CASIMIRA
dragon-shifting daughter of ashhal and ryatah
She visibly sharpens at his cutting laugh and sneering retort, white scales lacing across her skin and draconic spines rising along her rigid back. She has never been the type to be easily riled, a trait most likely inherited from her mother (certainly not from her father, as was becoming evident to her), but that did not mean she was immune against anger and frustration. Being pricked in just the right place was enough to spark some kind of reaction from her, and her family was one such spot. “You only know a version of her,” she tells him, and though her voice is level and steady there is a heat to them—a heat that tastes of dragon’s fire and smoke. “She has always been there when I needed her,” she goes on to say, holding his eyes in her ice-blue stare. “And I know you will lead me to believe that you cannot say the same, but I know it isn’t true.”
The defiance that rises from her chest to the words that leave her tongue are unexpected, but she does nothing to dampen them. He has pressed directly onto where she hurts the most, has pried at the open sore of her grief and made the wound bleed. “She has told me about you. I know that she has healed you before, and that you’re also someone that she would not willingly leave behind,” her tone softens the longer she speaks, her previous anger fading to a mere ember as a quiet sigh is drawn from her lips. The sorrow returns to her eyes, but it sits behind a semi-transparent shield of indifference that she is trying to conjure.
She is sure that he will find something in what she has said to be angry at. Is certain that he will spin any positive she throws at him into a negative, that whatever he is keeping hardly in control beneath the surface will boil over. She thinks that she has stoked the flames enough, that she should retreat, but there is also a sense of finality in this meeting—the idea that she will likely never see him again, that it is going to end poorly and he will ensure their paths do not cross.
It is this sense of reckless all-or-nothing that causes her to lift her eyes to his face again, to hold him there steady as she drops between them the full weight of the knowledge she has been carrying with her, “I’m your daughter.”
@Ashhal