CASIMIRA
dragon-shifting daughter of ashhal and ryatah
“I have,” she says with a small smile when he mentions how she must have spent time here, and some of the rigidness in her spine melts away. Not entirely relaxed, but at least now appearing as if she actually wants to make conversation rather than immediately return to Tephra. “When Heartfire was queen I stayed here for a little bit. It wasn’t long after the war in Tephra with Loess, and I just…needed a break, I suppose.” She does not say what really happened, even though, unbeknownst to her, he would be able to see it.
He would be able to see that concurrent with her thoughts of Nerine, there are, too, the memories of why she had come in the first place. Of Tephra cloaked in smoke and shadows, of a fight between her and another dragon, and then of a star-dappled mare colliding with her—and the bright flash of an explosion. The memory of being reborn from one of her own dragon scales comes next, when everywhere she looked everything had either been scorched by dragon’s fire or covered by hardened lava.
And there, too, is the feeling of failure that had bloomed alongside her newborn heart. The feeling that she failed her birthplace by not protecting it, by not being able to control herself in her shifted form.
She had been so young at the time that this brief falter had felt like a fall she could not recover from, and her naive mind had convinced her that Leliana and the other Tephran residents would despise her for what she could not overcome.
Leaving had felt like the only choice.
She had been grateful for the refuge that Heartfire had been able to offer her, and she is certain that most of the kindness had only been as a favor to her mother. Casimira is positive that despite her mother’s somewhat fickle ways and ever-changing morals that she would do the same for one of Heartfire’s children, too.
She laughs lightly when he calls her out for sounding uncertain, her smile turning into something almost sheepish, and yet somehow all the more genuine. “Guilty. It still sounds strange, I guess. I was born in Tephra and have spent most of my life there but I guess I did not expect to be queen of it one day.” She pauses, since she is not really sure how things like this are supposed to go. She was not actually after anything from him; she did not expect to solidify an alliance, at least. All she wanted was for them to be familiar with one another, to know who the other monarch is, since she already is close with Mazikeen and Hyaline. “You strike me as someone that always knew they would be king, though.”
if its not obvious since I went into so much detail, he's allowed to fully see her whole memory of the Tephra/Loess war, dying, etc lmao