She was so tired of death. It held them all, binding and controlling, stifling and smothering, and served a constant reminder that everyone’s endurance, ability, and strength came to an end. To a wide-eyed dreamer who yearned for naught more than repose, than renewal, than ebullience, the world had shifted to constant condemnation, to unyielding damnation, and covered her jubilant essence with downtrodden, suspicious sentiments. They’d all been forced to see their loved ones perish, the perpetrator still unknown, wandering the halls and valleys and parlors hoping to find one more clue, one more hint, of how and why all of this had occurred. Like another form of pestilence, they’d been diseased and maligned to presume, deduce, and suspect everyone, to forget about safety, to trace over foundations and lines long since buried. They too were ghosts and wraiths, phantoms and poltergeists, wayfaring detectives consumed and devoured by the deadly invocations and rites; even the Songbird had been ensnared into spectral wishing, into longing, for the tyrant to be found. Now her gaze had narrowed into naught more than protective stances and aspirations of grandeur, too far-gone to be remembered or granted again. Even as she drifted, the familiar faces poked and prodded her thoughts, vast images of fallen comrades and innocent children: Psyche, freed from demonic trappings only to be felled by the unknown, Ode, slain because he’d been closing in on secrets.

This time, the lithe nymph didn’t recognize the victim or her family. It didn’t ease the sense of pain, of recollection, of burdens, and she stayed, strayed, to the far back of the whimsical island (what an anomaly it had become; once a promise of sanctuary and all it could offer in the present was death and delusion). The only one she recognized was Jorogumo, all grown up and ivory-eyed, and even then she didn’t approach the grieving cluster. The awful, bitter, rancorous edges seethed and seized, pulled and pushed, and all she could do was stare upon the prone body, marked by some noxious bite mark, lain amongst the runes, another casualty of mysteries and warrens. How many more times would they fail? Her gaze dropped and she just listened to the wind, to the warbles, to the offers of finding a mother for a filly, and while she couldn’t bestow or grant any of those things, she drummed a quiet, crooning serenade. It whistled and waned, alive and nurturing, assuaging and soothing, across the vivid isle, hoping it could bring comfort in the horrific blight.

[Team Healers and Thieves!]