Darkness fell like sheer curtains around the tiny Lochan, and the scent of blood from Hotaru's knees was too thick and immediate for Alice to have detected him. When he cried out at them the pair jumped, the sound seeming to ricochet off the walls to brutalize their ears and destroy whatever hope they had of privacy. As if they should have expected it, utilizing someone else's cavern. Lady luck had never truly been on Hotaru's side throughout her life. Only hard work and determination - along with her fair share of cunning - had managed to overcome that deficit of natural fate-blessed advantage. She liked to think that made her better than most, even though it was a hollow sort of comfort.

The pair jolted away as Lochan went sprinting past them on thin limbs, Alice's ears clamping to her head and eyes flashing hell black in the firelight as she turned to watch him go. Hotaru's shoulders inched up towards her ears, caught between the desire to stay in this little safe haven, and the awareness that she was practically busted already. She knew how bonds worked, knew there was no way Ashamin could not sense that kind of panic. Though why Lochan was afraid of Hotaru and Alice, she couldn't comprehend considering their general neutral kindness towards him. Alice merely shrugged at her, a helpless look on her face, and Hotaru sighed.

Whether she could have chosen to leave in time or not, Lochan's panic had summoned Ashamin far faster than Hotaru had anticipated, and the sound of heavy hoofbeats from outside the cavern seemed to grate inside her head. Foreboding. Her name was like an accusation on his tongue, though it was spoken with no such intonation. The ensuing flinch was only internal, but she felt it shudder along her insides nonetheless. How could she explain herself? Standing there with damp cheeks and bloodied knees, in his home in the middle of the night? Without causing him to lose faith in her? Create a fissure of distrust and an image of weakness in his mind? It made her shake with panic, because her mind was so muddled that she couldn't think, couldn't fall back on the one power she could always rely upon. 

His apologies were easily shrugged off, because her throat was too tight to manage any sort of words. She couldn't even muster the barest elegance to apologize on her own behalf, and she felt horribly sick and vaguely horrified. You're ruining everything. Get a hold of yourself. You can't let this happen. You've come so far! Speak! God damn it Hotaru, SPEAK! Her body shook beneath the weight of her own acute terror. Was this what it was like, to fail? To sit and watch her empire, built with love and tears and pain and sacrifice, crumble to the ground before her? To finally falter in her steady upward climb?

Was this the result of having nobody to turn to? Was this the one weakness, the one fatal flaw of people like her? The Achilles Heel? To grow so broken and beneath the weight of her own repressed emotions that she simply crumbled? 

Alice whined helplessly at her hooves, pressing closer to her skin as if she could somehow tear her from this nightmare where her family finally realized she was unfit to be a Lady. Bottomless eyes flew to Ashamin in wide, hopeless plea. 

"Hotaru, is something wrong?"

She realized her eyes had never left the fire, even when he'd walked into the cave. It was a belated sort of realization, in that numb purgatory of panic where such a thought was the only thing to make sense in her mind. All at once her body seized, the trembling eradicated as she locked her body as firmly as a swaying foal did its knees to keep from falling. "When a bird lives its life on wings, climbing ever higher...what happens when it falls for the first time? It has never experienced such a sensation, and the wings it trusted in all its life are suddenly failing it." Her eyes slid slowly towards Ashamin, the whites of her eyes standing out, the only physical sign of her panic. "What can I feel except panic? Except hatred for myself, and fear for my own weakness?" It comes out warbled, and she suddenly feels like a yearling all over again - standing at the Foothills borders after leaving her entire loveless family, not knowing where to go or what to expect, and taking those first few steps into the darkness nonetheless. She's not used to feeling fear.

"They see me as nothing but a child, and a mare at that. I have built this land into everything it is. I have done everything asked of me and more," she presses, and her breaths are quick and her eyes are wild, imploring. "I am so much more than them," she whispered brokenly, standing there in total contrast, a lost filly with skinned knees and a thousand titles and awards behind her. Useless to others in the face of her youth, where they should have stood in awe that she achieved it so much faster than they had.