Ice could see the uncertainty in her eyes; she truly wasn't sure about why she had returned to him. He himself couldn't fathom a reason. Perhaps she held some deep-seated, morbid curiosity about him, or about the dark, shadow filled dungeons. He watched her, his eyes steady from the back of the cell, and like before, the ice seemed to glow, illuminating the both of them in the mist and vapor that hung in the room and creating an unearthly, still light. Her question surprised him, but it did not show on his face, which regarded her impassively. It was a valid question, he decided, and one he didn't know the answer to just yet.
It was too soon to tell; but he remembered, clear as crystal, the hundreds of years since his imprisonment and the tears he shed on that dark cold night in repentance for his past mistakes. Of those, he had made many, and he knew they were beyond count and beyond forgiveness. If he could not even forgive himself, how could he expect anyone else to? And so he had thought that perhaps, if only for a time, he had locked away that part of himself in a darker, shadowed place in his mind, and when she'd come to him the first time, he would not kill her. But then the desire to do so, to make someone suffer simply because they did not know his darkness, was roused in him.
And it gnawed at him like a creeping hunger in his belly. But in the time that he had sat in silence and though, the pebble smooth in his hands, warm despite the cold, he had decided that he could ignore that hunger, that he could let the beast sleep for a time, if only to discover this new innocence and light that came so willingly into his darkness. So he thought a long while on her question, and he finally answered her. “Yes,” he said at last, his voice calm and clear. “And no. I want to hurt you because of what you are; I can see your light, and I want to destroy it. But that same light is what keeps me from harming you, because it is innocent and precious, and so very rare in a world of darkness. I have long lived in the shadows – so long that I had forgotten what the day looked like. But I think I see it now, again, in you and in your eyes, and I do not want that gone. Perhaps I am selfish, and perhaps you think me cruel and dangerous; you would be right, on both counts. This is no place for you and yet...”
He trailed off. And yet what? And yet, he wanted to keep her here? And yet, he wished he could speak to her a little longer? And yet what? “I do not know what folly has brought you back here, but I am...glad of it, I think. The silence is a welcome companion, but it does not know how to hold a good conversation.” His eyes seemed to warm, just the slightest, and though it was surely nothing, it was almost something. “Tell me...what is your name, girl, and why would you want to linger here, with me?”