Perhaps our young hero is tensing- just a little- before the sterling beast who looms over him. Perhaps his voice is only slightly too small. Is that a tremor? Perhaps. There is no cruel delight; no sadistic pleasure in the Kingbreaker’s face nor manner- if these things existed, they were secrets between them. He only waits, waits and watches, intent and patient as a statue. He is not here to cause pain, nor humiliation. He has a purpose, and his craft is a delicate one.

“History,” he breathes, and unlike our tender hero, his is not a soft or nervous sound, but a long, hollow hiss, his exhalation a plume of dragon smoke. The topaz stare peering up at him seems almost to be waiting in turn, as if the Kingbreaker’s cold judgment might weigh upon that noble brow like a crown, or those narrow shoulders like an ermine cloak; might be found heavy in his hand like a scepter when he looks down from the steel monster whose deep shadow he very deliberately does not shrink in.

They are wet, red words, pooled in his mouth, dripped out carefully but bravely.

“What a tender thing you are, my love,” the monster tolls in turn, no mocking in his frozen voice. “Do you love her, I wonder, or is it that you hope to? Or is it some other emotion altogether that urges you to chase her shadow?”

Studying the shifting planes of his friend’s silver face, rolled out with soft white along their center like a fine carpet leading up into the soft dark tresses dripping down his head, the Kingbreaker ponders whether to continue. The long, lean neck below his scrutiny shifts subtly; a ripple from shoulder up, up, to the muscle of his thin jaw, which tightens, and as it does he swallows, and the whole length ripples down again, followed consideringly along its fragile figure by the dark beast’s eyes. By the time it has reached his shallowly-shifting breast, the Kingbreaker has come to a decision, his inscrutable face tilting, only a little, as if for his precious friend’s benefit rather than his own.

“Let this be my love to you, dear heart: it is a raw wound, I think, that you’ve shown this dear friend. All my words could hurt more, knowing that I know it; having seen the mechanism of you, there is no part of you that could not be made a fragility, and no violence need to be done to you for it.” This is far, he thinks, from our hero’s only weakness- perhaps far from the greatest one, even- but he offered it so openly and swiftly, and perhaps, despite what may have been a tremor, or a whisper, or shudder, he had not quite realized that he was splitting open his own breast to do so, baring pulsing veins of raw, intimate feeling for the Kingbreaker’s silent stare to take in. So let him tap a rib; let him stroke one such helpless artery; let him blow a little ticklish breath upon that exposed nerve there- that our hero, lean as a lamb and trying so very hard to be brave, will notice that he’s shed the armour of even that fragile fleece he calls flesh.

“A most precious gift,” he intones, with a weight that drags like iron ball and chain behind his words, and again, though perhaps our hero might even be comforted to hear a derisive note, there is none. Instead, with the practiced and serious purpose of a knight, he bows his head, until his gleaming eyes are nearly level with his friend’s, their noses near enough that our hero’s uneven breaths are ruffling the seething curls frothing around his massive head. “I’ll treasure it.”