outcast band named the Assassins. But who was she to blame? With a name like that, no one would want them around.
He thanks her for the healing and all she can do is absentmindedly nod in response. Hobgoblin is looking in her direction, digging, prying, ripping at the seams at everything that she’s kept locked away in an aggressive search for a key for a lock that he cannot make even the slightest change in.
They’ve been together for nearly two years, and never once has she even cared to allow him to know the name of her own mother, or even her appearance. For him, Sikeax is nothing more than a being who faded into existence through defiance and hard headedly carried out with life as if to be the norm, and in return, it furthers his need and passion to figure her out.
“You assassin?”
I don’t want to talk about it.
“Why?”
This time it is her who leaves him in the darkness, hanging at the end of a question that will quirk him into madness within the next passing nights.
She isn’t surprised that Zhu hasn’t mentioned her to him. Zhu was never the child to care or love, or at least show it to her. When it came to touch, he was quick to draw away and/or complain, and dare if she tried to teach him things. As a child, any story that slipped from Adrixaura’s or Tonka’s mouth was enough for her to become glued to them for an undetermined amount of time that never seemed to end, yet with her son, it was the exact opposite.
Maybe colts were different in that way.
“I’m not surprised.” The words creep from her lips in a soft whisper. Her son, her only flesh and blood, never caring as to remember anything as he worked to ensure that each parent was a being split as far from one another as he could keep them, and as if to top it off, cut himself away, and promptly left.
“Zhu fine.”
That’s easy to say. He loved you more than he loved me.
No apologies are given this time. His heart is struck carelessly at a time when it is soft and weak, caught up in happy memories that he had of a child that he cared for just as much as Sikeax, maybe even more. Internally, he recoils, sinking in his wounds to tend to them while she rests in a slowly shallowing pool of happiness that is turning into mud with sadness.
She returns to Volterra as if nothing has happened behind the scenes, speaking in a way that does its best to hide how Zhu has drug her down. “Mhm. I joined during the endless night, right after the Basin invaded.”
“Why Basin invade Throat?”
They invaded the Edge too.
“Why?”
Because they’re monsters. That’s what they do.
He draws himself together, pulling all of his brain into one strangled mess as it attempts to process the information that she had given him. It never strikes her that he doesn’t know the brutality of an invasion, how much it scars and clouds the head and how thirsty for vengeance everyone can become in the aftermath of it. War creates monsters, and in its wake, it leaves broken bodies, broken families, and broken minds.
“Lena nice. Lena Basin.”
Healers are different from warriors. We don’t go to war.
“Why?”
I don’t want to answer that question.”
“Are you in any herds?” The topic is still in his head, looking for a place to resurface when she is doing everything she can to avoid explanation. She knows better than to tell him ‘that’s just the way things are’ because it’ll only upset him, but there’s no other answer to really be given.
In the time between any response that Volterra gives her, she hopes it’s the World’s Edge if he is aligned. The Basin is full of monsters, the Foothills Falls is full of those who seek and destroy lives for sport.
His next fine choice of words makes her regret her previous statement. Yes, urine helped, but one could not piss upon any wound that they had acquired and expected instant relief. The only thing that she could possibly imagine rising out of it was an infection, and it was best to save Volterra from idiocy before he became like Amara: a walking mess of death waiting to happen.
“Not in that specific way. It just treats the pain. Uhh..” She thinks for a way to word it politely, but there isn’t really a way to do that and this is also Volterra, a man whom she can only see having a pile of bricks as a brain when it came to the more finer things in life outside of violence. “I think the only thing that you’re going to get out of urinating on your wounds is going to be an infection.”
She hopes that it’s enough to take care of and expel the idea from his head entirely, but if he was to achieve anything out of it, she believed herself to be the first to find out.

OOC: Hobgoblin shifts into a serval when mentioned.