She cannot pick apart the threads of his internal war, she just knows that there is something boiling within him—something that keeps him from accepting the shadows as his own children. His power over them is so similar to Rhonan, but he is nothing like the other stallion. Rhonan loved the darkness; he asked the shadows and made no demands of them. He wrapped himself in them willingly. There was a give and take to his relationship, and she understood that. Theirs was a natural synergy—the same balance that made up the entirety of her world. But Shahrizai? She could not understand his relationship with the shadows. This was different. This was wrong.
He did not give, and he did not take. He simply was at the receiving end of the shadow’s battering affection. She frowned, confused by the entire ordeal. “Be-cause you are them,” she growls, frustrated. She did not like feeling unsure of her surroundings, and she felt her fuse getting shorter and shorter. Anastasia was not a particularly cruel beast, but she was completely feral; she was not above killing something just to make it quiet. “Are you stu-pid?” she finally asks, blunt to the end, eyes narrowed at him.
She nudges him again, looking at the shadows like small, mewling creatures. Her ears are pinned against her skull, and she fidgets underneath his wild gaze. He was becoming more and more of an unknown, a variable she could not control, and she did not like it—did not like it for one second. “Be-cause you are act-ing stu-pid.” She clucks her tongue against her teeth as she reaches down to the ground, letting the darkness wrap around the inky blackness of her own nose. “You hurt them. Stop.”
like the moon, we borrow our light
{I am nothing but a shadow in the night}