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Kasef is full of anger, of a pure unadulterated rage that thrums through his blood like a racing inferno. He’s hardly stupid - he is the crown prince of Neolandia, now King, after all - and he knows it is his grief that suffocates him. He is somewhat careful not to let the rage blind him to what matters but the grief is different. He doesn’t know what to do with it. With his anger he can direct it, use it to power ferocious attacks, and have certainty in his leadership with every decisive act, every assured command.
His anger and rage make him strong. Like a king, like his father . His grief makes him falter. It makes him unsure and this unbecoming of a king and he won’t- he can’t allow it.
Yet, staring up at the stricken, frozen face of Thunder - petrified, in more ways than one - his rage seems to dissipate. The dragon's face is cracked open, so raw, so full of anguish, desperation, anger and a myriad of emotions that Kasef can’t name - only understand. And this terrifies him. Even more than the insecurity of his grief.
Inside him, his feelings of sympathy, even empathy or compassion for a dragon , the King of the Dragons, those feelings taunt him. A traitor. A traitor to his people. To his kingdom. To his father. To his dying father whose fate is uncertain, precarious.
And the worst part is that if Kasef looks carefully, he thinks he can see the remnants of a tear along stone scales. He can almost taste the salt but he can’t cry. Not as this monstrous lava creature. The transformation to this form and the heat of the lava caused his tear ducts to weld shut.
The stones of his own body burned hot with the magma and if he pretended hard enough, the burning heat of those rivers of lava could just be tears, water dripping off his skin in strange geometric shapes.
Water cooling the magma into obsidian in an instant, a stone cold and unchanging like those now of his skin. Like a petrified King of the Dragons.
So Kasef stares at the stone corpse of Thunder and the fallen king of the dragons stares unflinchingly back, beyond him. Towards the spire. For one last fight.
And with a body of stone and magma, Kasef does the same.
After all, how different is obsidian from any other stone?