It's the easiest thing in the world to be as he is. She just has to, for the first time, really relax.

Do you know what it's like to go through the world with a mind like hers? Always aware that she could rip out hearts, abuse and torment, escalate to violence before anyone else would dare to think of it? To be a fountain of will in a world of retiring sheep, having to cloak her true nature in fluff to avoid spooking the herd? Harsh language was not a sign of rudeness, it was a soft wrapping around the fury in her blood. She casts it aside here now.

Now to cross her is obliteration. Not in blood or death but in the shattering of the ego, the psychic demonstration of exactly what the hierarchy of the cosmos was and where you fit in it. Her thigh-high boots step across kneeling backs.

To have a fire like Ailee does is to be [i]afraid[/i]. Constantly feeling out the edges of people to know how hard they want you to step on them. Making decisions to reveal jagged edges to those who you guess are foes and hope that you're choosing the correct enemies. To pretend that you're not imagining those before you on their knees and struggle through a conversation with them as equals. Now she lets that resonating willpower speak all of its hidden toxic whispers. Now she lets her magic, infinite if you're prepared to pay an infinite price, boil out of her. And that's the secret the rats are blind to. They seek to maintain themselves, to scratch at the dripping blood of power, to be their wretched selves but somehow more. It's the same secret the so-called Archmages of the University were blind to, thinking themselves mighty if they could bind a single word at the end of a lifetime of study. She bound five in an afternoon. 

Her father once told her that if you borrowed ten pounds from a bank it was your problem, but if you borrowed a million pounds it was the bank's problem. She feels King Dragon stir. She doesn't think he expected this, even as he dreamed fitfully of her approach. He thought like she had thought, of the world as a vortex of sycophants and delusional slaves, scratching around the edges for a power they could never look directly at. Now here she is, cutting directly towards the Heart, looking him in the eye. 

It would be a mistake to say that they are the only two people in the world that matter, because neither of them would for a second acknowledge the other's validity. One of them is the King Dragon, the King of the World, the Heart of the Heart, and the other is just like everyone and everything else - a subordinate, a slave, a toy. But as Ailee steps deeper and deeper into that violent rainbow both realize that this toy is insane. It is insane to dream itself a king, and it must be fixed and broken. 

"Get out of my Heart," said Ailee.