The wyvern in her grip twists and utters a sad, angry noise when Malik rips off the claw from its right wing. Mazikeen winces at the sound, the pain, and she is just about the shift her weight to allow the beast to leave when Malik draws her attention with his question.

The draconic face that she wears does not display her emotions as readily as other shapes, which she is grateful for because this question makes her immeasurably sad. Some days it feels like the waves caused by her life with Gale are small ripples, and then there are days like today where she wonders if there will ever be an end to the clean-up required.

“Tell me why you want to, Malik.” Mazikeen asks, taking care to keep her tone soft (which isn’t hard) and light (which is). “Are you hungry enough to eat a whole wyvern?” The wyvern struggles a little bit but she tightens her grip on it in a warning. She was going to attempt to let it leave this cave with its life - it just needed to stay still a moment longer.

Was it too late to help Malik learn this important lesson? She had to hope not. She did not want her son to believe he could kill anyone or thing just because he wanted to. It was a very strange sort of spoiling that had been done to him during his second childhood. The same Mazikeen that would not have intervened during the wyvern’s attack would have allowed Malik to do anything he wished, especially if there was blood involved.

She knows it must be confusing, the change that's occurred in her, and she cannot help the fear that Malik will be uninterested in being around who she is now.

Mazikeen hates the cautious way with which Malik replies to her. Or, not the tone itself but what she thinks the reason for it is, the memories that tell her she had not been kind to her son. It’s a tone that reminds her there had been the better part of a year where he had only known her temper, her indifference, or her reluctant attention. That there was a time when he needed to be cautious around her or risk being lashed out at.

She hears Gale in Malik’s reply and her stomach twists. Her talons dig a little further into the wyvern in reflex but she eases up when it makes a sad, pain-filled moan.

It is an effort to keep her gaze on him, to not look away when he asks her why she wants to kill the wyvern. “I don’t. I want to let it go.” Mazikeen admits quietly.

“When your… when your father was around, I believed each kill made me stronger. Made me better. But that’s not true.” Each one is a fracture in her heart that will never be healed, but she worries over showing that weakness to Malik now. How much of his father was in him, how much of what Mazikeen had been like? He tolerated her stretches of sadness now but if she really let him see how broken she felt would he scorn her? She is too uncertain to try, too desperate to want to make up for lost time and that means keeping him around for as long as he’ll let her.

And if he knew she was weak, would he want to kill her too?

These questions storm through her mind so she continues to speak rather than let them drag her down. “There’s strength in holding back. In knowing when not to kill. I would have decimated the deer population of our home, and then moved on until there was nothing left, and then where would I be?” If she could have torn all of Beqanna apart, Mazikeen knows she would have done so without hesitation. She would have let that wildfire in her heart take over and then when there was nothing left she would have wasted away in bitterness and anger. “We should only do it when we’re hungry or when it’s absolutely necessary. It’s a waste of life otherwise.”

A more practical part of Mazikeen thinks that Malik's reasons for wanting to kill the wyvern are negated by the fact that she is the one holding it down. If he wants to know he can kill it, he'd be better off fighting it on his own. But this part of her cannot find a voice just yet as she waits for her son's reaction to this lesson that is so different than anything else he's been taught so far.

Being able to shift is not worth taking a life - she would rather him not be able to shift at all than to be a murderer. But Mazikeen does not say this out loud just yet. The lesson that she was supposed to have learned during her quest has finally sunk in years - and though she loves her ability to change shapes, adores the family that the Pack has given her, if Mazikeen woke up tomorrow and could no longer shift again it would not devastate her. It is not everything. And if eating the hearts of other animals was what it took to get it back, she would live the rest of her days as a horse.

Instead of saying all that - she asks softly “I can shift into a wyvern, a dragon, and many other things. Would you like to eat my heart too, Malik?” Mazikeen hates that she doesn’t know for sure what his answer will be or that she does not know what she would do if he were to attack her for her weaknesses. She couldn’t fight back, not against him, but she did not want to die anymore. “Your father did. The day you were born. I survived thanks to the kindness of someone else then - I don’t think I’ll be so lucky a second time.”

Or however many deaths it has been now.

As she feels the weight of the memory of waking up with no heart or eyes settle on her, she suddenly wonders if this is a cruel tactic. Mazikeen shakes her dragon’s head to clear it a little, though this does nothing to erase the shine of tears in her orange eyes as she watches her son carefully, her voice quiet. “I know this isn’t what we taught you before, I know it’s probably very confusing.” She looks down to the wyvern that no longer struggles, that seems to understand that its life depends on this conversation. Whether it can actually understand them, she doesn’t know. “This wyvern may be someone’s parent. If it does not go back to the nest with a belly full of fish to share with hatchlings and they die, does that matter?”

Her gaze moves back to Malik, wondering what she needs to say to get him to understand. She had not been terribly concerned with teaching him lessons beyond 'don't bother me' before and she does not know how to do it now that it matters. “If we killed all the deer and moved from land to land, eventually there would be nothing left to eat at all. There needs to be a balance. Generations of deer are required to keep generations of us and other predators alive - and for that, some need to survive.”

Malik doesn’t respond to her question about eating her heart and she closes her eyes for a moment against the wave of agony. It is not a yes, but the fact that it is not a no either tears something open inside of her. She is so thankful that she gets to spend time with her son at all but of course it is too easy to think that things would have been far smoother if they had stayed with Wishbone. If only Mazikeen had been able to hide them more efficiently, they would both be safe.

It is an undeniable fact that Sickle’s life would be better without knowing her birth parents, and now there seems little doubt that the same is true for Malik.

She let them both down so badly and she was ill-prepared for the process of trying to make it right. Would Gale know? Not who he was now, but the one who had shown her around Islandres. The one she had shared a too-brief summer with before the ground fell out beneath their hooves.

As soon as those thoughts rise up she shuts them away, opening her eyes to focus on Malik’s questions. “I don’t think it works like that. It’s all connected. The predators that feed on the deer, the deer that eats the grass. Removing one part of that cycle throws the rest into chaos.” There is a small, rueful smile that twists her draconic mouth. “And chaos isn’t as charming as we’ve been led to believe.”

A heavy sigh escapes her then, feeling the resignation that this will not be something she can make Malik believe with fumbling words in one afternoon. If there are magic words to share with her son to alter everything else he’s been taught, she does not know what they are.

So she stops trying for now and instead warns him before she starts to shift her weight off of the wyvern - her voice hollow but firm. “Watch out.” The creature beneath her freezes for a moment, as though testing to see if it is a trap, but Mazikeen just snaps at the air to encourage it to flee. The wound on its wing should not be a death sentence - or she hopes not, anyway. Otherwise this entire conversation has been rather pointless.

Once it is gone, she shifts into a feline shape that matches Malik’s and turns her attention back to him - eyes sad but paired with a smile. “I haven’t said this nearly as much as you deserve, but I love you, Malik.” even when when you scare me. “I just… I want more for you than a world of death.”