Perhaps I have mistaken her - or rather, perhaps I have not given her the appropriate level of credit where credit is due. Nari is a craftier thing than one might assume, or so I have grown to feel that way inclined. Her silence is her strength, her voice never having betrayed whatever thoughts she deems as needing to be hidden - or those she desires as such. Has she outplayed me? I cannot help but wonder. There is an ease to her, after all, that feels all too familiar.

There is the instinctual recoil when she pressses against me, teeth preening the fur of my neck, and yet I push such an instinct aside, forcing it down into the shadows of myself as I return the pressure; I curl my head around, meeting her eyes with the same intensity as her own.

She has been here even longer than I, more salt in her blood than any other; first a child of the sea, a healer in the making and then a warrior. But now what? I ponder it for some moments as I continue watching her face, hunting for any unconcealed emotion I might find: some insight into what I might not know. I stay close to her, as if my very body will consume her own if she so much as lets her guard down: "I wonder if there is a name for such a sensation," I begin, my voice low and eyes unwavering from hers, "to feel such frustration at an event that may not even occur," I step forward then, breaking away for but a moment as I arc around, drawing my body down the opposite length of her own - ownership, one might say, as my scent seeks to cling to hers. "A man has been following you," I pause at the word, looking over my shoulder and back at her before I continue on my path around her, "but now he leads the plains."

I pause once more, back now where I had started. I rise to my full height, head tilting as my eyes drive into her. "How would you respond if I said I would not permit him to lead you?" I know, after all, that she is a free woman, too much a fire to ever be held down by the sheer words of another. Yet, I cannot help but wonder...had a woman finally been able to make me want to ask?