I am the pattern, the plague, and the prison --
There are women like her back where he is from. Women who are carved of flame—made of the very thing that is meant to destroy. He recognizes that in her from the second that he sees her. Watching her with his hooded eyes as she moves through the forest, flickering with the kind of fire that can only be born into someone. It catches his interest, snags it, and he doesn’t bother to hide the fact that he is able to ignore his own frustration for a moment. It is a welcomed distraction when she finally stops near him.
For a second, he says nothing.
And then a second longer.
Morrowind is used to keeping others waiting. He does not mind keeping them on the hook. He feels no rush to answer her—no obligation to answer her own interest. He so rarely saw others as equals who were just as deserving as him sating their interest as he was deserving of them sating his own.
Finally though, his own desire to learn more overrides the arrogance that stretches the silence out.
“Perhaps I am,” he rumbles, looking down his nose at her, his features carved from granite and stone. He shifts and despises the way that this mortal body aches when it stands still for too long. The same way that it aches if it is in motion too long. Such a weak, flimsy thing, in the end. He once spent a thousand years standing atop a mountain to watch the storms as they passed, to watch the earth grow and fall away.
He cannot do such things here.
“Why would it matter to you if I was?”
MORROWIND
