She's got the devil's eyes
Only fools refuse to learn from the past. A fact Heartfire understands far better than most. Wyrm might have his attention fixed on the future, but she understands the value in knowing the past and present. Far more than what value there may be in knowing the future. It’s fickle, at best, the future. She knows enough to know how easily small, seemingly inconsequential things can change its course. She has been its orchestrator enough to know that it is far more than wishful thinking too.
Something Wyrm had never quite understood. She hadn’t cared much then, but she sees it so clearly now.
Time and age had done the viridian shifter no kindnesses. Had he still had eyes, she doesn’t doubt the encroaching madness would be visible for any to see. Still, he is sane enough now. For a while yet, perhaps. But she has seen it before. She knows the symptoms. For a moment even, she feels pity.
But not enough to save him from himself.
She stills when he speaks of their son, his words absent, almost callous. She is not certain thought of her eldest son will ever come without pain (not certain she wishes it to), but she does know she does not care for the way he speaks of him. For the cold disregard in his words.
Only a shower of dust answers him though, the leaves and branches overhead breaking apart until they drift heavily around them. Until nothing stands in the way of sunlight as it streams down, bringing a wash of warmth and light into the clearing. A warning. The only one he would receive. “You should be kinder to our son. He cared for you more than you deserve.”
Perhaps it’s foolish, to grant him that much even. But her eldest children would never have existed without him. Only that fact affords him any leniency. Anything else they might once have shared had been ground into dust beneath his heel long ago.
She shouldn’t have come, she knows. Should have allowed him to stew in the knowledge of his fate. But that inability to leave well enough alone had always been a terrible fault of hers. Just as that self-assured confidence in his own immutability has always been one of his.
“If you ever knew me at all Wyrm,” she finally responds, her voice steely beneath the soft syllables, “then you know I will not tell you that.”
and they'll cut you like a weapon