This place.
 
It makes me think of Aithniel, and probably always will, unless of course I’m thinking of the Sun, her father, and all those long battles and struggles that were born from the claiming of the wild lands of the Rift.
 
Oh, Gods, mother’s face when I told her, this being the first positive remembrance of the treacherous bitch I’ve had in weeks.  It draws a sneer to my lips even now that, as distraught as I had been, as worried for myself and our bond as I had been that Aithniel was half God, my mother had nearly died at the notion.  
 
I halfway hope she had, in recollection.  At the time, I had laughed, in good mood as we walked to the place that had held me together when she had left the first time.
 
Dragging behind me, my tail is heavy and sodden, but the ripple effect of the earth ahead that mirrors the sky and some unseen rainbow shimmer across everything in the world holds my focus, so I do not look behind me to see the strange elongated V of rippling wonders that spreads out behind the half moon divots in the moony sand.  I do notice that my heart still feels way too heavy in my chest, and that I rather wish I hadn’t come to this stolen beach the longer that I’m here.  My thoughts, which have been dark since my return to Helovia, are no less bleak, moving away from the dagger that is golden and comforting to focus instead on other lesser (but no less potent) pains.
 
'…then you are no family of mine – I am just a possession.'
 
Where in the hell she got that notion I don’t know.  It makes me wonder for the hundredth time what sort of crap the bird horses have funneled into her head, if they have told her the same bloody war tales of our people as my mother warned I would hear; it certainly sounds like the rhetoric, that we, the unicorns, are not the just and rightful ones at all, but murderers, slavers, those who seek to own to the world, rather than simply reclaim it, to return it to a just order.
 
I didn’t want to… I don’t… want to own Aithniel.  I want to save her, and I can’t if they blind her (though who they are I don’t really know) with their hopeless clinging to the present.  How could I bare for her to choose a world such as this, one of suffering, and pain, over the utopia promised in the waters of the Nightwalk?  
 
I can’t.  And so I walked away from her that long afternoon, and I let the rift between us grow, until now I’m sure it is a chasm further elongated by flippant female hormones.  I let the rift grow because I fear she is beyond saving, and I fear what that means; I let that dark thought fuel the fire that rises in my belly when I ignore the black truth for my carefully woven lies.
 
If she hates me, she will avoid me.  It’s better that way.
 
She left us, she left me.  It’s her fault, her fault, her fault…