"I will stay near the herd tonight for my safety." He is not convinced. He would not be convinced. He thinks back to the Festival, her bedecked self tailing after a climber-mother. The twinge of envy he saw when he took her daughter’s to bask in his victory beside him but left the mother with the other women of her entourage. He knows there is a part of her his kingdom had stolen from her spirit because he knows that they had tried to do much the same thing. Ironically, their method had been Sanctifying him in the name of Shu - thinking the temple might dampen him, that he might turn stale like air trapped within walls.

But Shu was too clever and too wild for them to temper him - and they gave him the perfect vessel on earth so that there was a great murmur among the people that Shu had risen amongst the gods - the first prince to ever be Sanctified of that god… There had been plenty of rumors from there.

Shu had not been able to free her then, him too young to be of full use to the god and his interests - but he is no young boy, nor some haughty prince any longer, relishing praise and another true-won victory in a race. He has filled out since she’d seen him in that festival, even considering her time with him celebrating the end of the War. He is a handsome creature with a striking star on his brow and the glitter of stardust across his belly as if, as a child, he’d laid belly-up to gaze at stars beneath the path of a comet and it’s tail rained down dust of the cosmos. She is not his equal in Mira - but here, there was no such thing. There was no rank to bar him, no brother she’d met to bar her. He could look on her, spend time with her, and like where he willed.

If will had any sort of say. Even in that moment, her denial of his plea blatantly applied, he can only yearn for what he could give her here - to see her with Shu’s breath slicing between her ears and her sides heaving with the awesome power fed from Shu to his servants. She tells him she will return to Mira and he steps towards her, almost dismissing the threat that her words pose. "Tell me, why should I stay?"

"I will die at their hooves before I give up what was bought here. I will die before I send another message of war, of betrothal unwanted, of land relinquished to enemies. I will die before I am forced to reject anything over politics that might have made me happy. I belong to my brother, to Shu," he stops, a weighty emptiness and hard-stop hanging in the air, begging for a continued speech. "Have they bound you up so long that you cannot feel the tug? Have they so stuffed up your ears that you cannot hear him calling you?" There is a wildness that begins to brim in his posture, in his eyes, that so rarely took form. He was the happy one, the one that pranked and joked and teased like the lightest breeze over the dunes -- the one she saw there, hinted at in the gleam of his eye, was Shu whipped into a fury so that a wall of sand buried all in it’s path.

"Stay because there will be nothing there to give you wings. Stay because you know there was, is, and never will be two creatures so much of Shu that we barely fit in our own flesh. Stay because when you return, they will one day tire of fighting to stamp you down and they will let your father bind you in a marriage of stone walls and bury you before you are dead in the earth of a Household of Geb." He lashes his tail at his hocks, ears flattening, nostrils flaring. He sees in her his own spirit, his own soul, strapped and pinioned and bound, like a hawk seeing his mate bound in a falconer’s trap. He sees in her what may very well have been meant when her climbing mother had brought her to meet him - the intention of so burdening Zazu and then tricking him under the guise of pleasure courting a Chosen One of his own patron god…

They had found her for him. They had found her, made her into their puppet, snuck her into his company under the mother’s likely promise to win him for her daughter. They would have poisoned Zazu, tormented her, brainwashed her, stripped her of even the lightest wisp of Shu’s intentions… and then used her like a lure to draw him in. Tame him. They had taken the half of his soul he could not control and had attempted to strangle him with her.

He would undo the damage they’d done.

"You wanted a race. Race me. Race me for both our freedoms. If I catch you, I will loose your soul from them by giving you my own wings. If I catch you, you are mine and not theirs. If I catch you, I will buy you from Pakhet and we’ll drink freedom so deep that not even Shu will know what to make of us."