She breaks through the trees that line the vale’s southwestern point, body held gracefully and her armor gleaming in the spring sunlight, golden legs dipping in and out of the growing grasses and wildflowers as she jogs her patrol route. The season after the disaster of Frostfall is quiet and peaceful, droll and languid, and while she mildly appreciates the change of pace from the chaos of before, she would much rather have something more fun to do than mine and trot along the boundaries of the Basin.

The dust of her labor lays on her from her early morning endeavors to crack stone and relinquish the metals beneath, slightly drained from her magical exertions and not utilizing her patrol path for physical training purposes as she might have on other days, simply floating along at her easy trot with black tail streaming along behind her, golden eyes lighting up as she spies the Corporal and a face she has not seen before fringing the gateway.

Moving towards them at her easy pace, she arrives with a smile on her face, long tail wrapping about her hinds as she stills her motion and a courteous nod delivered to them both. The female who has come with Deodat has asked a question as Illynx enters their fold, eyes searching the colossus that guards the doorway into their home, but for the time, she only has eyes of scrutiny while the stranger floats about in her wonderment. She is large and bay, marked with blue and crowned with a chocolate and azurite streaked horn, and at first glances, Illynx sizes her up as a soldier, her weight well suited to line the front assault to break apart the form of the enemy force, but there is also something innocent that radiates about her, reminding her of Zima or Tangere; both of those women had sought the path of healing over the one of violence.

It was a shame, really. Illynx had more uses for swords than flowers.

"They’re guards," she says, answering the woman’s question within a few seconds of arriving despite all her mental ponderances, "this one is only a shell." She giggles, a tinkling merry sound as she hits lightly on its side with her horn, drawing a boooong from the empty bronze of the left statue before turning to the right, creating a much more solid sounding biing. Her smile flickers light and playful on her lips, almost as if a butterfly twitching about her muzzle, as she returns her full focus to the duo.

"Welcome to the Aurora Basin. I am Illynx, Lady of the Mountain."

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.