Sometimes, this place feels like the end of the world. Now is such a time: how the sky goes on forever if you tilt your head a certain way, how the air howls cold songs inside your lungs, how the mountains are like teeth bared, waiting. You drink it in and your heart beats reverence. You drink it in, and every fiber of your body sighs home. You're a small thing still, insignificant against this backdrop of glacier-cut valleys and arctic sky, but you love it even if you don't quite understand what love the word means.

Today, maybe, your heart's a little weak with love. You woke up this morning and reached for Mama and she was gone. You knew she would be and still it felt like tripping into a hole, like waking up on Armageddon eve and the world is beautiful, but it's wrong. It's still wrong. You woke up a long time ago, but here you are, pecking at the dirt around the borderlands like a lonely crow. Maybe a part of you hopes to glimpse your father again, or Vesper, or even Mama come back from her important mission (a part of you whines, weakly, what is more important then me?). Anyway, those particular distractions are lacking.

Those are — but not others.

Unfamiliar strangers climb now into your valley. You watch from far-off at first, just a black speck against a backdrop of much more interesting land. But your heart bleats like a pitiable thing and it nudges you toward them, and with nothing else to do, you obey. You obey.

And by the time you're up close, you realize you probably know the blue mare. You've been in the Basin long enough to glimpse most of the herd, at least, in meetings, and even though you usually have better things to think about, you recall the utter weirdness of her color. You don't know her name, though, or anything else about her. Your body draws up out of instinct, out of manners, so you're sort of presentable by the time you make a weird whistle-call to the strangers. It's like hello, only less civilized, which fits you anyway: you're like a boy, only less civilized.

It's remembering Mama that makes you stand up straight and look at them, at all.

"Hullo," You say eventually, when you're close enough. That odd habit of staring hasn't diminished in the least; you stare at them in open curiosity. And you're sure you've seen the blue mare before, but the giant — and she is a giant — would have stuck out more, wouldn't she? Your eyes crawl down from her withers to the stripes on her legs. Neither woman has wings.

Your own wings flex and fold again.

"You're new," you guess at the big mare, tilting your head. It might be menacing if you were bigger, but you're just a boy still, sullen and odd. "I'm Virga." You don't welcome her; you've never seen anyone welcome a stranger before, and any rules to the ritual evade your knowing. If Mama were here, she would lead by example and you would be tame. She is not here, though. She is absent, absent, and you're alone with this home you love but also fear. Alone is such an unsavory way to be.

VIRGA