Birdsong always merited its just rewards, its long-lasting wait for the burdens of Frostfall to crack, to chisel, to fly away into the expanse of merry sparrows and emboldened sunshine, drenching the world with warmth and delight. From gilded ramparts and sodden rainfalls came verdant greenery, arrived tiny bulbs, miniscule, delightful blossoms, little shoots gathering the heartfelt nutrients of spring’s wholesome sonnets. As nymph and kitsune basked in the serenity, in the tranquility, their hearts’ drank and indulged in copse reveries and glade raptures, witnesses to blades and boughs reimagined: tapestries, portraits, compositions of green, of emerald, brightened into luminescent shades. They picked and nestled amongst the beds of roots and moss, they sidled through the tundra forest, the linings of pine and fir, they whistled and caroled amidst the mass of jasmine follies and carnation hopes, tried to forget the woes of deaths, of miseries, and settled across the expanse with a full heart and stalwart endeavors. Lena identified the ample herbs discovered long ago: the rich, sometimes blighted bearberry, the assisting pasque flower, the blades of the diamond-leaf willow, the Labrador tea after she’d explored the ground for further bits and pieces. Imogen, ever the buoyant patriot, laced them amidst her widened mouth (bravely refused to broil them into ash and flames), and followed her sienna mistress as they drifted and traversed, gypsies of the north. The latter smiled, perhaps for the first time in long, beaten segments of time and conjectures, examined and scrutinized the frond and needled bundle, questioned the only other occupant. “Do you think it’s enough?” The ivory vixen was inclined to agree, chirped through her mouthful of herbs, dancing lightly ahead of the Time Mender as she hastened a light aria of laughter, followed the pale beast on their rose-lined path and mission.

They traversed down a familiar passage, crossed their borders and angled southward, past the Frozen Arch and all of its mysterious corridors, down amidst the melting snowfall, and swinging westbound towards the well-known World’s Edge. Though years and seasons collided and corroded, healed and assuaged, the sylph still felt a restless prickle down the fixture of her spine: maybe out of fear, maybe out of humiliation, maybe out of shame for all the actions scalded and concocted there, because she’d fed the fuel and fire with her own anger, because they’d all had brutal, damaged, scarred hands and the perilous, flagging efforts of her kin only masked the hurt they’d withstood ages before. As they rustled and rambled into the mist, into the murk, she listened to the rolling sea crashing against the rocks, she pictured the disastrous outcrops, the beautiful sprawl of merciless steel and moonlit conspiracies, slowed as the chimes of memories echoed, scrawled, ghosted against her senses. Poltergeists of the past: a glass wall deteriorating, spotted Lords and his daughter leaping amongst warrens, mighty warriors sacrificing hearts and minds, control spiraling out of their dignified throngs. A billowing breath cascaded from her follies, and Imogen exalted her concern with an embellished snort; Lena shook her head and continued onward, slinking amidst shadows and sunlight, returning to old elements, enveloped in forest grasps and timber clutches. All at once, before she could be folded back into the murk, into the disastrous claims and ruined glimpses, into haunted spells (for this was to be a jubilant affair, not a crusade back into unrelenting tales), she bellowed a charitable, honey-spun beckoning on their fringes, along their borders: striving to bear gifts instead of demons.

[Lena comes with herbs from the Basin to give to the Edge! ^_^]