For a few moments, Lena felt her efforts would be in vain. The war-torn, hardy, stalwart Vladic, a creature who’d seen many a hardship, no longer wished to be warranted amongst the affairs of soldiers, insurrections and seditions. The fairy was never truly inclined to be a part of them either, but always shackled and shelled, shielded and armed herself for a battle, for a war, for an array of chaos if her empire asked for it. It seemed he’d seen enough for a lifetime, waged enough assaults and sieges for other kingdoms and countries, and longed for a more peaceful age to his newfound home. The mare could wax poetical on her terrain, on the christened and anointed hot springs, of the glorious, intertwining caverns, of the mountainous regions lined with auroras and dreams, but she refused to ghost over the layers of upheaval lined into the core, into the foundation of each and every glacier. She rejected the presumption of lies, of duplicities, of specious warbles or fabricated trills, and she had no wish to unravel the length of her moralities now, to deceive a creature that had only shown her kindness. Her honeyed eyes, open and wide with candor, with sincerity, with a tenderness brimming and brewing beneath the awakening plumes of ambrosia and song, stared upon the burly beast and offered him the candid truth. “I cannot promise peace. We are a nation strung by tension.” Against conspiring herds snagging and stealing their children, against open, relentless wounds marked by eternal grudge and tribulations, and as the Foothills stag spoke, she didn’t bother to mention their involvement in the recent invasion either. Perhaps the silvern masculine was unaware of how they’d bore arms together, contracted and obligated to turn and shift upon those the Basin longed to annihilate. Or had their affairs changed, altered, since the brutal culmination of their loss? Instead, she turned towards the flicka, the little fey who seemed to want no part in a herd life, and the nymph understood, deep in her nomadic, Romani heart, the desire to roam, to wander, to be free, and then, the surge, want, yearn and hope to belong. Perhaps Cypress would one day find her calling amongst Helovia, united into the stars and heavens to her rightful place. She extended a warm, polite nod to the flicka, a wondrous rhapsody. “I wish you well on your journey.”