"Shadow Wroth" Zakroti said, shifting a little in place as he settled. It was an unusual name, he had to admit, but no more unusual than those the Oshwel gave to their own. Whether the Drakken or the Gemminites had named it such first he knew not, but it was enough that the name had stuck. Their own names in the west marchlands had not dissimilar meanings when translated, but he suspected it was deliberately intimidating, forboding. A move designed to continue to coerce conformity from the kingdom that bordered Drakka. This was the Great Drakken's favoured form of conquest and control over them, after all, a constant reminded that their kingdom was at their mercy, for it they withdrew either from the southern border or sought to take it by force, they could do so in a heartbeat. The Great Drakken, far from the brutish beasts their behaviour odten seemed to convey, were possessed of great cunning and such strategies were deliberate and careful. 

"Then what do you make of it? There's more culinary variety here than some would have you believe, I'm sure. That of my homeland and beyond will hopefully prove pleasing enough."

"They make poor neighbours, that much is true and sure." Zakroti said with a shrug of his shoulders as he took a mouthful of the soup, chewing and swallowing. The Drakken were prone to infighting, whether individually or collectively. The large variety of Drakken kind only made this all the more apparent, and the split between the West Drakken and the Great Drakken as they were known in the common tongue was one of the more fierce and filled with conflict and violence. Religious and cultural differences hardly helped here, and the relations between the two had been strained since time immemorial. 

Zakroti was snapped back to the present when, in the midst of signing about trade with the Great Drakken, Miry almost dropped her bowl to the ground. There was a silence for a few moments as the soldiers peered at her and the young Gem shrunk away. 

Zakroti slipped over closer to her, sitting beside her and giving her a reassuring smile as he lifted her bowl back up from the ground and offered it to her

"Since...?" He asked gently, intrigued by what she had to say. He listened - or watched rather, he supposed - intently as she signed to him. Zakroti paused and sat back, thinking to himself for a moment

"I know several languages, my Drakken is somewhat rusty, my Gemminite speech and handsign is, I imagine, even worse." Zakroti said with a light shrug of his shoulders as he said back and took another spoonful of soup, thinking back.

Most languages had been taught to him by Xarxlosar, though such physical languages weren't. That would have been a tad difficult on account of her not having hands. Still, it had long been considered important for a noble of Osh Edehame to be something of a polymath, though naturally few actually lived up to it. The expectations of what the 'perfect' noble should be and the reality of what the nobility was rarely seemed to match up very well, in his eyes.

"I learnt it from my sister in my youth, who learnt it from our mother." Zakroti explained, sitting back a little and taking up another spoonful of the soup, placing a piece of the tough reabak meat into his mouth and consuming it as he thought. All Drakken co-opted and conquered that around them, and the Oshwel particularly had a reputation for co-opting. Until the rise of the Kingdom of Askalan, the Great Plague and the partition of Kalderas, their domain had stretched wide and far to the great southern wastes. Bit by bit, they had come apart, but for the loss of their imperial might and prestige, their spirit and romanticism had lost none of its potency; It was sometines joked that no map of their territories was ever complete without reference to the boundaries of their former glories, a reference to the habit of referring to the various new kingdoms and princeships as 'the lost territories.' 

"There's an old joke that our conquests are driven solely by such appreciation for foreign things and such disdain for our own."  Zakroti chimed in again, taking another bite of the tough and hard meat. That was certainly true, by his reckoning. For all their pretences of being different to their kindred, the Oshwel had surely been among the most prolific of plunderers in times of war. He alone had added countless new oddities and treasures to the collection that his father had built upon, that each proprietor of Mu'Jupostat had over the years built up. Although shorter than both their kindred, they had lost not aj ounce of their capacity for war, and if anything the conflict between the subgroups of the Kingdom of Drakka kept in check the imperial ambitions for both.

Zakroti peered off over the horizon, the rocky and semi-barren land. He would be glad when this was behind them, and doubly glad once they reached the west marchlands and his home, a comparative bread basket by contrast to this hell scape. This was most of what the Gems knew or saw of Drakka, though; A desolate, brutish, unforgiving place. Even he would defend the Great Drakken from such slander, their lands had their own beauty in parts, and their ways their own merits.