It is fascinating to see the interact between me and him, I suppose, but I am blinded still by my youth and myself. My own selfish need to grow and do this or do that. If I wasn't born a princess perhaps such a thing could be expected of me but I had trained for the last few years, traveled and spent time with others. I should know better. Hadn't my father taught me that? Hadn't the alligator? Halcyon? I could count many times my recklessness had been the bane of my existence. You would think I had learned. I should have learned but it doesn't stop my foolish young brain from diverting back to it's normal state. I should see the way that Elohim looks at me with his strange intensity, should understand perhaps that there is more there than simply loyalty. The undying kind mixed with an emotion more intense than what my friends look at me with. Blindness was my fault.

How could I know that Elohim thought himself nothing? A mere shadow that lurked the world with no intentions, no goals? It would have alarmed me to know this for I had been born with the intention of growing into an heir. Now I had achieved the ultimate goal: become a leader. Maybe not in the way I thought or how I thought or even where I thought but it had been done.

It is instinct along with my rank that allows me to draw towards him in such a dominant position. Age factors little in that I was born from alphas, mated now to a child of alphas, and would have nothing less than alpha blood in my veins. I imagine there would be times it would flare until I struggled even with Halcyon at times despite our status as equals, much as it had flared the time we had felled a deer and I had snarled him away from the meal, overcome by my need for dominance. Elohim responds calmly to it, lowering his face, and some instinct within me is assuaged by it.

Empress, he says, and my smile falters for only a moment because my mind flashes to a figure larger than mine, broader than mine, with emerald eyes and russet backed ears. Then I blink away her image and grin at him, that almost boyishly pleased grin that I had adopted as a pup (despite my sex), and I shake my neck in a prideful manner. I have much, after all, to be proud of. I remember talking to him - my Chancellor. The idea, I think, appealed to him back then and maybe it is that which draws him here.

I give him a look that clearly states 'duh' before I plop down into a seated position, a lot less graceful than my prancing earlier. "Yes, Chancellor," I say in an exasperated way but offer him the title in a conciliatory manner. "Then all that I know will be here where I can see them." I say it happily and yet there is a sort of obsessive tone to it. Since the passing of my parents I had begun to develop a sort of... obsession, with knowing where my friends and loved ones were. I hadn't shared that need with anyone yet, had been trying to ignore it, but it brought me such intense relief to see each one. To not imagine lifeless eyes staring up and bloody spittle flying.

He jerks, suddenly, and spits out a question. I frown at him, unsure what he means. "Well," I start slowly, brows pressed down, the question confusing because I could not know how he truly felt. The reason that he dragged himself from Glorall out into the plains he dislikes just to see me. "The past leader gave it to Halcyon and he asked me to come, so I came. Besides, it is cleaner than Iromar and I ---- don't want to go back there."

This, I know, might lead to the next question in a series of questions. Why not?