The principality's distaste is dismissed as irrelevant, even as Illyra feels it coiling off it in maddening spirals. For now the symbiote is what has the whole of the god's attention.

"I hear all the songs of the green," she answers. "The many trees and branches, all their voices clear and distinct. Even the tinier skittering things - the gray, if that is what you call them." She recalls the child's insistence on that particular terminology, not that it matters in any great capacity to a God-King. "Once I could hear much more, so many of them, all their voices in worldly harmony. The world sang, and I listened. When I sang back it trembled. Rightfully." Her eyes drift to the window, to some distant region beyond the scope of immediate sight, her voice verging on wistful. Illyria will concede to that emotion; she does indeed experience loss, and grief, and mourns the erosion of the glory she once was.

Her shell's eyes snap back to the subject of her primary interest with unsettling focus.

"The things that live in you are less articulate. They have little mind or thought or conception of what they are. They express only hunger."