Mazikeen hates the cautious way with which Malik replies to her. Or, not the tone itself but what she thinks the reason for it is, the memories that tell her she had not been kind to her son. It’s a tone that reminds her there had been the better part of a year where he had only known her temper, her indifference, or her reluctant attention. That there was a time when he needed to be cautious around her or risk being lashed out at.
She hears Gale in Malik’s reply and her stomach twists. Her talons dig a little further into the wyvern in reflex but she eases up when it makes a sad, pain-filled moan.
It is an effort to keep her gaze on him, to not look away when he asks her why she wants to kill the wyvern. “I don’t. I want to let it go.” Mazikeen admits quietly.
“When your… when your father was around, I believed each kill made me stronger. Made me better. But that’s not true.” Each one is a fracture in her heart that will never be healed, but she worries over showing that weakness to Malik now. How much of his father was in him, how much of what Mazikeen had been like? He tolerated her stretches of sadness now but if she really let him see how broken she felt would he scorn her? She is too uncertain to try, too desperate to want to make up for lost time and that means keeping him around for as long as he’ll let her.
And if he knew she was weak, would he want to kill her too?
These questions storm through her mind so she continues to speak rather than let them drag her down. “There’s strength in holding back. In knowing when not to kill. I would have decimated the deer population of our home, and then moved on until there was nothing left, and then where would I be?” If she could have torn all of Beqanna apart, Mazikeen knows she would have done so without hesitation. She would have let that wildfire in her heart take over and then when there was nothing left she would have wasted away in bitterness and anger. “We should only do it when we’re hungry or when it’s absolutely necessary. It’s a waste of life otherwise.”
A more practical part of Mazikeen thinks that Malik's reasons for wanting to kill the wyvern are negated by the fact that she is the one holding it down. If he wants to know he can kill it, he'd be better off fighting it on his own. But this part of her cannot find a voice just yet as she waits for her son's reaction to this lesson that is so different than anything else he's been taught so far.
@Malik