"You would rather us lose all chance for a then in order to grasp at maintaining the security and safety of a now that isn't sustainable?" How ludicrous. That was like trying to hold onto a fist full of water. "Change is inevitable. They know about us, it's only a matter of time before they take what little sense of stability we have left and pull it out from under us." That was what humans did. To each other. All over the world. Why on earth should they allow a people so capable of such intense cruelty to their own kind to run the world? Mircea loved humans--put so much into the preservation of them, and the fight for equality for marginalized groups, knew that they were also capable of intense kindness and creating beautiful art and music and prose and poetry--but every time they took one step forward, they took several backward. And she was right, they were poised to implode, but.
What if they didn't?
They were also horribly resilient.
Oh whatever, like she was going to go full dragon-mode in the middle of her beloved wife's library. And if she did and swallowed him in one gulp? Well. He'd lived a good life. Honestly, he hadn't expected to make it to forty, so five hundred seventy was more than enough. Mircea shrugged. "Maybe forty years." He hadn't been in Vietnam, but had been in Eastern Europe again behind the Iron Curtain, and had seen a few riots in that time. "You've been here nearly as long as I have though, Sheriff. This isn't exactly a hotbed of crime or war or revolution."