With curious eyes, Huyana watches the water spatter on the general's face, surprise flashing like coins tossed in a wishing-well in that impenetrable gaze. She laughs, and the sound is like raindrops on glass ornaments, the light-hearted tinkle of a brook winding over stone. You are no monster, the roan girl wants to shout at him, wants to proclaim to the world, you are not stone. An impish smile crawling across her face (she is still shaking from the last vestiges of laughter); would she be able to coax another reaction, however small, from Deimos? Her tail whisks over the lake's agitated surface and its wild ripples and splashes. It flicks again, sprinkling the water with more droplets.

An idea crosses her mind.

She raises a foreleg, darkened with water, above the lake, lifting a cascade of frigid water in its wake. But suddenly, from the tip of her hoof to the point of her elbow, the flesh and bone and tendon slough with the water, into the lake. Huyana gives Deimos a fleeting, mischievous glance before thrusting her face into the lake - and it disappears, seemingly swallowed by the clear water. The rest of her body slides in easily, and she is gone; there are no traces of her existence. It was if she had never been there, and all is still when the violent bucking of the water recedes, leaving the general quite alone. She wonders what he will do.

From underneath, she watches him from the very body of the lake, his dark face silhouetted against the clearing sky. He was framed by stars, and she thought what a beautiful likeness this was; calm, serene, how things should be - a warrior at peace, a bloodied blade put to rest. If she had lips, a heart, lungs, Huyana would have smiled, laughed, cried, but she made due with what she had at her disposal and admired him from the deep instead.

What strange turns life made: a young Huyana would have loathed Deimos on site - he was the polar opposite of any ideal the young girl had. He was darkness, he was death, he was destruction, but Huyana herself was also darkness; she could be selfish, angry, fickle. They both had their different brands of darkness - he was the absence of light, whereas she was the murkiness of the deep sea, the sudden dusk a stormcloud brings; but sunny days always followed rain, and above the ocean's surface there was always sky. Light could penetrate true darkness - but darkness could never, ever obscure light. War could wreak havoc and destroy all the eye could see, but spring would always come, and rain would heal all.

""

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