If she had known what disdain the golden felt for her, for her simple mind and child-bright views on the world, she might have not have trusted him with all of the terrible secrets that rode in her heart. She might have run away from this copse of trees, into the deluge around them, to shed her sorrows with tears that would be camouflaged as rain instead of words that left her soul as open and vulnerable as they could be to this monster wearing his golden mask. Perhaps someday someone might reveal his atrocities to her and she would cry for a lost friend, but his mask was perfect to her, unmarred, unstained, uncracked… She would find no chink in his armor because, as he had so kindly pointed out, she couldn’t see it at all.

Indeed, she spoke of which she knew not. She wanted freedom… she said it allowed and she could feel it in her heart, but how many times had she called wanderers lonely? How many times had she invited them into her home so that they might garner company and friends? And hadn’t she hated that year she spent alone, wandering the woodlands by day and shivering in the dark by night? Did she really know what freedom meant, or did she only love the idea of freedom? Perhaps, it was simply that the queen wanted to eat her cake and have it too.

No one should ever hand a child a crown- they’ll only break it.

But it seemed she had broken the golden too, who sighed and looked away from her. She frowned, suddenly remember that lady Illynx had had been cruel enough to destroy the golden’s love, whomever she might have been, and here she had come traipsing up to him in this storm and likely brought back every bad memory of the moment, of the history, that he had shared with her. She sighed herself, at her inadequacies. She had not meant to be cruel, had not meant to pain him, but she clearly had and she lamented her inability to even seek council without causing pain. She had broken Kaj’s heart, now Thranduil’s… whose next?

Love, he whispered, and she looked up from the ground she had been staring at. Putting someone’s needs before hers, trusting they will do the same? Her mouth twisted and pursed, her eyes closing. She loved her herd, had proven it by fighting Aurelia, killing the damned snake, putting their needs before her own, but loving the herd was… abstract to the queen, a duty that had been assigned to her that she had taken upon herself. It was forced love- a love she had not been given a choice in when the Lady Moon had descended from her midnight throne in the sky. But this love for Kaj, this love she thought she felt and that she wanted to be able to give him… This was a voluntary love, one she had found in her own heart first- but the golden made her question even her own heart.

Was it really love she felt? Would she really put her own thoughts and feelings before Kaj’s without hesitating to do so? She knew Kaj would, had even, but herself? She was a selfish coward. Was it the selfish coward’s rite, then, to never be able to love, by the definition the golden had given? Her eyes returned to the ground as she tried to work this all out. His next words didn’t help much, giving her no peace in the matter. She did not find this love to be freeing at all. She found it to be the very death of her. Perhaps she had been wrong, then, to say she loved him at all.

She turned, pressing her head firmly against the nearest tree, feeling the bark as it scraped against her flesh, fighting back tears that she knew would come anyways. She wished the pounding rain would disappear, the lightning, the wind, the howling. Strange, then, that as she wished it, it seemed to happen- she could almost feel a sort of magic flowing through her, making it happen. Cautiously withdrawing her head from the trees, Kahlua turned to find that the rain pounding down was building up a wall around the copse of trees, hardening with glass-like clarity, protecting and isolating herself and the golden, an exit from the walls found beyond the trees on the side she had come from.

And, when the structure was done being built, the queen felt exhausted but also whole again. She could craft?! She knew not where the magic had come from, but found it to be a ray of hope when all had seemed lost before. And even the torrential downpour seemed farther away now, as the beads of water beat against the glass instead of herself and the wind blew around her, but not through her anymore. But the questions she needed answers still haunted her, still demanded to be heard. At least now she could speak without falling to tears, as she had threatened to a moment ago. “Can love ever be anything different?”