He is surprised by the depths of her despair, believing her to be quite a creative and imaginative creature whose depths were not shallow but erred on the side of happy. It is a new experience to discover this to be only part of her story, of her innermost self.

Her beauty perhaps had helped, as did the almost uncle-niece relationship she had with the elder man that felt a little like a child professing her undying love for her father because he was the man of greatest worth in her young life. It was charming, it was sweet, it was naive-- but how she speaks now is all of those things in an utterly different way.

His eyes grow concerned as she continues, his ears perked forward intently and his eyes growing only more contrary. Her heart? He knew the matters of the heart all to well, being his brother’s heart as his brother held his soul. It had long been an investigation of his among the verbal annals of the priests of Thoth in his homeland. "You poor, young, beautiful girl. You have not realized your full bloom and already you doubt your beauty among the flowers already plucked and brought to their ended potential." He turns to better face her, to address her as seriously and unpatronizingly as a windbag like himself could.

"You are Ours, Shahrazad. They may have kept you for a while, tended you for a while, but you are Ours in blood and in heart. That is your place among us. Sister of the Desert and a lady that any brother in our number would happily court, if you’d find pleasure in one of us." He does not know that his brother has already taken this matter in hand, planning to gently maneuver his brother-bishop into the perfect place of play. "Because he does not control where your heart goes, ⲣⲟⲥⲉ." Rose, an endearment, but he is safe hiding behind their differing languages. She would not know the Pharaoh’s tongue.

"You say if it goes with him, if it turns away from what is before you and yearns only for what is behind. And, if it should be flawed - incomplete - naive… all I can say is that it is a finer heart than many I have myself known." He reaches out a Sabino-Rabicano roaned nose out to her, "You do not need to know what colors your petals will be before you have even burst the bud of youth, Shahrazad."