>>5713353>>5713535>>5713559>>5713640The risk of telling your Queen of Men abut her king-father’s condition is obvious: what if is distracts her form the mission at hand? That would be terrible, obviously, as she’s become the backbone of your negotiations—the bridge between two unlike worlds. She’s aware of that too, though. Would she really just… Abandon her duty?
You try to put yourself in her place, but it’s hard for you. Reptilians of the Master Race rarely know their parents as more than a genealogical footnote, and feel no bond to them—not unless, like your Serpent Queen, they were selected and groomed for a position of importance due to talent or an especially attractive array of features. You try to imagine how you would react if ‘Roth’, the Dragonblood in Hawksong who supplied half your genetics, were to perish… But you only even learned of him months ago, and your relationship has been characterized by his resentment of you. Your mother, well, you feel a sort of kinship-bond with her… But you never knew her when she lived, for she laid your egg and then left, to die a year or two thereafter at the hands of the Green Knight. Your only encounters with her were glimpses beyond Death’s veil.
The Chaplain, maybe? He is… LIKE a father to you, in some ways. If he were to die, would you feel as Ekaterine might? How would you react if you heard that he was unwell?
You sigh. Queen Ekaterine is your partner in this endeavor—and in life, for that matter—and deserves to know the truth, whatever her reaction. You will handle it when it comes.
“Eka,” you say, “there iss sssomething elsse that you should know… Ssomething that the Thief hass dissscovered.”
Her reaction is, well… Very human, and very female, as you understand it. There are tears—a wasteful expulsion of water from the eyes which makes you distressed to see it, not least one which because nothing you say seems to stem the tide. Water, ever your bane, is also your foe in this realm. She wails, and sobs; you run out of words, and simply hold her, eventually donning the shape of ‘Long Wang’ again simply so you have more soft surfaces and fewer spikes and scutes that she might cute or abrase herself upon. Eventually, she seems to calm.
“I must see him,” she says.
…Or so it seems.
