His face is a swift, fluttering and singing in the cage of the Kingbreaker’s hands, his glistening eyes wings that beat a frantic rhythm against the Kingbreaker’s far-reaching fingers. He has not, in all his frail glory, even tried to free himself from the beast’s long shadow and pressing presence, though he stretches silently back on tensed haunches from the monster’s body, recoiling from touching him as a hand from a poisoned spinning wheel. Even so, there is no resentment in the slender lines of his lean young face where it tilts up to the Kingbreaker’s looming silhouette, only a tender bravery.

“She abandoned me without even giving me a name. I want to know why,” he says, his voice unhesitating in the way of unsure fingers steadily setting down a chess piece- a risk taken with full knowledge. What, the Kingbreaker wonders, is our hero testing with this move..? When he feels those cold, considering eyes upon his bare breast and, rather than shelter himself behind the armoured trappings of obfuscation, instead boldly holds apart the fingers of his ribs to better expose his innards, what is he trying to see in turn..? Because now, the monster thinks, it is not a slip of the tongue that he lays out these intimate thoughts for him- it is an opening move.

How… Inconveniently intriguing.

“And you? What are you here for?” Ahh, there it is. The fragile shards of volcanic glass and quartz that make up our hero’s fine face are gathering together into- perhaps it is suspicion, for it isn’t quite aggression. The frigid expanse of the Kingbreaker’s great head remains almost unmoved, but though his brow is a smooth, passionless tundra, there is the smallest twitch around his mouth; not a smile but a spasm of some fleeting emotion sharp enough to slice a crooked dimple at one corner of his steel lips.

“I am here because I love you,” he says, the distant thunder of his voice reverberating and terrible and emotionless. “As I have loved so many like you.” He says no more on this, but there is a horrible hollow softness to the fading of his words where the spectres of a ghostly army of unspoken things drags at their heels and weighs down their ankles with cold, clutching hands. A pause, his face silent but his eyes stoked embers crackling with wordless thoughts.

“You have a name now?” Not a demand- though his voice is diamond, cold and impenetrable as ever, there is no cutting edge, no expectation. He isn’t asking for the name, only to know if that small armour is in place across our hero’s chest, shielding his tender heart with one more layer of care.

Only sacrifice this pawn, hero- you may keep the rook.