Vérzés can't help but admire Hubris' attitude, his noncommittal shrug that seems to imply he shares none of the red's anxieties. The crimson dragon contemplates this, wishing he'd been able to think of it in such a way when Vadir hatched. Alas, Volterra's inability to ever bend the knee has rubbed off on the dragon he's grown up with; Vérzés refuses to submit, even when millions of years of scale-hierarchy breeding tells him he should. His life would be so much easier if he just accepted Vadir as his superior and let her throw her weight around, but his pride won't let him.

He hopes Hubris never has to suffer the same jealousies and endless nights of worry that he did, looking over his shoulder to see if his new sibling was plotting some dastardly way to assert their authority. In those first months, Vadir had made his life a living hell, although he'd kept a lot of his feelings bottled up away from Volterra so as not to worry him. His attitude had been flippant, his body language aggressive, but inside he was screaming with the constant state of anxiety that Vadir's arrival had forced him into.

Vadir's successful pin on the young gold sends a spasm of insufferable smugness into Volterra's mind. The stallion receives a mental glance of those haunting black eyes from the newborn and thinks that perhaps his submission isn't as absolute as it appears, but Vadir will hear none of it. Now that her duty as queen is done, the gold's body language turns relatively friendly, far friendlier than it's ever been to either Vérzés or Hubris. In the still-unnamed Babel, she's found the closest thing to an equal she will ever have. She can't seem to take her eyes off him, and extends a muzzle to try and curiously sniff him, even waving a paw in a greeting that is quite at odds with her previous display of dominance. To put it simply, she's fascinated by the shiny.

Volterra watches, chuckling despite himself. He's never seen the gold like this before; she is never friendly towards other dragons, but she seems thoroughly taken with the newborn, especially since he'd appeared happy to acknowledge her position as superior. He was right; she's smitten. His attention returns to Isopia as she speaks, and he feels a sudden spasm of warmth and joy in his chest; they're talking how they used to talk, before everything happened. They're talking as friends, as mutual dragon-bondeds, as confidantes, and he realises how much he's missed it.

Had somebody told him an hour ago that he'd be offering advice to the Mountain so soon afterwards, he wouldn't have believed them. But he's doing precisely that. "It's very different. Like me with Vérzés, you've spent a lot of your formative time with Hubris, so you get to know each other's habits and quirks as you grow up together. Adding a brand new consciousness, a brand new personality, into the mix is bound to be confusing." He glances between red and gold, eyes glowing with fondness for each of them. "For me, it was especially jarring because Vadir is female, which is completely different to having another male in my head. It should be a bit smoother for you because they're both the same gender, but it'll still take some getting used to."

Another glance between his dragons and then between Isopia's. "It's worth it, though. They're worth it." And they are. They're the best things that ever happened to him - for all their flaws, he wouldn't change them for the world. "Have you got a name for him?"