Imogen would have liked to play with the stallion all evening, muster constant forms of entertainment and bravado, but Lena’s musings and purpose tied her to other whims and ruminations. She pranced away from each stomp of the beast’s hooves, curling her tails in various different directions, hovering in the Stygian, midnight oils as they continued gathering stars and dust for their fancies. Chirping, chirruping, cooing into the chilling atmosphere, lending light into the plunging darkness, she dashed beneath the Time Mender’s unmoving, stalwart limbs, blue eyes a welcoming, teasing beam. They may have continued, had Ashamin not been distracted by the serenity of the Songbird’s voice, and the kitsune blended back into the background, watched with keen intellect and interest, an enduring scale of justice and potency layered beneath sweetness and delicacy (bonded individuals too alike, altering and shifting with one another).

The subjects altered his curiosity, a siren call, a wayward song, and the sylph bore witness to the unsure transformation, as if he was enticed, beguiled, allured by the words, by the phrases, by the promises conveyed in her prior sentiments – but by which, and how far? The intricacies of the lands, the harmonious phrases dipped in ambrosia, candied and laced with sugar, placed without the trials and tribulations surrounding them? Or was he stirred by magic, the pleasant and treacherous invocations pieced and woven together for protection, for annihilation, for serenity? Each had been carefully cherished, doted, beloved, adored, because Lena did love, probably far more than she should. All the steps she made throughout the barbaric days, the hours, the minutes, the seconds, were for the Basin, were for her brethren, kin, and companions. They stoked fine ambition. They incensed reverent aspirations. They cloaked and hid manifestations of pride. They plaited remnants of tranquility and rapture. They gleamed with dulcet wings, prospered with absolute sacrifice. Courage, bravery, spirit, and determination glowed in the sweet essence of her presence, in the harmonious, seraphic exploits, in the luminescent bliss she emboldened through audacious splendor and varnished opulence; and she always yearned to add more and more of those benedictions, of those ounces of benevolence, into a world she treasured. Sometimes she was not repaid for her efforts, thrown into pits of misfortune, tossed beneath swinging pendulums of malady, but she never forgot the warm rhapsody of Elysium, the cool breath of the mountains, the entangling elation of peaks, of valleys – for it was heaven, it was home.

Was that something Ashamin wanted? Was that what he craved? Or was he like many of their world: tempted by the notion of power, of enchantments, of eventual triumph, devastating conquest? Her eyes searched his for a conviction, for a semblance, of his notions and wishes, but his expression shifted many times over (wonder, like a child’s, enamored and bewitched, and fear, like the unknown could destroy him), and she was only left with his strung silence. The information she’d presented was a lot to take in, to absorb, to even try to understand, so the nymph committed the same actions as before – patient, waiting, regaling nothingness and heavenly armaments, stoic and composed in the face of tenacity and liberation. Only through the quiet eaves, the hushed arches of the forest, did she finally hear the soft, faint, indistinct query indulge her, combining her preceding statements into one sanctity, one sanctuary. Her smile radiated in a warm, nourishing reverie, indulging into the beauty of repose, acknowledging truth through the boundless entities of their world. “There’s magic everywhere.” In the trees, in the ferns, in the moss, in the swell of the sea, in the hot, stinging nettles of sand, and yes, in the perils of snow and nestled rasp of ice. Petals of the free, grace and finery sown into gilded, golden compassion, burst in her love of the earth, in her benevolence of the realm of auroras and raptures, trying to chase away the ghosts flickering behind his eyes, the tremors, the apprehension, rising through his voice – casting the smallest of assuaging whispers, a minute trace of soothing arias, sweetened and soft. “I can show you.” Kind and tender, sanctified benedictions, coiled together in the eternal bliss of her movements and motions, dabbling into the shards of a pathway, hastening towards ice and snow, chilling ramparts and persevering prowess, maneuvering ahead of him and tossing her head towards the primrose trail.