He was right, she knew, but she still didn’t especially like that he had said it. The past didn’t decide for them...She wanted to shake her head, but she nodded instead. Clever, but he lacked a full understanding, she thought. It did decide, at least in part. It decided who they called family, who they called friend and foe, where they lived, where they hunted, even what they thought. In order to defy those things, one had to fight hard, and seldom did many have enough fight in them to survive, let alone come out the victor. Of course, a discussion for another day. Ruby had a feeling, after all, that there would be many discussions after this. She had a duty of sorts, to be sure, but Apollyon seemed curious enough that she expected he’d seek her out one way or another. Ruby couldn’t help but feel a little smug about that, even if she had no direct evidence.

She didn’t answer his question though. How would she help him? She had answered only with looking into his eyes and offering him a grin, a sort of ‘we’ll see.’ They were off then, across the moors and through the reeds. She couldn’t help but laugh quietly at his reassurance of it being no issue to avoid eating the bodies; in the past, it might have been less of a problem. As far as she knew, her kin, or at least some of Iromar, had eaten wolves they had deemed ‘unworthy.’ She had never learned if there had ever been an expiration date on that unworthiness – for all she knew, they might have very well chewed on their bones or fished their bodies from the river no matter how long they had been floating...But she wasn’t going to tell Apollyon that. Despite her pride, even Ruby had her limits of what she could accept as, well, acceptable. To her, it didn’t make sense to eat their own kind, and especially not after they had already become deceased. That seemed below them – perhaps it had been a proud thing once upon a time, but Ruby couldn’t help but associate the behavior with wolves too incapable of hunting real prey, or too starved to know better.

He was good at keeping her thoughts on track, she had to give him that. "Imagine how bored the kings and queens of old might be without enemies to conquer, or wolves to call to heel,” she replied with a grin, only half-serious in her reasoning. In truth, she knew they had their place in the history of Iromar and Moladion, but she did agree to some extent. If they were going to fish wolves out of the water, it should have been those that weren’t worthy to lay at rest among the great. Yet, perhaps she was right, or at least closer to the truth. Her lapses in knowledge made her uncomfortable at times, and she looked at the water with a serious face, aware that she had found yet another gap.

Climbing ladders, though. She shook her head, aired out of her mind once again, and looked towards Apollyon with a look much more kind than her previous ones. He understood the appeal of that, then? The appeal of climbing rather than simply being born atop a pedestal? That pleased her, and she wondered if Avery had been making him work for his place at the top after all. But his words grew sharp, and she recognized a venom in them that she had not seen before in his family. At least, she’d not seen it in Avery. Ruby watched him with a sudden curiosity, blinked for a moment, then let her eyes move back to the waters and over the bones.

"You would consider your grandmother unworthy, would you? Do you believe as such because your mother, our Monarch, believes so, or have you weighed and measured her yourself, Little Princeling?” Her voice was completely serious, quieter than usual even. She did not look to him as she spoke, but rather she kept her eyes trained on the curved outline of the bones below. Ruby had found herself genuinely curious, and she wondered if she would be capable of weighing and measuring the worthiness and strength of her bloodline against her own beliefs.