The slight grin at Erthe’s cheeky reply was quickly swept clear off his broad face as the dethroned king shouted. Eyes crinkle in a frown. He felt like an intruder on this cathartic yelling, the moment that should have been shared between father and daughter. Even if the catharsis was aimed at everyone and no one, it still felt like a private instant suddenly made public— a display of a man’s pain for them all to ogle and pass judgment. And who was he to judge? Who were any of them to judge?

The mind has a way of packaging grief— some minds are better at it than others, to be sure. Usually, and woefully, it is both experience and practice that makes one more adept. But sometimes, like poison, too much grief overwhelms the threshold, and suddenly you’re spiraling and snarling and striking out. You become reduced to a primitive and feral beast focused on self-preservation. Because the soul is so tattered, so raw, that if it’s not protected, it will disintegrate. And what will you be then?

The Elephant did not want to know.

So he waited and watched, in sad and solemn silence as Mauja raved. An ear tilted sideways in uneasy concern for his friend, biting back his placating and comforting words. The heaving sides of the spotted man would make his ears deaf to anything the giant would have said in that moment. “Do not dare to fault me for being weak.” But the King, in that moment, did not see a weak man. A grieving man, a broken man, yes. But not a weak man. A weak man would not rant at the arrival of his daughter, nor punish himself for the faults of fate. A weak man would collapse beneath the sands of time, fading to a whisper in the dust of destiny. Mauja stood, shoulders trembling beneath the weight of his misfortune— yet he still stood, adhering to whatever cardinal direction his compass pointed. The giant wanted to call out, to stop him, to tell him these things. But the Elephant let him go, in silent contradiction.

But Erthe did not let him go so peacefully, shouting small icicles at his retreating back. Blue eyes, dark and dismal, turned first to Glacia and then to Erthe. They both had lost someone; Erthe her mother and Glacia her sister (though he did not know if they had been close). She also stood on a precipice of losing her father, as the leopard physically fled from the possibility of love. He studied them both for a moment, Glacia with a evaluating eye and Erthe with a sterner, colder stare. “Grief changes a person— no matter how big or small the loss. And, truly, time will fade the pain, even if the sorrow never fully leaves. But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that, when fate strikes and takes what it will, you do not let that grief, that anguish, turn you hard and unfeeling towards the misery of others. And it will try to do so, it will make you measure other’s sorrows against your own and find them wanting. But does that matter?” His impassioned monologue paused for a breath, before answering his own question, “No. Because in the end, everyone has lost. Every heart has broken or ached. If, from your own pain, you can find compassion and understanding, then, and only then, will whatever was lost not have been in vain.”

His tirade of words, spoken as much to himself as the women around him, left him breathless and speechless. Eyes, flaming blue with the power and passion of what he spoken, looked over them all before he began to move away, “I am glad you have joined us in the Edge, Glacia.” His voice, now subdued was spoken over his shoulder as he began to melt into the mist.