The world was not black or white.
It was immersed in shades of grey.

She stood overlooking her herd land, eyes raised to watch the first drops of warm rain break upon the water of the lake from the straight curtains of her forelock, attempting to decide if she should retire to her cave to let the storm pass or if she should remain in the open and take the beating from the Gods. Within herself, she was contemplative as usual, though her face read only boredom; as hostile as she'd been lately, it was a nice reprieve to be able to quietly reside within her own mind, and even the tears of the sky weren't as terrible as they normally were to the woman. She'd found that she had grown and changed quite a lot since the failed rescue mission of the children, truly since she had returned to Helovia after her unspoken leave of absence. It wasn't that she had tried to do so - Illynx wasn't the sort to take note of faults within herself, and thus didn't seek to improve anything about who she was. As far as she could be concerned, she was fabulous and the rest of the world would bend around her; or at least, that's how she had once thought of herself.

Now, she wasn't so sure.

The loneliness that had seeped into her heart since discovering that she had been left alone, again, had made her rethink a lot of her cold and impersonal tactics. Surely, she didn't regret any of her previous actions but for a few fleeting memories that were easily enough swept under the rug, but she had come to understand that having but one friend in all the world meant that she was far more vulnerable than those she had once believed to be so piteously weak for living their life in the hearts of others; if all it took to wound her spirit so deeply was to remove a single soul, she couldn't be very strong at all.

Her mind slides away into nostalgic memories of the Edge, the place where she had tossed that stupid colt from the cliffs and into the tossing ocean for insulting her pride. To be honest, she couldn't even remember what he had actually done to deserve it, but as she was with most of her violent reactions to the hornless, she didn't suppose she had needed a reason to begin with; what remained most firmly in her memory was the way the leader of the herd had discovered the broken body of the pegasus child floating like a bloated turkey in the water below, the wrath with which she had been accused though she had been seen by none and left no clues that could lead them to believe it hadn't simply been an accident. That it had been her wasn't the point - it was the shade of grey, that middle ground between the truth of the thing and the visual evidence, that had condemned her.

She had been born to be loathed, and part of her accepted this even now, surrounded by those who followed her for reasons she was unsure of.

She was pretty, that was damn sure - a quick glance to the slightly disrupted lake water at her hooves verified that, and surely not as stupid as many of the others she had run across. The woman could hold her own on a battlefield (unless it was a bitch and her damn dragon) and she was not afraid to speak her mind; but none of these stood as valid reasons to her for them to trust her, if they even did at all. After all, what had she ever done for anyone other than herself or Psyche? Hell, her crown had been accepted for the sake of the Empress, not by any true wishes of her own, despite her need for importance and endless vanity; the weight of it all had steadily been pressing in on her since she had departed the Basin for the fateful battle that had been the end of her beloved's extended reign over the valley of the unicorns.

Pulling out of the full force of the rain that had now begun to flood from overhead, she lingered beneath the trees and felt the occasional spill down her spine, though the conifer she had chosen was old and broad, well suited for cover until the pathways described by Kelec could be finished. Suddenly realizing that she was moping quite piteously, she shook her head as if to rid it of a cloud of invisible flies that ate away at her eyes, replacing her thoughts with pleasant ones of conquest and blood shed - no matter that she and her kin seemed to have accomplished exactly the opposite of all their nefarious desires.

@[Torleik]