The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
Her next flood of words has him feeling mixed feelings. It meant that there was a hesitation to touch where there never had been before and that when it did touch hers, it was only briefly. Her intent and beliefs were becoming to seem too rigid for her to learn, too fixed for him to be safe in her company. If she had her own beliefs and he was meant to follow her only to realize she was not who he had hoped - not one of his people at all, that initial distrust in naming her as equal would have been a wasted gesture. Pretenders to the glory of his station came often, named in ignorance of the truth behind their call-sign.
“You should not owe anything to a religion, the religion is owed to you. Why subjugate yourself to another faith when you are a faith in the flesh?” Again he watches her weaken herself. She preferred to be too different than what she could have been if she had not formulated some silly mortal belief to enforce her will upon herself. Trapped, a sad sight for him to witness. “You claim to offer me a place, then tell me it is on only your terms. You claim to offer me a voice, but it should only matter if you agree. That is no place or voice for me at all. You want to teach me and no longer be taught, Sekhmet, and I am too much my better self to allow my words to pass between ears who have too much of their own will to dominate and will not hear the wisdom of another.”
His voice is lowered, the suggestion of being made pawn when he was meant to be a king making his nose wrinkle in a half-bared grimace before his lips return over his teeth. He is a wilder thing than she was, he thinks. She had been tamed and made less by her insistence that she was tied to this mortal world so entirely. He sits before her, disappointed and trying not to appear so much so. “I am the greatest of my kind, Sekhmet. I am your teacher. You speak my holy mothertongue because I saw greater things for you, thought you were better than these ones who wander your Moladion. I did not think to see you squander it and weaken yourself, nor expect you to think you would subjugate the one who helped make your voice ring with the power of my own ancestors.”
There is a bit of chiding, and a bit of high speech, but he hopes that she realizes how she must have sounded. “I have always listened, I will always learn, but do not think for a moment that this means you will be correct. Beliefs of mortals are flighty things, more premised in the hopes of fear and love than true power provides… you may choose to believe what you will, but my world is more ancient than the ways of any three year old she-wolf.”
He closes his eyes and sighs once more, “So what will you do, how will this go? Are you expecting one who was once a god among his people to heel and never speak or defend the rites and rituals of a culture that dates a millennia before your own? Do you expect an advisor who will watch his advice go unheeded time and again? What enticement in that is there for one as myself to remain at your right hand, then? I will not remain only to be supplanted.”
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