Piano wire tension flinches taut up the back of his near arm at her shift -- the surface of a defensive flare that brands bright in his eyes in a look flashed quick aside. This is the bristle of a creature coiled at the bottom of a drain, starved and hateful and ready to snip off the end of the finger being curled down the chute after it.

There and gone.

He folds it away under a spring draw of tension, haggard through his chest, hard bit into collarbones and across his shoulders.

“It isn’t Oghma,” he says, finally, measured over an ill-repressed shiver of exhaustion. “I’m sorry I mentioned it. Please let me rest.”