“I was expecting the dragon,” Seoraj observes, wry, his arms resting over his knees where he's sitting, close to but not against the cave wall; might get cold, sitting right up against it. Might not have expected the exact details, but 'this is going to get really insane' has been more or less his stance on the whole thing from the beginning. Call it a hunch.

--which is a pretty good way of stepping around that which he did not expect, actually, because it's interesting and he's...interested, that's clear, but it's out of his field of experience in ways that dragons turned out to be not quite.

He knows what he's doing, with a woman. Meg, for instance; if nothing else, can't say he doesn't know where everything goes. Doesn't end up feeling like he's starting all over again from before his voice finished breaking, which was not what he thinks of as one of the more dignified periods of his life, such as those have been.