The Songbird didn’t stop running. She followed one duty after another, giving chase to the changing winds, rising past foggy outcrops, staring down chilling veneers, racing across hillsides until she could find something else to distract her, divert her. Placing her attentions on one trial and tribulation to the next meant she wouldn’t have to think about her own, and for once, she truly did hide from all the troubles weighing across her shoulders. Today, she wasn’t brave. Today, she wasn’t courageous. Still resolute, still determined, still passionate, but to the degree of concealment, hushed depths, unsaid quandaries, and meandering footsteps hovering over the boundaries of fragility. Like a fleeting fragment, a sliver of interludes and hysteria, the Mender and her kitsune drove through terror, through horror, and plunged away from calamity – stoking out the woodwork of the Threshold instead. The pair slunk silently amidst the forest, the canopies, the undergrowth, and Lena didn’t listen for the chirping of tropical birds (not here Imogen reminded her, the gateway was certainly not utopia), didn’t shift wildly as shadows crawled across tree limbs, as leaves rustled then fell in their hellbound spiral. She was merely a quiet presence in the halls and corridors of more wayward, lost souls, and she could likely join them, just as forlorn, just as desolate, just as confused and befuddled. Not a word slid from her throat, not a song, not a warble, not a croon, and suddenly the silence was all the more deafening, and she could take no more of its haunting, poignant memories pressing across her spine, her skull – her melodies danced and waltzed from the harmonic chords woven along her tongue. The pieces never cracked, never frayed, never rumbled and rambled into discord, following her, preceding her, as she ventured deeper and deeper into the void, into the veil, into the hollowed stretches of the unknown.

The sun sank between eaves and branches, painted majestic colors against the dappled horizon, gave bright hues to her sienna frame as it molded and blended with pines, firs, and faltering, deciduous pigments, continuing her singsong even as the scent of another trickled and whittled its way through the thick columns and ancient abyss. The ivory vixen by her side gave the slightest of chirps, and the minstrel, the fairy, the nymph, quirked her brow, slid the pieces of a smile across her lips; altering their path to shadow the newcomer’s appearance. They marched over roots, over moss, over ferns, composed faint arias, sanguine and amiable, angelic and blissful, even when the most virtuous of benedictions felt far, far away – her eyes ran, fixated, on a stranger leaning against the trunk of a tree, nestled between labyrinths and pathways, painted in twilight hallelujahs. The sylph maneuvered in petal soft contortions, light, airy, delicate, a shimmer of fey audacity, a glimmer of her stolen elegance, bestowing a smile along with compassionate hymns, altering the tunes slightly, adjusting the mellifluous frame. “Hello! I’m Lena!” Then she ceased, close enough so he may see her in the dimming light, may reach for liberation, laurels, and roses, but far enough so he had the ability to flee, the notion to shirk. Her gaze, her stare, warm, delightful, pleasant, noted the sword buried between his eyes, reminding her of roots, of ash, of stone and rubble, if he was one to seek growth in one location, or travel a great distance, hoping to find a rendering from nothingness. The gentleness of her absolution, of her deliverance, of her liberating, satin notions, continued, like spring blossoms, like Birdsong raptures and reveries. “Welcome to Helovia! Who are you?”