"You're wrong though, as I'm the only one who really knows." Maren huffed, followed by a low chuckle. "Now, don't get cocky," she shook her head, "You will make me regret looking forward to the day you are grown up."

"... I thought he was the nicest of the gods, but now I don't know."  

"Consequences, dear. He wishes for me to know the consequences of my actions when I cast my blinding veil of mist over others… Or at least that is what I like to think. One may wish to have something like power, but that one must give something in return." She paused, thinking before she continued. "For a God to be nice would make no sense. Of course you may decide this for yourself, but I believe none of them truly are. If they are, it would simply be a consequence as well instead of it being a mere solidified and established trait. They simply pursue the laws of nature and teach them to those who think and listen as They grant a quest."

As the girl mentioned that it was good that Maren hadn't yet hurt herself she only smiled, rather suspiciously, actually. She wasn't about to tell Erthë how many times she had bumped her head to a low-hanging branch, tripped or fallen. That the girl hadn’t noticed could only mean she still looked pretty damn good; an accomplishment in itself, she thought with slight, perhaps unjustified pride. "Right?" She thus smiled in agreement, smoothly going along with the filly’s conclusion.


The girl laughed at Maren’s concern, although the mare had no idea what the deal was with that. It was already such a rare occurrence that she spoke out her worries about… Well, someone; another person. Being laughed at afterwards didn’t quite match her expectations. Not that it hurt, it was rather just that she felt like she was being lied to. Into her face, but she couldn’t see. Her; and not see what the girl was talking about. And it bothered her, it bothered her immensely to simply not know while she could've. Still, she listened carefully to the girl’s report; what actually happened. As Erthë spoke Maren’s wings folded themselves around her alabaster cheeks, forming their own little cushion for her depressed, unknowing thoughts, suddenly regretting whatever she could have but didn’t.

Regret is overrated, she promised herself once again, even though it felt like she had emptied a box of nails inside her stomach — she, because there was no one else to blame. Why she would feel this way? She didn't know, for it wasn't affection. More... expectations she couldn't fulfill, didn't want to.  “I’m sorry,” she said. There, I tried;  empty words she had heard so many times herself when she was young. It hadn’t done much for her then, either. But, as she stared into the blackness, she realized that the only thing she missed in those words was the cure for the loneliness. And the real reason she felt so bad for the girl was merely because she saw so much of herself in her, pulling her back into nostalgia she had long swallowed; throwing up what she had thought was kept to be lost in the back of her mind. Once, she had a heart, knew how to care. But at another once, she sold it off; traded for knowledge and faith. So perhaps she was just apologizing to herself, for seeing her own past terror in Erthë.  

Something she didn't deserve.

So the diviner couldn't muster the courage to ask if she, perhaps, needed any help with this promised quest. Instead she asked. And she swallowed it along with all those other things when the girl reached out to her nose once more.  “So... you’re with a herd now?”  

Maren

BY THE PRECEPTS OF HER PURITY