The creature made a sound.
Not the chuckle or the inquisitive sound it had done earlier. Something between them, the sound of something processing a question it found both accurate and insufficient.
It snorted.
"I refuse to acknowledge you as my owner," it said, "until you grow stronger."
The sentence was not hostile. It was not condescending in the way that contempt was condescending. It was the specific delivery of a statement of conditions, something that had been decided and was being communicated, the way a person stated a fact they had no particular emotion about because the fact was simply the fact.
His mind ran through this too.
It had called him frail. Weak. Had expressed disappointment, the mild disappointment of something that had been waiting for centuries and had arrived at an expectation about what would eventually come to break the seal and found the arrival insufficient.
It had also said owner.
