Lost stallion wanders to his father's grave and his birthplace. Trailed by his one love and shadow, he is not quite alone. The bond that would lend him her whispered emotions and tender advice is broken, but she follows still. He is not yet alone.

And though he feels a monster, he seeks comfort. Undeserved, perhaps, but comfort nonetheless. His heavy steps carry him through the wood and send shudders through the earth. He stomps with each step, trying to feel the world shake beneath him as it would beneath his brother Archibald. But he lacks the power and the control; he only kicks up dust. Behind him Manhattan whines, begging him to turn back. The task granted to him by the Goddess of the Moon is not worth the pain of returning here. The pain of the memory of being born, and the familiar tang of blood on his lips that he will surely taste when he sees his father's bones... none of it is worth the magic.

Her advice is unheard and thus unheeded- the stallion walks onward. Knox scans the clearing with silver-blue eyes and a sight willfully undamped. He longs for the warmth he hopes to find in empty, soulless bodies of his forefathers. He does not consider that the darkness rests within them too, that it is something so eternal that it can never be cast out. He only wants to feel. And so he parts new grasses with a steady walking beat, and he lets the wind of the dark forest pull him in. This place, the closest place to one of belonging, is where his father died.

He wonders if, had he been older, he would have helped in the murder. Surely he would have obeyed mother, surely he would have forgotten Roanne the Sentinel. But Mandrake had made a mistake when she placed the bridle over the colt's brow. She had given him a relic of the old country, and given him the sense that he did not belong. A part of him still rested with Roanne's bones, hidden beneath the flecks of dried blood that coated them and hid beneath decaying skin. He finds the corpse now, sees what is left of it.

He did not think he would feel anything; he thought he would simply take an article of his dead father's body and depart to find his mother. He was wrong, he was so very wrong. And though it is a weakness, he falls. He falls to his knees and lets his heart fall as well. He wonders then, in that moment of utter depression, if he ever felt hope in this world. It is Manhattan's soft touch against him that keeps him from giving in. Her steady blue gaze that grounds him, and the warmth of her beside him that lets him breathe again.

It is just a ghost- the clean white bones of a ghost. Decay slowed by Frostfall has hastened in Birdsong, and the bones lie a clean white. He pulls himself closer but stays against the earth, appreciating its support. Slowly he parts his lips and reaches out with teeth that have killed. Slowly, he grips the hilt of one of his father's bones. Manhattan seems to fade away beside him and thought of his father slowly occupies his mind. In the cold, damp, dark of the early evening, Knox is alone with a ghost.