Isopia, wracked by indecision, was stunned into silence.

"I-"

Competing thoughts of, I don't have any friends, and I've never asked for help rose to the surface of her mind and lingered there.

Isopia's long dark eyelashes fluttered over her stunned golden gaze, as she continued to remain silent.

She felt some hidden part of herself - the part capable of feeling complex emotions - stir and wince at the trees first question. Why hadn't she told Zero? Well ... it had never really come up, now had it? It wasn't that she wasn't going to tell him, she had just ... never mentioned it. But that wasn't the whole truth. The whole truth was more along the lines of not wanting to alienate the only person she actually liked. She was riddled with magic and power, and he was always playing catching up, both metaphorically and literally. But she loved him, in the truest sense of the word, but because the concept of love, for Isopia, was so fractured and badly twisted, she mistook it for something so precious that it was fragile. Real love was durable, but Isopia had never experienced that before, and so she tried to diminish anything that might come between them. Certainly becoming a queen of sorts would do that, wouldn't it? Surely he would no longer see her as the girl who had frolicked in the woods with him? Who had discovered whales? Who he could run to and hug anytime he liked? She wanted to be that for him - she just wanted to be his friend.

Yet despite all those thoughts of love and friendship and needing him, it had never occurred to the mountaneous mare to ask for his help. Had she ever asked for anyones help before? Isopia did a cursory search of her memory, but couldn't really come up with an instance where she had. She simply did not have the resources (aka friends), to call upon. And those that she did? Well ... she wouldn't burden them with her needs. Isopia was a solitary and as the tree had deduced, lonely creature. The facade of strength and single-minded focus was in large part a pretense, to hide the shattered being she had become. To ask for help was to invite rejection.

And we we've all seen, Isopia doesn't handle rejection well.

"He doesn't live in the Hidden Falls." Isopia said finally, her voice as clinical as ever. Of course she wished that he did. The days where he snuck into her world of waterfalls and hidden pathways, suddenly appearing in her clearing, were some of the most cherished of all her memories. "Why talk of politics when we can talk about starwhales." She concluded, almost apologetically as her golden eyes tried to find the sunlight stare of her best friend. Why talk about who I am supposed to be, when I can just be myself with you.