CASIMIRA
dragon-shifting daughter of ashhal and ryatah
She can see as he weighs her words, as each cruel magician she names settles into place. She can almost see too the way his mind is trying to work out a solution, a way that he could take them on, and she feels a bubble of panic rise into her throat. “I don’t want you to do anything, Savior,” she tells him, quiet yet almost pleading as she reaches for him again. “I don’t want anything to happen to you,” she continues, searching his face, the worry pressed so cleanly onto her face. “If you see either one of them promise me that you won’t do anything, please?”
A tremulous sigh passes between her lips, and she lowers her head so that she can rest herself beneath his neck, relaxing beneath the feel of him against her. “If anything happened to you I wouldn’t survive,” she confesses to him, though it does not feel like a confession, but more like a confirmation of what she has known all along. She has had to watch Atrox survive without her mother, and while he wears his grief disguised as anger she recognizes it all the same, and it is a pain she hopes she never has to bear.
“I know,” she tells him softly when he reminds her she did not have to ask to live here. “I just feel…..strange, after having been away for so long.” She had told him once how Tephra had not felt like home when she was younger, despite the fact that she had died for it during the Loess-Tephra war. She had told him too how Hyaline did not exactly feel like home, either, and it was only recently that she had realized why this was — why no place ever felt like home.
If only she had learned to not be afraid of her love for him she could have been home all along.
She settles against his chest again, the weight on her shoulders feeling lighter now that he at least knew all that was troubling her. “Gale is gone from here, right?” she asks him, her lips tracing circles along his shoulder idly.