The fairy laughed at Frost Fyre’s response, gazing up at the bright, vivid world and trying to remember the sense of ebullience floating over her now. Not everyone disappeared. Not everyone lingered in the void. Sometimes they came back, returned to the branches laden with snow, to the rising mountains and the frozen hills, to the wicked, wild tundra captivating and beckoning them back, again and again. She wanted to ask the mare why she left, what made her reappear, what snatched and beguiled and allured her back into the threshold of dancing, lingering lights and cold, majestic beauty – what caused her to stray, then waltz again. If she could do it, couldn’t others concoct the same?
 
Why didn’t they all want to stay in the first place?
 
She listened to the wind curl around the edges of caverns and stones. She watched her breath curl in warm, tender, lingering puffs, then dissipate. She simply existed, in between time and space, in between angelic figures and spotted whims, in between honeyed assurances of recurrences and sparkling wishes, like she could chime and echo them back into life.
 
I’ve never been happier to be freezing the girl had spoken, and Lena realized, snapped, rushed away from all those merciless, harsh, unrelenting blows to her sentiments, to her emotions. Shouldn’t she have been content too, to exist in this wide, open, barbaric plain, with monsters and sinners and dreamers and heartfelt soldiers, who clung to life with determined, resolute ministrations, who started the day fortifying their aspirations and ambitions? Shouldn’t she have been grateful to merely be in this magnificent, exotic world?
 
Before she could muster something, anything to respond to Frost Fyre’s beautiful sentiment, another appeared – another bright, undaunted speck glimmering and glittering on the horizon. He was like candy, sweet and pleasant, honeyed and layered with so many silly, wondrous things that Lena couldn’t resist the temptation to widen her grin, to embody and envelop everything the realm had to offer her. Why should she have been lamenting her losses when there was so much more to discover, so much more to do? “Johnny,” she laughed, a whimsical sound, like belles, like mellifluous strings, “I’m fine. And yourself?” She responded in kind, amiable and affable, reaching past the empty husks of her shell and proffering, bestowing, those pleasantries, those defining characteristics she’d always managed to muster despite any agonizing sentiment gliding her way. The sylph erased those withering, writhing sentiments now. They were of no use in this grand sphere, in this reverent glade. She said nothing more, stepping back to allow the sienna and ivory mare bestow her own introductions, gaze sauntering from beast to beast, from creature to creature, ignited and incensed and grace all over again – hushed in the cold, but exuberant, wild, and untamed in her heart.