In the shadow of the trees, an angel walks.

He’d left the battle filled with an energy that comes only from being very amplified and then suddenly cooled, and much like the humming throng of ringing metal striking against stone it reverberated all through him so that he was restless and searching.

Aithniel had been gone as soon as the fight was over, and he could only assume it was to return to wherever it was she lived now, perhaps to tell them what had come to pass. While Cathun had told him the truth, the dark colt is still unsure why it is his sister would return to the land that had starved her as a child, left her orphaned and unwanted in a meadow of flowers, and the contradiction (he has so many of his own, it is some wonder he makes such a big deal out of other’s) leaves him has hopeful that she truly is there as he is doubtful its true at all. Erebos had been burned by the blood and was off somewhere being healed, Rikyn having decided to stay behind in the red forest mostly to think, because his head was alive and stirring.

For the first while since having left the Nightwalk behind him, the young prince was truly content to have returned home, having found his purpose alongside a God that was not the First Gods, but the only sort he might have in this life (he was not so vain as to think he would ever see a world in which the balance was whole and even). He had found his friends, and while Aithniel was mad at him, he was sure she would forgive him in time, and that all would be well.

His thoughts were not of sad things, and it delighted him as much as his small conquests on this day had been; how many boys had been praised by a God, anyway? And rather than dwelling in missing his Xynia, or the cool confines of the cave, he thought of how fascinating it was that the imbalance, while it had damaged his people and cost the world of Loorien so much, was also wonderful in that it allowed whole forests, such as this one, to be ripped from one reality and settled into another.

Maybe it wasn’t an imbalance at all, he thinks as he rounds a corner, maybe it was just how it…

His thoughts die as he sees her, the woman whose soft voice turns his gaze, her vibrant pelt of moonlit indigos and royal blues stained upon a rich blackness. Her horns are glass, like many of those in the northlands of his birth, of his mother’s rule, perhaps one day his own (how brightly his ambitions glow under the loving kiss of a God’s approving gaze); he admires her well before he notices the waters that trail in her wake in a magical pull, and it is only as he approaches closer that he notices she is quite a bit older than himself.

Still, she is delicate and graceful, graceful and thin as strands of silk caught in a gentle wind.

In his youth, most women are so.

"Most lived, miss," he says softly, not wanting to startle her – for it is dark, and he is like the shadow with his chocolate flesh tinted in onyx and gold, his markings and hooves perhaps the only things of clarity in the strange crimson shadow of the healing red wood, "though the Bear did not."