He came, and she felt him like the weight of an oncoming storm cloud. The air seemed to grow thick with his understanding, but Isopia stood strong beneath it. It was after all, her weight to bear.

For a moment she did nothing. Her body wasn't stiff but it might have looked like it was. She considered his word carefully, and almost laughed at the enormity of her answer. This was of course no time for laughter - and she didn't feel even the slightest bit mirthful or cheery - but enough so, her lips threatened to part and bear a weary grin. That too she bore patiently and forced her lips to remain still.

"Because I had to." She said finally after contemplating her words thoroughly enough to suit herself. Only then did she turn.

Her golden eyes were rimmed with a weary blackness and the lines of her jaw seemed to slack somehow with grief. Isopia's horns even seemed to droop downwards. The weight of her pain was obvious. It was perhaps the only emotion that had ever shown clearly on her features. Her wings splayed slightly and her head drooped, crown lowering to bear herself before her father. To let him peer into her mind and see the enormity of her decision and the bulk of her grief, or to strike her down. It didn't matter which.

"Life shouldn't ... shouldn't be that arbitrary or sloppily made." She continued, her stare rising somewhat. "When you create life you do so thoughtfully and intentionally. You do not create lies." Fervently, her gaze roamed to the small grave where the snow wouldn't fall, and then back to her Father. "It was my fault -" Here, just for a moment, her voice broke. Sadness shattered her academic and sterile tone, infecting it with the truth of her pain. "-and I couldn't let him enter this world. Like a seedling that thinks itself unique and special, only to blossom and find itself drowned in a sea of others-" The girl shook her head. Her words weren't right, her mind was delirious now and she couldn't find the right way to articulate her justification for the murder of her son.

Perhaps that was because there wasn't one.

"I loved him." The d was like a ghost. Was it even there? It was also unclear if she meant Volterra, or her dead son.

But why not both?

"I was hasty, I gave in, and I was nothing. How could I commit myself to rearing a life born out of such a corporeal sin?" Again that shake of her head, as if trying to erase the sloppiness of her words. "I made the choice. The life. It was mine to take away, though I do not bear that choice lightly."

Isopia's eyes began to sting. She had never felt this feeling before, and suddenly her head raised sharply. She expected to see her Father angrily using some magic or other on her - to perhaps burn out her eyes for her treachery. But what she felt next was even more shocking that her lack of punishment; tears. Saline burst through and down her cheeks and Isopia inhaled sharply with the exquisite pain and surprise of it.

In that moment she wanted to scream. To wail, and run to her father. Some instinct that lay dormant inside of her until just now, suggested that some how he could make it okay. She had never thought of her father as anything more than a sperm donor, but in this moment she thought that maybe he could provide her comfort. Somehow - she wasn't sure. But she was immobilized, thinking herself undeserving of comfort. She was a murderer now, after all.

The words I'm sorry danced on her lips. But she wasn't, not really. What she had done was wrong, immoral, unforgivable perhaps, but she wouldn't repent. The consequentialist calculus was clear in her mind: whatever price there was to pay was still better than the outcome she had avoided.