[Miasma]

  "Dad?" Miasma questions, stalking tentatively after the timbre wolf. She curled up not far from where he spent the night, just barely close enough to feel his heat, but not enough their fur might brush and he realize her presence in his sleep. "Where are you going?" Do you really want to know? YES.

  She stops for a moment, one paw raised. Ready to follow, ready to run. Big, pretty eyes, nothing like her parents. Deceivingly innocent. "Can I come with you?"

[Crow]

It was unwise at best, an observer might say, to let a girl like Miasma so close to his vulnerable, sleeping body. After all, he had done her an abhorrent wrong, obscene in its casual cruelty... would there come a time when she remembered the kind face of her true mother, the rambunctious grin of her little brother, and repay the injustice by biting into her captor’s throat like a ripe fruit?

Silly idealistic fool, of course she wouldn’t. He was her only family that mattered. He had saved her from a life of mediocrity and infidelity. He did not treat her unkindly. Nobody would dare harm her so long as she roosted beneath the shadow he cast. Miasma was his alone.

“I’m going to find the temple, little love,” was his response to her question, her longing ice-blue eyes. “The Dragon wants me to stay there with her from now on.”

The black wolf looked full at the half-grown yearling, leaning down to meet her height. “Come and see.”

[Miasma]

  "Temple?" she repeats, like an infant just learning to speak. If there is a temple, is there a religion? The Dragon, of course.

  The Dragon wants Crow to stay with her. Miasma's expressive, young face falls. She's never hidden emotion well-- but intention is another matter. Azuhel can't be taking Crow away from her. He has children with her, but they have Azuhel, and Miasma doesn't have--

anyone.

  There are tears in turquoise eyes, so shimmery. Like semiprecious stones, like overripe fruit, ripe for plucking. No, no. That can't be right. If Crow belongs to Azuhel, Miasma still belongs to Crow. Always. Until death. Until her bones rot off Alteronian necks to dust, and their bones the same. Forever and ever and--

  "Come and see," he says, and the orphan girl nods to her abductor-father.

[Crow]

“Temple?” asked his little pet daughter, her innocence and her ignorance one in the same. She’d likely never heard the foreign word before.

“Yes,” confirmed Crow blithely. He’d already started his trek, knowing with unsettling confidence that she would follow as he straightened back up and stepped past Miasma on long, lean legs, the hairs on his underside briefly mingling with those on her back. “It’s a sort of place built in old times... to admire older forces.”

In his youth, when he suffered so from a ghastly lack of imagination, he might have indicated the mortal triad of gods who named themselves after flowers. Crow, like them, had become weary of that game. We belong to that which we fear; the Rosa were playthings of the Dragon.

He smelled salt and licked his gray-whiskered muzzle hungrily. Without looking back at her, the black beast cooed honey-sweet, like a jackal trying to coax a day-old gnu from the safety of its mothers’s shadow. “What’s wrong, Mia?”

They ducked into a scenic route, the canopy growing thicker, it’s shade growing blacker. The temple wasn’t far.

[Miasma]

  She shuts her eyes, shakes her head, violently, until the tears fly off and away and all that's left is her forlorn face. Such a trick may have fooled Kaiju, but Crow is more than his spawn could aspire to be. Besides, Kaiju isn't here, is she?

  Miasma dashes after her father, falls in at his side, gangly legs trotting awkardly to keep pace with his long gait. "What if the Dragon doesn't like me?" she asks, in lieu of Are you leaving me? "Wh-what if her other children--" Your other children. Your real children. They're dragonlings, after all. Heirs to an empire, and Miasma just the servant girl, to a war hero that left his kingdom. They're bound to be better--

  But they're with Azuhel, and Miasma is following Crow to meet them. If any of his lost children want a place with their father, they'll have to go through her. Jealousy, she is well versed in.

  The forest is bleak, but Miasma isn't afraid. She presses to her father's side, and lets him lead her through the dark.