Esse and I stood facing each other without speaking. I was armed and presenting to make a Minbari grin though I wore a stoic face to hide my nervousness. He remained cloaked and nearly completely hidden. The huge boulder in the middle of the petrified forest was the only witness between us.
A friend had offered some insight to repairing the relationship. “You are not as you were when you first met him. To you, he is as he always have been, only more revealed over time. To him, something new has become. Something he does not know because he does not have the doll to filter your responses anymore. He does not know this present you at all. You humans are a fickle lot. Sweet can become sour. Resolute can become yielding. Who you were before can be who you are now or who you will never be again. Introduce yourself and start the relationship over.”
Right. Starting over.
“Hello.”
He made no reply nor movement. I smiled at his intentional rudeness. He grunted and narrowed his eyes slightly.
“I’ve learned a trick with the axe. The Black Axe. I can change its shape like the feathersword now.”
A breeze attempted to break the tension between us. Nothing stirred in its wake.
“Okay. I’ll be blunt. I’m still pissed that you tricked me into giving you the doll, but I have a couple years of evidence it was not to harm me. Yes, you took advantage of my developing skills for fuck knows your intentions but you also used it to keep me from hurting myself or making decisions I would be regretting for several lifetimes. Thank you. But I have several decades of evidence that such restraints are harmful to me in the long run. I make a poor pet, [Esse]. If I did not release myself, I would have turned on you eventually. And for all your tricks that you think would keep me, you fucking know better. You know my skills and my potential better than I ever will. So fuck off with this pouting about your dog running away. I am the Black Wolf, the Thrice Carved, and the Trollsbane. And I am not running from you, bitch. But it is up to you to tell me why. What is it between us?”
The breeze attempted again to remove the tension between us. All it could accomplish was the beginning of a gentle snow fall.
He almost smiled. I think. He turned and walked away from the boulder and I. His words drifted between the large snowflakes. “You still have [the key].” It wasn’t a question. “I have no tea to be polite with. And no coffee as well. Those are the offerings to dragons, I’m told, and I am none.” The snow obscured him from my vision.
I stood collecting snow on my cloak for a few moments more, turning all the possible connotations of his choice of words in my head. Settling on the most probable message they conveyed, I had only one word to answer the obscured echo of his shadow.
“Ass.”
Things are going to be okay.
I left the petrified forest and the dream.