"I suppose that's a possibility... if you consider other skills besides fighting to be warrior-like..."
Akelda turned to Ellise with a look that suggested folly. Her eyes, rimy blue and unyielding, bored into her like ice picks, judging and gelid. But behind them there was the inexplicable sense that an old soul was watching through them. A woman who knew a different world, to the one both idlers currently sat in.
"That's... an interesting statement," she spoke, in her small, high voice, her dress shuddering lightly from the neck down. She said so quietly, and slowly, as though she were trying to process all the ways in which Ellise did not belong to her world. And as though she had picked her words deliberately, to cause as little offence as she, in her regal state of mind, could manage.
"Odd you should assume so few of us are fighters, though. You would, perhaps, be shocked to find that in times as dark as these, most everyone who wishes to wander is taught to defend themselves. This world is full of very stiff breezes."
Akelda squared her shoulders slightly at that, wordlessly suggesting there was much to her Ellise, and indeed nobody in the room, might have expected. But the gesture was hollow, almost invalidated entirely by her emaciated frame, which only proved to poke at the shoulders of her gown like the poles of a tent.
"And it's also odd you'd assume others might say it's a sword that makes a warrior. Is a warrior not one who wages war? Are they not politicians, who rally the men? Are they not writers, or artists, who vilify the enemy?" she asked, although it was in a dreamy, pondering sort of way, as though she were- at last- truly interested in what Ellise might have had to say. She had marked Ellise's statement as an odd one, but not necessarily one which displeased her.
"It is not my capacity to cause physical harm which makes me a good ally," she drew her spiel to a close, exhaling deeply. Her breath was a billow of icy mist, but the room wasn't particularly cold.
"Although... that should not be underestimated, either. What is it that makes a warrior, in your eyes?"
ButtsnBalls