She divided her time between pretending and dreaming, trailing away from the ghosts of presaged treachery and into the snow-laden willows of promise, of opulence, driving hope into onslaughts, harnessing beneficence into horror. Her eyes found the stars and counted bright, blinking constellations, her ears listened to the chilling wind and imagined summer breezes and firefly gatherings, her frame bent and flowed beside the Thief’s, feigned that she too was garbed in gold. By and by, as they drifted down warrens and sea foam, prospered unsung lyrics and rhymes, trilled and chirped into darkness and dawn, the nervous, apprehensive edges showed their clawing features, dragged their fangs down her spine. Her songs, her imagination, her arias, her chimeras altered and changed, morphed and reshaped, into anxious hymns and brittle hallelujahs, painted runes and enigmas with crisp, restless strokes. Her strides moved out of rhythm, possessed no elegance, forgot how to shuffle in petal-soft motions, stumbled into dunes and damp sand. Her breath shuffled into agitated curls, puffs composed and manifested in overwrought fronds, coiling back upon themselves, too unsteady to survive in the midnight twirls and morning light. Her fairy gaze scanned the horizons and choked back trepidation, waiting, waiting, waiting endlessly for danger to find her, cloak her, damn her into the furthest reaches of pain and torment. Once, she’d marched into war and welcomed it with a vicious, wild embrace, and now she wandered into peril without a mask, without a veneer, without a façade, demonic fathoms wasted, infidel capabilities forgotten. Every noise was a sign of impending doom, an augured fortitude, a frothing mouth, a glittering, glimmering sheen of embers tethered and embarking for her figure, without a single individual making their presence known. Like monsters in childish nightmares, they simply existed everywhere, with no space or time defining them, chained and shackled to nocturnal oils and diurnal splendor, lacing and weaving their shadowy frames around her frightened sector, preying upon the first taste of fear, the first relish of dread. The disquiet haunted her bright thoughts, her candid, affable being, bade and burned, scarred and bestowed, the silent channel of swallowed souls and poignant, elegiac statues fallen into the abyss. She printed and carved her wake into the shambles of the shoal at the morning’s early beams, stretched across the ardent reaches of the ocean, marveled at the strength, the seizure, the composure, of the elements and how she could never capture the substance, the spirit, of its nature; she bent, she broke, she withered and wilted in the surging promise of pain and torment. Her eyes swam over to Roland’s, bestowed a wan, dim smile, drenched the unwieldy gaze towards the sand, then returned to the biding wiles of time, forced to stray back into its macabre hands – and like an immolation, like a sacrifice, like the lamb beneath the executioner’s knife, she marched ahead, pressing into the shore as a gift, as an offering, to augured tyranny, blazing blades, and towering infernos. The Songbird sought the heat, and paused in its unrest, an impending phoenix with only one set of ashes.

[@[Gaucho] @[Roland]
- For Sun God quest. ^_^]