Trepidation floated and sparked all the more, deep in the fathoms of her illustrious heart, a disquieting, coated, waxy interlude neither prompting her to flee or instigating her actions; a mere reminder of the shifting signs, of the softening paradigms across his face, of the thrown carcasses across his spine. Even a small part of her was disappointed in her sentiments (hadn’t she had a part in making those pelts into the fallen, who was she to judge?), but so torn, so uncertain, so undecided, she strayed and stayed in the same pinnacles, effervescent flesh in the aurora skies. She followed in the slide of silence, petal soft steps, motions and minuets of a dancer’s silken movement, the whittled chords of lakes, of washing away blood (poignant and familiar), listened to the throngs and speech Thranduil conjured, and tried not to feel like the Pied Piper’s babes, led down mountain paths and across ravines, never to be seen again. In either contortion, she seemed all the more the fool: a moth stoked into the flame, or a suspicious, blackguard mind; both made her feel ashamed and rueful. But the conversation continued and lingered upon Imogen, and though the ivory vixen tried her best not to be offended (for certainly she could be intimidating and unnerving – it was all in her foxy eyes!), Lena’s smile coaxed a matching one out of her, and the brush of feather-light music, a mellifluous rhapsody plucked from the Mender’s lips, washed over her in a beneficent candor. “Perhaps a kitsune’s talent lies in their deception…” Wasn’t it all the same glamour, the same decadence, the same specious gallows they trod upon now, in the present, wavering over some unnamed tidings, some foreboding measures, some augured opulence pressing along her brow and into her chest? Didn’t they all play those singular tunes of deviousness and pretense? Thranduil, who seemed to be something else altogether, giving over shades and shadows and masques she couldn’t pick apart or unfurl, Lena, who sometimes wove the most tender of vibrations to save a life, and then broke the next, sword stuck in an intruder’s sinew, and Imogen, who chirped and chirruped, then composed burning infernos. They wore so many layers, and subsequently tore them apart at any given moment.

He continued, asking, probing, querying, and Lena wanted to oblige, wanted to accommodate, and in another instant, keep everything to herself, not give everything over to the mysterious, ambiguous creature who fed on secrets and tales. Her eyes glided along the unfreezing lake, with its cold, clear waters, with its gripping hold, and changed again, flickering and blazing in the chilling embrace of the frozen sphere, spiraling into tunes and melodies. “If they revealed every aspect of their natures, they'd have no upper hand.” Here, her flowery stare altered and morphed into a visible, keen line, stoked upon Thranduil for one singular moment, and faltering in another second, swooping back to the innocent candor, as if she’d never been a serpent in the grass. Imogen, twirling by the long plumes of faltering cattails, snickered. The songbird’s drumming arrived again in sweet arias and inquisitive diatribes, incapable of being the sole creature scrutinized. “What do you do for the Basin?”