[open] don't think twice

[Terin]

She doesn't come any closer to my sun-warmed rock, neither hunting nor defensive of her lake.  Perhaps because it is not even her lake at all, I learn. She is no more a resident here than I am and that - along with the softening of her ethereal features - lessens some of my concern.  It seems a strange coincidence, that the first creature I meet upon my return to this world is the kind that spawned me.

That is who she'd once known, I suspect, my sapphire scaled sire. I did not know him as anything more than as patriarch of our Ischian island, a distant presence that ignored me just as he did my many scaled siblings. He'd been curious about me at first, my mother had said, when I was so strange and scaled. But that had not lasted long, and my memories of him are blurred and faded with time.

I know of his reputation though, know it well enough to wonder why this stranger would come closer rather than turn tail and swim away as far and as fast as she could. As I observe her though, I realize that perhaps her ability to swim away had kept her safe. He didn't drown them all, I knew, yet I was sure she was no member of the harem that he had kept.

"My name is Terin," I tell her. "Many of my siblings share our father's coloration. Was it him you knew? Ivar?"

@ Deiti