The sentinels were a ruddy, red orange in the light of the falling Sun, the first stars blooming in the violet tails of the sky and a quiet row of clouds clinging to the upper peaks of the mountain; the Lady and her newest trinket arrive beneath the splendorous light, Kyst dozing along the spine of her bonded and the Gilded Blade chattering away at the woman about anything they passed that seemed of worth to mention and many other things that mattered very little at all.

As she was with most she brought home, the golden one is anxious to see the stranger’s reaction to the Sentinels, the keystone of the new empire that she sought to build on the foot stones that her sister had laid out for her. They were a symbol of strength, of brilliance blended with innovation, of her own dark heart and the way it had bound itself to the man who had molded the metal to create the only thing in her life that had ever been brought into fruition whole, and perfect.

That she was already breaking her little Rikyn went unnoticed; she was far too enamored with how much she loved him and the way it made her feel important to be concerned with how her parenting affected him. Either way, the boy was invisible until the Time Lord deemed him worthy of being someone again, having asked for the weirdest magic she had ever heard of and receiving an equally ludicrous punishment. Her problems now of course made sense; she rarely made bad deals, after all, and it was fair to forfeit power for the gain of more.

She missed both her son and her magic desperately.

At least, she thinks with a smile as Kyst rouses with a sleepy stretch and long, yawning mew, still has her griffon.

Perhaps the sadness that she dwells in flickers momentarily on her face as she turns and reapplies her mask, a smile slipping over her lips as she pivots around to stand framed in the full beauty of the Basin at dusk. The wind is chilly, but not so cold as it will be in a month or so, the summer having stretched long into the autumn to keep the air warmer than it should have been, fluctuating from freezes to near humidity over the past week and what Illynx suspects will be a week or so more.

The snow is crisp beneath her hooves, a background sound to the prettiness of her voice as she gives her official welcome. "And this is it," she says with a smile and genial tilt of her crown, gesturing around her at the prettiness of her home.

@[Grimmrot]

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.