Anger flares to life in her expression, over what I perceive as cold lack of concern for my loss, not understanding that, for some, the concept of death wasn’t sad at all, merely a fact of life, or a cheerful passage into a greater beyond. I held to much importance on the things I had now, the power I had attained, the items I wore, and the relationships that I had forged; I was narrow mindedly focused on the now, unwilling, or unable, to think of death as much more than something to be avoided, mourned, or praised, depending on who it was affecting.

I raise my own magic as I watch her metaphorical bristles lift, and, unlike her, I don’t let it slip away, wary of having her try to hurt me at random, as she has done spitefully before. What was the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me?

Yeah, I will not be the one taking any sort of blame around here for Mordecai being a bitch.

I almost drop it, though, when she throws out her most shocking action as to date: she apologizes. An ear lifts forward in hope while the other stubbornly lays back, insisting it’s a trick, and even when she returns to her native tongue, a proclaims that she was wrong, I remain guarded. Staring at her, head still lowered, my eyes narrow as I wonder whether or not I should trust her, and believe that she means it.

My mother was the sort to say sorry if it won her something, such as my forgiveness. Was my company such a prize, to the desert raven? Or was I just a toy, after all, leaving her little room to lie and manipulate me?

Or… was she truly sorry? Somehow, I doubt that. She’ll probably just leave me again, I tell myself, but quietly say out-loud, instead:

"Yeah, me too," I tell her, remembering what I’d asked of Glacia (who doesn’t know of Mordecai, or vice versa, I suddenly recall, guiltily); it wasn’t fair of me to expect anyone else to be more than they were, either. So what if the girl I’d given myself and all my moral convictions to wound up being a heartless tramp?

I should have known that was who she was from the beginning. She, unlike me, had never pretended to be more than she was – probably not for anyone, especially not some morally conflicted virgin boy she’d seduced in a fire-lit cavern. She’d never asked me to give her my promised eternity with the First Gods, a tryst broken the moment I’d shared a coupling with her.

I just did, and I’d enjoyed it, and there was no going back now.

"Laz kisha... evo saav?" I sigh in horrible Dothraki, meeting her eyes, with a tilted grin, trying my best to let go of the icy resentments I feel towards her, "I’ve got my very own land full of much more private caves now, after all."

[ Translations: Laz kisha evo saav? – Can we start again? ]