I heard that he died.

I don't know who told me. I don't know what their name was, I can barely remember what they look like. It's said that such a moment is unforgettable, but all I remember is the cold fact, and the immediacy of the pain that it caused me. I'd wandered around hopelessly in this land, knowing that any left after the sundering had made their way here, looking for him, and at last I found him, it just wasn't the touching reunion I had envisioned.

I don't know what's become of my mother and I don't much care. Given her tendencies to cower in the face of danger, she's most likely dead. And I know that he is. So that makes me alone. That makes me an orphan, I suppose. And it's not that I won't do fine on my own, because I've been doing that for most of my life now. It's not that with every inch that has grown to my beard and tail, which now both stretch to hit the ground in thin sheets of black, I haven't gained enough experience for a year of someone's life. It's just that my attitude of fatality and my general apathy caused by a sense of defeat at last feels justified.

Because I'm not sure what I have to look for anymore. I have prayed each night to the Gods of Light and Fire, but for too long I have been abandoned by their graces. I remember that once there was a time I saw the great fox himself, his glowing form just barely grazing the surface of the mirror that lay within the frostpine. I haven't seen or heard from the gods in months now.

I hadn't really seen or heard from anyone until two days ago, when a passing outcast gave me the news. And I still don't know where to find him, even after that. Though now I'm not sure it's worth it.

Would seeing his corpse really help anything? No, likely not. Nothing really ever helped anything. Which is exactly why I have landed here and folded my wings, let my whiplike tail extend outwards and far beyond my form until every hair only just graced the ground, lifted my head just high enough that my horn, still decidedly and disappointingly short, fell between the patches of shadow. I have blended with the darkness that I had in the past months slowly started to become, not expecting anyone to find me, not certain of what I'll do if they did. Because nothing will help; nothing ever does.