The Sentinel is suddenly affronted with emotion that he is not sure how to handle. A mare he's never met, strikingly similar to his one true confidant—and she knows him. He wants to tell himself it is coincidence and convince himself he has to be wrong. Then he can push away the upset and hurt, forget the pain he feels.

The Sentinel's worst days dawn upon him with swift and and cruel justice. He remembers how he ran from the shadows he should have fought, remembers how he let himself be tricked and swayed by Mandrake's foul heart—he remembers knowing he would die and watching it all happen with quiet acceptance.

He remembers wanting to die

It is, he thinks, the worst thing one can recall. He pulls further from her, though she has already parted from his touch, and paws nervously at the ground. His head shakes back and forth with upset and obsession, his golden eyes roll as they had so few times before to shine blue. His features shudder, his form shifts and changes to that of his very own son. Knox stands before the mare, Aylin, as he has learned, in a state of desolation.

But isn't everyone tired, and isn't everyone sad? Knox knows what Manhattan would say to him now. That he cannot hide from his feelings, that such a coldness will turn him black inside. He must live through being tortured someday, because somehow, so does everyone else. Recovered from blindness but not from pain, Knox looks upon the mare before him with an inconsolable aching in his chest and still speaks. "Roanne the Sentinel was my father—he died almost two years ago when I was born," the hunter informs her cleanly, carefully. Manhattan is not hear to hold him back, to usher him into silence, and so he speaks freely and openly. "I inhabit his form some days, to remind myself of who he held dear; his land, his people, they became more a part of him than I could ever have been." His blue eyes wash over the midday scene. He realizes with discomfort just how close Roanne has taken him to this mare, and yet he does not pull away. The bridle about his features, now a flat and healed white, cages in his darkly mysterious yet gentle expression. His neck arches back and turns, revealing the dapples crossing over his features and the sway of his thick curled mane. There is a pause, a sort of stillness in the air as he listens to silence. Silence of a bonded gone away. "I am Knox," he says at last, hoping to explain. "Your mother must be Evangeline. No one else ever felt so strongly about my father as she," Knox nickers, maintaining his father's low volume. Mournful within, Roanne calls out to his son and to the fading memory of his own lost chestnut companion. Words fall from Knox's lips like fading summer rain, following a strange natural course beyond his control: "She was his everything."


"—"