Instantly, recognition flashes across the lacey faced mare and Illynx smiles warmly in response, her ego swelling that she is growing so adept at naming the numerous faces of her fold. Surely, she should give Deimos credit for the work, as well, but we all know she is not the sort to allow her thunder to be at all diminished by the punitive rainclouds of others, and so the stoic and dark man is cast to the back of her thoughts, a simple cog in the clockwork of her coven. He has his uses, as do all men; for one, he can sire children, evident by the little flower thing she’d met some seasons past, and she had felt the touch that had made him famous across the land, but neither of those things truly made him a legend. Any man could wield the scythe of death and wear just as much mystique and prowess as Deimos did, and the man, so small minded and trapped within himself (oh how very alike our two rulers of the snow are, how very distant they make themselves) that he cannot see that he has been granted a gift that he takes for granted with his silence and bitterness.

Beowulf is so very unlike Deimos that it almost makes her laugh out of place that she thinks of the dark stallion when discussing aloud the soft hearted, bear of a man that had offered assistance in defense so long as it didn’t involve getting his hooves bloody. Even at the meeting it had been hard not to giggle at him, dismissing his request towards the crafters and the sentinels, not wishing to hurt his gentle soul with her knives of truth. Beowulf was weak; Mammoth was not a fair name for such a man. But she laughs all the same, her dark locks tossed with a carefree air from her golden eyes, and she nods in consent despite her inward rebuttal of the statement.

She may seem kind, but she is a stranger; Illynx doesn’t know how long her tongue is, and doesn’t wish to find out how fast it wags.

The Lady takes note of the way the other woman absorbs her words as if she speaks of magic unheard of in this era. It adds an extra tilt to her smile, but her mockery is held carefully behind her poised porcelain mask; its too easy to slip into the easy laughter and cadence of girl talk, the way that this female drinks in her presence as if the aura emanating from her chocolate and gilded brindle frame was ambrosia, intoxicating, relentless.

That same curiosity pouring from her companion’s face is voiced aloud, to which Illynx has also grown used to; she has a way of painting love into her words when she spoke of her snowy province, a sort of reverence that had been missing even when she had once described her home as that of where she had been born, the falling cliffs of the World’s Edge. She had once spent an afternoon hiding from the rain with Deodat, discussing the hearts of their kin and the relation she felt that each of them held to the snow and stone, how even sweet and soft as Lena or Huyana may be, they were no less ruthless than the soft glimmer of light across bitingly frigid ice.

She didn’t think then that he had understood what she was trying to say, when she’d asked him if he was comprised of flame, or ice. He had answered wrong in so many ways, and yet, had told her more of their composite soul than she had known prior. To each of them, she owed some truth learned, though she might never admit it through her pride, but she surely would never forget what they had given her.

All this power, shining and fierce.

She laughs, light and airy, amused by the fact that snow mane had become lost in her adventures north as so many others who hadn’t had guides to show them the way. It made her even more proud of herself and those who had walked the hard road to the Basin from the lost land of the Edge, those who had learned the secrets of the winding, tricky routes of the mountain passes on their own with no one to show them where to walk. "Just us in the Aurora Basin," she says, smile sweet and supple on her lips, "for a short while there was an outcast band housing themselves in the tundra, the Assassins. Life is hard when too exposed in the North, as I said. I almost pity their failed companionship; they struggled to live in such a place, to be sure... what love they must have felt for their leader to remain where no food grows and the wind can still find you even deep into the glacial caverns." She pauses, gazing out towards the sky for a moment as she ponders her singular meeting with that man, Tonka, some time before she had become a Lady and shortly after she had returned to her station in Helovia. He had not seemed so much impressive as simply kind and bold, even if inexperienced and not the most clever in the art of leadership. He had reminded her, in ways, of the Merciful, perhaps even lost Lord Mauja, the sort of man that others loved deeply and fiercely, the ones they wished could lead them but that lacked the solid cores necessary to do so.

Illynx had no softness left within her, or so she liked to think. Women were far more suited to the role of kingship than men, the only throne they truly desired or honored the one in which they got their spring rocks off onto.

"There is only one way to my home, and all who know its way are those who were guided by those before them," she explains, putting to ease any fears the femme may have that she had failed to see such an obvious sight as a herd land, "after my kin and I lost our home in World’s Edge to the Qian, the Lord Time approached our then leaders and led them into the mountains to our valley, the only reason it is now anyone’s home other than the Lightning God who lends it and his strength to us. The peaks surround it in such heights that most of the snow and wind are held back by the stone and the caves run deep and plenty enough to shield us from whatever terrible weather might manage to reach down into the Basin. It is a good life, though not as warm as the sands of the Throat or splendorous as the rolling Windtossed Foothills, but the grass is sweet and our God is good to us even when the world is unkind."

@[Agrona]

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.