en natt så kall och månen den var klar

He was not a shepherd anymore—nor the leader of wolves, singing his victory songs and setting their blood aflame with battle-lust. He was no divine crusader on a quest of purging, no two-faced politician who danced upon a knife's edge to bring glory to his own and devastation to all others.

He was just a broken man who was used to so much more, that just life itself was not enough. A restless beast who had lost its strength.

"If only," he echoed her quietly, thinking of the vast, black cavern underground. Hidden from the sun, he'd felt more alive, somehow—or maybe it was just the near brush with death that had hammered some temporary sense into him. It had been a whole new world to explore, and there, he'd almost found some kind of peace in the blue lights of the glowing room. Could someone full of light have lit all the distant walls of that cavernous, vast blackness? And what would those walls have revealed? Wondrous displays of light in the crystals, or the dried, old blood from something much darker?

Or just a plain old cave?

Arah suddenly seemed naive, and innocent, and his heart so dark, and heavy. She smiled—and it was beautiful on her, she ought to smile more, be happy—but he could not. The words died on his tongue. I've been trying to come back to life for years and I'm still dead. They tasted of betrayal, and weakness; had he given up the fight? But he was so tired, and everything that mattered.. everything was wrong, and he didn't know how he could ever make it right again. If it was even possible, or if some things were so deeply out of joint that nothing could ever set it right.

Surely his silence spoke volumes of his mind, even when his distant gaze and voice did not. Hiding behind the tangled locks of his hair, he didn't think of it, of the things his lack of words hinted at; just watched the young griffin quietly, as she came back to perch upon her bonded. "Tell me Mauja... How do you think we should spend tonight?" He'd barely reflected on the time of day, but that was not the reason his entire body suddenly froze, and his slightly narrowed eyes turned full of suspicion as they landed on her again. What, he wanted to hiss, suddenly afraid of her smiles and her kindness and the warmth of her voice—burned too many times by his own stupidity and lack of control, too many mistakes, and Snö's words ringing in his mind like an earthquake and the shrillness of a keening storm.

"I really do hope you did not mean for that to sound that way," he managed to force out, his voice cold, but his soul desperate for her to smack him for even daring to insinuate she might've meant such a thing—

And he felt even more the villain, knowing how he stared at her with a mixture of frigidity and desperation, when she looked at him only with the warmth of her golden soul.

But he just needed to know: know, that he was safe.

[ -smacks the idiot pony- ]

Se dem brinna över verkan se dem dansa framför bål
Se dem mässa inför satan se dem smida sina stål