The first to enter their pristine silence is the dark one who had helped her bring him into the world, his moments of quiet lingering before he speaks covered in her consuming admiration of the slender boy nestled alongside her. She raises her face to look upon him, the moonlight filtering through the natural drapery that had first drawn her to this stone hole to sweep across his charcoal colored skin. He looks awkward standing there, more so than she’s ever seen him, and for a long while she simply stares at him, through his words and his quietness, wondering what it is that has left him looking so stunned.

Surely it’s not the child. There are consequences involved with what they did together and the only one of them that was essentially guaranteed was the appearance of precisely that which fed from beneath her.

Was it because she had named him without asking? She hadn’t ever thought that Ulrik would be the sort to want to be overly involved with her son, part of the reason why she had selected him as a father over so many other options; the woman thirsted for control, and the thought of anyone attempting to wrest it from her over something as important as her own flesh and blood (even if he was of their own, too) would be faced with more wrath and walls than any army in the history of the world.

She doesn’t think that’s what it is.

He will be great, her mind repeats to her, its strange way of telling her she has wondered to long.

Could he be anything else? She wants to reply, but refrains. Instead, she smiles, motioning with her horn that he can come closer if he wants. She figures he won’t; it was shocking enough that he’d actually fallen to her desires and that he was here now was more than she could have asked for – especially considering she hadn’t asked him for anything more than his assistance bringing her child to life. "And handsome. He looks much like his father. Let us hope he is as shy as you are lest he bring us more grandchildren than we can house or feed." She laughs, a light sound, her golden eyes glowing in her emotions, so many sweeping through her.

She cannot tell the Engineer how much he has given her, and it has only been an hour at the most that she has seen the ball of foal that wrestled in her guts for so long alongside her; she can feel the holes in her heart sealing around his image, the sweet sound of his name lingering in her breast. She loves the boy, even if she never admits it, and that she feels it so purely and without doubt could make her weep, so overwhelming this serenity that floods her soul when she beholds that which they have made together.

And she had thought their sentinels were the pinnacle of their greatness, the finest thing that the two of them could give life to. She had been wrong.

She cannot tell him this.

She just smiles.

Her man, if she might call him that, is soon joined by another familiar face, one she had hoped would come to meet Rikyn; he was, after all, her brother in some ways, considering how Illynx felt about the white eyed girl. She was not hers, to be sure, and she had never claimed ownership over her or done much as far as teaching or guiding her, but the sensation that Jorogumo belonged to her more so than the others of the mountain still filled her. Her snort of disdain towards the Engineer rouses a look of mock disdain from her followed by a short ripple of laughter, knowing her temper and ego well enough to know that anyone would have received the same initial reaction from the Spider.

She wonders, though, how well Ulrik will deal with her sharp tongued orphan.

Returning the girl’s nod as she praises the boy at her side, the Lady listens to her words and hears them as deeply as she feels them; together, she and Jorogumo shared a pain, the knowledge that the world was unkind and without reservations as to who it lashed out at.

When the girl has done speaking, the golden one looks over to Ulrik with a flash of apology rising to her features before she returns words to the moon-eyed girl. "I would never abandon him, sweet Jorogumo, and he is blessed to have one such as you in his life," she says, seeing so much of herself in all that burning pride and passion; it was just so incorrectly used, directed in all the wrong ways… but she had once been the same. She couldn’t even remember their names, the faces she had left to rot in the sun, the hearts that had bled in honor of their memory, but she knew now why she had done all she had done.

To spite them, for all their light, how it burned her eyes and left her alone in a dusty room, clutching to the only handle she had to survive the agony of her soul: hatred. Break it, break it all into a thousand pieces, and cast the sparkling dust to the wind to mingle with your laughter.

It is a hollow life, this.

Where does all that glitter go, anyway?

"I wish…I wish I had done more to save you, after I found you in the woods," she says, softly, "forgive me, Jorogumo. I should have been there for you as my Empress was for me when I needed her most."