This invitation was not rolling as smoothly as the others she had offered, the stallions next round of questions drawing her features into a pinched and rather pained one that she would have to crush his hopes so openly and in front of a mare she’d rather not see best her again. That he has had the audacity to ask in and of itself is irksome, forcing her to remind herself that he is new to this place, and the hidden laws that define its functions. He cannot know who she is, or whom she leads; he only knows what she tells him.

What I tell him…

She could lie, she thinks, attempting to come up with a suitable one for him as Elsa ruins all chances for her to be able to weave her way around this small problem of mutant adoptive parents. For the first time since her arrival, her eyes flit over to the pegasus mare, golden depths burning with a slight hostility that she coats with the sweet lacquering of her voice. "Are they still using that hideous word?" she asks, rolling her eyes in her pretty face as she shakes of the minor insult. She didn’t ever like that word, even when it described those worthy of its insidious title; she preferred to think of herself and her kin as wiser than the others, for they saw the truth clearly as if it lie at the bottom of a still pool.

They had standards for their membership, something that most of the other herds, as she could tell, definitely lacked aside from Dragon’s Throat. It mildly agitated her to admit that a sworn enemy to the herd was one of the few who understood the mission that the Plague sought to complete, a separatism of races ending in a bloody day in which all that did not wear horns fell to their superiors.

It would take far too long to explain that now, and the stupid white mare has already wound up her words and left Illynx with no other options but to reply and hope that it was suitable enough. "It is a matter of logical reasoning, snowflake," she says, letting her acidic eyes slip away and brighten once more as she moves to explain her way out of the awkward corner that she has been placed into, "we keep the strongest, and let the others filter down to the Edge, and the Falls. I cannot help that some of my family would rather kill the wretched souls than let them pollute the kingdom elsewhere. So, no, my handsome friend." Her gaze attempts to meet his seriousness etched into its details, a hope that he might understand what it is she attempts to accomplish with her chosen herd.

"You’re family would not be welcome, nor would they chose to stay even if I offered them a place among us," she tilts her head in her usual off kilter way, golden eyes sparkling, "my kin are not known for their kindness. We are known for our chosen path, and that is the path of purity. No wings take flight over our sacred vale but those about to be swiftly removed for foolish indiscretions."

"But we are strong, and long lived, as far as herds go. You will find no deeper companionship than you would with those upon the mountain, I can assure you. No other can understand your plight so well as those of your own bloodlines. Your family, if they come, could live elsewhere, you could journey to visit them, wherever they might be… but they may not enter our fold. Our laws do not bend, even for those in your situation."

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.