Something stirs in the meadow at midnight. It moves on on legs too long, too thin, to ever hold a proper weight; it moves like a creature breathed from spun glass, careful and improbable. The moonlight bathes its thin hairs in silver grandeur as shadows pool up like black water around the cloven hooves. It thinks, it had a name once -- or had several -- but perhaps they were all things made up by a fearful mind.

        Perhaps there is no place to recall the creature’s name. Perhaps there is no one alive to know him.

        His thoughts swim like hungry fish through the cool darkness. They are always nipping at his fetlocks, now. They bare sharp teeth at the back of his mind. Perhaps they want him to remember something -- who he is -- who he was supposed to be. He reminds them with a quiet frown, with the sharp flick of his naked tail, that he has never known such things. He is, as he wanders and looks at the sky, as true to the heart of himself as he can ever be.

        He is alone, and only the stars bother to see him at all.

        Though this sky, the place above Helovia, is not his native sky, he understands it now -- a little bit. He draws vague pictures with the subtle movement of his eyes. The restless momentum of his hooves falls short, and in silence he plays connect-the-dots with himself, and maps north, and thinks that once, briefly, he could have called a place there home. But home is much like family, like friends, like fairytales and all the things he has wanted but never understood how to grasp. He has left it behind -- let it go. He breathes out, and looks down, and with pale eyes drinks in the moonlit splendor of the meadow.

        It grows cold. Whispers of frost move on the night breeze and he fails to comprehend their meaning, wondering only if the kiss of cold means rain or something else. He thinks of the glittering rocks up north, of the sparse grass and the endless sky but far from those now he recalls them all like objects from a dream. He stands in knee-high grass and that, too, still rocks strange against his mind. Perhaps he is lost -- more lost than he has ever been.

        And he is lonely.

        He understands that now, and something black crawls around in his chest, leaving streaks. If only he could manage to hold on to something… If only he had answered that god in the meadow, or followed the girl with the midnight voice, or gone back to Roland and asked about being a thief -- but he did not. He disappeared instead, and now he stands stagnant as ever, slightly cold and a little concerned, wondering if perhaps this is his sole inheritance -- this loneliness.

        Perhaps it is all he was ever meant to have.