Few were the commands given to her by Psyche in all her years among the Plague, and fewer still those that had passed the lips of the Frostheart before he had faded away, leaving Illynx (not that she complained, mind you) with her flashy new title and an imaginary crown nestled about her dark rimmed ears. Lady or not, however, his command still clung to her thoughts, ever loyal to the superior that she had never truly loved or even admired for much more than the power he held; Mauja had been only a symbol of the life she now lived, and while she could not recall his face no matter how she pressed her brain, she remembered very clearly the night he had come to her with a task that, in retrospect, had filled her with a robust pride to be so trusted.

And so she kept her word to the Lord who no longer reigned on the mountain, her gilded orbs watching the ebony and crimson figure of her foster child from a distance, as she always did since her father had managed his escape during the failed invasion of the Edge. Mauja had not told her that she must converse with the winged brat, only hold her within the boundaries of the snow clad peaks, and so she had silently observed Destry for the many months since she had been assigned the task, at first only once or twice a week (Azzaron was still available to baby-sit his daughter, then) but now almost daily since her father's successful escape. Her keeping evenly shared with Ulrik and the numerous patrols, one would have expected the child to have had some interaction with the horned company of the Basin, but each time Illynx found the winged darling in her sights, she was alone.

Despite the way her feathered appendages made her gut crawl, the woman with the yellow lock felt pity simmering beneath the disgust, self loathing enveloping the emotion. She too had been alone, once, no choice of her own, as it was with Destry; the only differences between herself and the child were, for one, that Illynx was of superior breeding, but also that the pegasus' family was alive and well outside the borders, while her own were but dust blended into the rich soil of the World's Edge.

Boredly watching her patron skirt through the emptiness of the valley, she could not help but notice that with each passing day, the red tipped wings of the girl drooped lower to the snow encrusted earth, her eyes gleamed less brightly. One could not expect a child to understand how fortunate her circumstance truly was; she should smile, run freely with a grin about her face, to know that her treacherous mother and mutant father had been allowed to keep their breath, that they still lived and could be found. Illynx despised her misery anyway. Truly, the half breed was condemned by the GildedBlade for simply being born, and the thought of why the ugly little wretch was so unhappy was much further away than the still distant idea of thinking about her feelings as more than a nuisance.

The mare had begun to turn and leave the whelp to her own devices when, suddenly, it seemed as if the little pegasus had simply gone mad. A shrill scream split the silence of the Basin, drawing Illynx's head upright in a sudden flurry of motion, her eyes widening at the sound as her features swiveled around to stare with surprise in the direction of the prisoner. When the bush burst into flames alongside the child from a bolt of red hot light that had seemed to erupt from all across her flesh, the last few gears that had been initiated into motion within the golden laced warrior's brain as the child had screamed out to the sky clicked into place, sending her golden tinted legs flowing with elegance one after the other, her bay bodice cat like as it closed the distance between Destry and herself.

Any plans Mauja had for her vanished with him, she consoled herself as she ventured nearer, I am now queen. She is mine to do with as I please. Still, she couldn't help but wonder why it was that she bothered to try and console the child, if that was even why she was approaching her in the first place; rodents deserved to wallow in misery. "Oh, Destry," she called out as the filly stifled the flames and buried the coals in snow, her voice sweet and feminine, a candy coating over the putrid carnage of her soul, "do you really hate the mountain so that you would burn it down?" Stilling her momentum about four feet from the foal, she looked with gleaming eyes to see if the child recognized the shadow that had followed her since the day her father had finally escaped his snow clad prison.

[ OOC: Hopefully Krazie doesn't mind me going ahead and posting. :| I had ze muse and I figured I'd use it. If she'd rather post first, I can take it down and modify for Loth. <3

Also, I'm not sure if Neo ever messaged anyone with the details about what happened OOCly involving Delinne leaving the Basin as Neo poofed like three days later and there was a lot of other chaos going on outside of RPing. xD But Illynx has been quietly stalking Destry since then (GUARDIAN STYLE WOOT WOOT) and Ulrik should also have been keeping an eye out for her, under Mauja's orders. :P ]

There was a river once,
with many round stones
enchanted by shallow hopes
of embracing the ocean;
water is peculiar this way,
how its life is a line
that cannot bend or change
without the approval of its bed.