[private] how deeply are you sleeping, or are you still awake

[Malik]

The tails keep growing, she tells him, another one every few years. Though it seems a fairly innocuous ability, it also seems like something that is most easily explainable as: magic. And Malik cannot shift into magical things.

Not yet, anyway.

First he must find one last gift for the fairies, one last bit of something magical. And since this awareness is always in the back of his mind, it seems perfectly sensible for him to offer: “If you ever get too many, I’d take one.” Exactly how she’d be able to give him one occurs to him only after he speaks, and he pulls his own fluffy black tail closer to himself at the thought of somehow severing it.

“If….uh…that’s a thing you can do?” He’s looking anywhere but at Sokali, feeling unable to stop the words that keep spilling out. “I didn’t, I don’t mean…”

Then he stops, closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath in. If she hasn’t turned and run in the time it takes him to gather himself together, he finally meets her gaze and says: “Sorry. That was weird. Can we start over? I’ve been on a quest for the fairies for most of my life now, and sometimes I forgot how to not think about it all the time.”

@Sokali