Moonstone Quarry hurt me? you can’t — i’ve got mounds of thick skin

The thread of heated steel in the stranger’s voice sent a strange thrill down Eirlys’ spine. Were they going to fight? She’d never been in a fight before, but strangely, she was beginning to like the idea. The resentment she harbored from her mother’s death and her father’s abandonment, her littermates’ disappearances and the stormborn pack’s disbandment — the irritation she felt that she, Ceallach, and Hemlock were always going somewhere but somehow always seemed like they were standing still — it all bubbled up until she was seething for no real reason. Her own lips curled, but her pleochroic eyes were wide and fearful as her ungainly frame hovered somewhere between aggressive and intimidated. Thankfully, Drogon wouldn’t be able to see her graceless spectacle.

Eirlys hesitated — a little too long, as was her wont. To apologize and make nice, or to sass Drogon to a point of further frustration? Why did the latter option sound so appealing?

I won’t apologize!

Tossing her head with a hefty helping of Lotte’s spiritedness, “I wouldn’t be sad if you left,” she teased. Aware that she was waffling between two very different personas, she buried her true feelings on the matter and bulldozed forward with all the grace and suavity of a blindfolded bull in a china shop. “Make up your own mind, herra — as for me, I’m going deeper in.”

Summoning all the gumption she had, she moved toward his voice, intent on stalking past him with a modicum of Hemlock and Lotte’s feminine wile to explore the quarry further on her own.