He had learned long ago that there was little reason to expect things that he had not earned. When he had been young, he had imagined what it would have been like to have a normal family, with a mother that would love him and a father that would collect women and have an abundance of children for the once young red stallion to frolic with. Under the watchful eye of the painted stallion that had played his father, the boy had not been permitted to fraternize with the painted children, and the history of his true parents had been masked from him by his mother.

Despite all the eyes in the trees that stares down on them, watching and judging in a brutal silence that burns against the stallion’s skin, he almost feels comforted by the presence of the woman, even though she too has a brutal stare that would have made a lesser man flinch under her gaze. He stands before her, still a little off to the side, listening to her words as she seems to accuse him of things that he has not done. Were Vercingetorix a bitter man, one easily angered and one that was ruled by his emotions or hindered by his thoughts and imaginations, then he would have declared her an angry harpy, only bitter because the man she had thrown her maidenhead to was now done without a trace, indifferent to the appearance of her child that she had offered up to him. Instead, he drops his head barely an inch before speaking to her. “You don’t keep company with the others?”

Vercingetorix does not shift the blame to himself, offering that he should walk with her when she wishes to walk amongst the trees. Though the forest is thicker and thinner in some parts, the walks were peaceful and the predators were thin picking, opting to go about their business in more densely populated places. This was not one of those places.

“What do you want from me, Vercingetorix?” Her voice rings softly, the roll of his name against her tongue almost unnatural… his name never did sound right in any mouth but his bastard father’s. The man that had named him conquerer, the man that had slaughtered his mother as a gift on the boy’s mother on the hour of his birth. His past was a bloody one, and he had been aptly named. “Nothing at all.” What could a stranger possible want of women that were even stranger to him, women that had been lovers to an unknown, absent man. He had wanted nothing more than to make a home for himself here amongst the trees, where there were eyes and monsters to watch everyone, beasts that twittered amongst the leaves and perched upon the branches. “I came here to make a home, and in that I invite you and your companions to stay.” His voice is soft now. “Being bitter will not earn you any friends.”