The Lady thought she had seen a ghost; a ghost that lived, that breathed, that crossed her path and walked out into the world of Loorien, out and away from Helovia.
 
And so, she had followed the ghost, as many would do, curiosity, the need to know, carrying her away from the wind smoothed thrones of the mountain she had come to think of, quite vehemently, as hers.
 
Surely it would be there waiting for her, she thought, a vain creature if there ever was one; surely no one would see the void left in her absence and grasp it.  Besides, she had to know if the ghost was real, or if she had simply gone mad and hadn’t the taste or sense to notice.
 
Into the night they had gone, she and Kyst, a third – her son – trailing along some distance behind the two more bold and learned of the adventurers.  If either the griffon or the mare had knowledge of Rikyn’s presence on their tail, neither bothered to care or to turn around, even to remember him in their magically shared recollection of those first legs into the unknown.
 
Not to say that the golden bitch hadn’t been out of Helovia before – she had – but the person she followed took a northern route that she had never yet travelled, one that brought the rains that allowed her to slip away from the boy who struggled to catch up to her, and one that blurred the remnants of the trail which she herself followed.
 
But it hadn’t blurred it all away, had it?
 
She enters the realm of Helovia with her griffon along her back, a seemingly regular portrait of the two who had been together for long enough now that Illynx’s memory placed the griffon in mental scenes that she had very much not been present for, their hearts so entwined that the golden crowned unicorn found great difficulty imagining a life without her companion at all.  The only difference between this image and the countless other times they have been seen together in this forest of welcome, of farewells, is that the mare now shows her age in the silver details which now etch along her features, and that the griffon is much matured as well.
 
’Don’t know why you came back anyway,’ morosely comments the bird creature, ’you are nobody now.’
 
The mare stops, suddenly, harshly, sending the griffon yowling and scrambling for purchase on the shining metal upon which she rides; Illynx’s ears pin fast to her head, golden eyes glowing with an anger that is sudden, and famed for being so.  Standing beneath the shade of a tall pine, the Gildedblade lets every ounce of her outrage at being called such a thing pour through their mental bond, forces it through their mind link until the griffon’s mind shudders, her speckled wings pulling tight to her amber and ash dappled sides.
 
Even the mental hymnal that is the bitch’s voice is cold as ice as it cuts through the warm bond of their thoughts.
 
’I’ve never been nobody.’