A weight settles within the Nightingale's soul. It grasps, drags, tugs forth worries, anxieties, fretful ideals that dance among obscured corridors and lengthened halls within the very clockwork of her mind. It extends into her bones, her swaying slow dance across the ballroom of existence, burns her, scalds her with heat so agonizing that she is shocked and aghast to find flames have not licked up to kiss her clammy flesh. Illness does not plague her, however somber her mood, and despite the holiday festivities the Nightingale finds herself to be (remorsefully) unable to frolic amidst the laughing, guffawing crowds, the children that play tag across the sodden Earth, the quiet couplings beneath sheltered trees, gentle tugs upon harks and soft lyrics in the hidden, forsaken areas of the backbone of the land beneath her hooves.

Ah. But of course, you would want to know why, no?
Allow her to explain herself, the tiniest bit more, doll. She's getting there.

When the woman came to these lands, she was met by the angelic frame of a soldier, dappled black and ashen, alabaster, glacier ice from the farthest away ocean's, the very arctic itself, and followed him forth into the darkness that swallowed her, ensnared her as the fly against the web of a spider, damned and hopeless, accursed to the dripping fangs and starving stomach of the insect of prey that has gathered a successful hunt. The expectation she was given from the soldier gave her the enthusiastic and utter impression that the world in which she hath entered was not so unlike the world in which she has crawled from, of majesties and civilizations, cities, palaces carved from the stone beneath cobblestone roads for the Queen and the King's alone to gain entry into.
She was, as one would assume based upon logic, dazed when she was brought to that of a swamp littered and festering with the dead. Maggots fed upon the bodies of the long-forgotten, shadows crept along the contours of one's visions as if they indeed survived, and the dead gathered unseen in the midst of the living to gaze with hunger in their lifeless pearls upon the souls that intruded upon their slumbers, ripe for the picking, if only the mistake of a hoof in muddy water's would occur.
She was, even more so, alarmed when the insane came forward from the shadows, crafted from chaos itself, and gave her the title of Seeker.

And most of all, she was frightened by the notion of affection that boiled up within the glass-captured heart, beating as frantic as the wings of birds beneath the cage of her bosom, the flesh that had become iron bars against the cruelties of the outside world. She had grown far from these things, these petty state's of mentality that often drove the sane to their doom. It was illogical. It was foolish. She was the opposition of such things, the voice of reason, the cunning grin beneath a cowled hood.
She had dwelled among the most intriguing of scientific discoveries for so very long that the Nightingale found the sane as but pawns, toy figurines among the glory that was the Asylum. All that mattered was the ability to find out what made them tick and then the Nightingale could tear down the very walls and palaces built up around the fragile bud that was their mind, raw and unfiltered, and she had yet to gather the essentials (a good brain, a willing or unwilling subject in which to test her theories upon) to do so, although she twisted and sang and all but killed herself to see how, and in which ways if so, mortal's could be mutated to absorb her lyrics, and do her bidding in the process. Finding a new homeland was essential for the process to take place, for the dirtied landscape of the Marsh was no hospital, no place to sit a cranium upon the ground, and no place to examine organs to find out what quite made them work. She was certain if a brain was laid in all it's splendor upon the quagmire's surface, a greedy hand of the undead would reach upward to steal it from her grasp before she could make proper assessments based upon her gained knowledge.

No, the Nightingale found the land of the undead repulsive, disgusting, vile as one may find another's vomit sickening to the stomach. She had yearned, craved, desired the taste of freedom from the darkened land so very much, that she had neglected to count one's blessings.
It was taken from them in one sweep of the unknown.

Thanatos sent forth his shades upon them, took the very landscape that they had sweated and worked for from beneath the steady suction of their hooves.
It was true, the Marsh had been no palace, no Kingdom, no civilization in which one should live (or wish to) if they cared, any minuscule amount, for the well being of their frames.
But it had been home, somewhere along the line in which she had traveled, it had become her home.

And as all things do, when they come in contact with her flesh, it had withered, and died, crumbled as the delicate petals of a spring flower cast into the raging force of the Heart.
It was inexplicable. And it had left them homeless.
Would it be so surprising, if she dug and fought her way into the encased, bloodied red muscle beneath obsidian and alabaster sinew, and found that she was just the same as she had been so many years before? Would it be so shocking, to find that she, the Nightingale, was still the same young girl that had trembled and gazed upon the lifeless body of the corpse she had so elegantly murdered, the corpse that had given her life?

No.
It would not be so shocking.
Not at all.


She had followed the cardinal that flew above her dome, stained as sanguine as the fluids that came from her veins, as cursed as she with the blood of those whom had fallen to the Witch. Oh, the Nightingale could scrub and roll in as much water and as many hyacinths as she wished, but no river, no childish flower would cleanse the splattering of red she saw each time her reflection met her indigo pearls. Perhaps it was odd she found it so bemusing to observe. Perhaps it was leading her to her death, to burn among the flames she had, no doubt, created from some.. fiction of her tormented mind.

And so here she was. Beneath the branches of a silver and aureate laden tree, beneath the squirrels and cardinal that had called it home, the flocks of birds that had come forth, the phoenix that sat regally atop the branches of the Great Tree, she stood, awestruck, amazed.
She registers the sight of her blood-stained Queen, if only for the faintest of moments.
A quiet, exhausted prayer trembled forth from her mind, not in speech, not in words.

Please. Keep us safe. And then, softly, as gentle as the brush of a downy bird's feathers—
"Amen."