[ OOC: omg this is forever long I'm sorry :| totally didn't realize i'd gone novella until i posted it and was like o____o ]


Others had held their tongues?

Temporarily she wishes they would have shown themselves to her by now, so she might have taken the tongue from them that stood still as stone while a purely militarist male replaced the royal wit and strategic might of her friend. Her mouth was the only one not lined with rot and guilt, and may the Gods bless those who felt as if their former Lady had been unfairly removed from office or improperly replaced if she ever discovers that they were standing there at the meeting, softly choking on their own cowardly ineptitudes and watching as Illynx made a complete idiot out of herself.

She was their Lady, god dammit, and whether or not she was any good at it didn’t matter. It was the principle of the thing. Why give anyone the rank if they were just going to be loud mouthed statues that gather the herd every season or so? Weren’t they supposed to respect and honor her?

They at least should not have let her stand alone when their hearts beat in time with hers.

Perhaps Torleik was right, though, and she nods in understanding as he explains his own silence. What good would words do? She had proven that they were only hot wind in front of them all and perhaps even snuffed out the embers of rebellion in their chests that might have ruptured into flame had she only been more tactful in her placement of blame. "It is probably the case with them all. The treachery had been committed and all there is to see now is how or if we will suffer from the brash idiocy of some of our men."

She really should learn to bide her time, learn of what there is to know; had she been gifted the knowledge at that moment that she will know in a years time from now, things would be going very differently. She may even have kept silent herself – after all, it has been for the best.

She simply does not know that now. Perhaps that is part of the issue, as well; that she fears her friend is abandoned and broken in the wild and that not a one of her “brothers” cares for her plight at all, that Illynx cannot look into a seeing glass and know what the future may bring.

She is terrified of what life has brought to her, the simple little bitch that she is, and too proud and too stubborn to even admit it to herself.

That he laughs at her jab at the character of her co-leader brightens her spirits slightly, and the reasons for her random decision to vent to this man of all men are illuminated; he could be a friend, if she had such things. Neither of them truly care for the current political situation in the vale (because, believe me Torleik, we’re all well aware she’s not cut out for this sort of thing) and they both seem to enjoy one another’s company well enough.

He even manages a smile out of her, meek as it is, with his jovial response to her humorous (albeit truthful) name calling.

Was? he asks her next, and it rings in her head like an echo trapped in a very small room, making her mouth fall out of its temporary amusement and back into her dwelling pout. She is not really sure why she has worded it so; surely she still loves her Empress, and hopes that their friendship is not broken as their herd has become. But Psyche had left without a word to her oldest friend, and while Illynx does not generally become overly involved with the way others treat her, it has never been so with the black queen; she longs for the mares approval as one desires air, and in the absence of her company Illynx had never been as much as she might be alongside her.

Or so she believed.

"I… I just don’t know where she is, or if she is alright," she hastily interjects, not wanting to appear cold in the face of the love she feels inside of her chest for the woman who has seemingly been torn out of her life.

Torleik had continued speaking, however, so there was no time to explain further; she listens with raised ears and her gaze glowers with fury when it is laid open exactly what she has assumed.

Deimos had been there, and so he’d been selected in the haste of her friend’s departure with no other choices eminent. Psyche was a feisty woman, her heart a nest of starving vipers, and surely there had been little conversation after her pride had been wounded – it almost draws a smile to the dismal Lady’s lips in memory of her dearest’s burning rage, how savage she could become when provoked while normally so composed and pristine. It sickens her that she has been forced into this new life by a foul play of cards, but what is even more interesting is the observation that Torleik has made on behalf of Ulrik.

She ponders on this for a while, rain water dripping over her eyes.

Her dark conversation companion does not know all of the truths of the mountain, she instantly assuages. Ulrik’s condemnation of the Lady Psyche had not stemmed from her failures to the people of the Basin, but rather to the dark veins that ran through her; she had become obsessed with being a good queen to her people and had forgotten the true reason she had risen to power. Illynx can only assume that the absence of Mauja, an ever present support for the Empress, had led to her failures to be able to keep control of both stations.

The machinist was an outcast. He made his bread and butter off of the activities of the Plague, every other creature in the Basin be damned; it was the same for Zar’roc and Belial, the guardians of the pass, horned and savage men that would kill on site and without mercy.

They were among her favorites, to be sure; the outcast men were tempting in their wildness, the animalistic way in which they existed. It defied the way she lived her own life, so confined to rules and regiment and cleanliness, it tempted the shadow in her heart that had driven her to the path of war over all the other options available. Looking over Torleik, she wonders only briefly if she will inquire what she already believes.
"Ulrik has not spoken much of our culture on this mountain, has he?" she asks with a raised brow, an irritated fire still lit in her eyes for the stupidity of the mountain electrician (and a mental note to send him on a quest for a better replacement across the continent should he piss her off again – however well received that notion may be by him). There are the usual thoughts crossing her mind when she broaches the topic of the hidden society among them to those who do not know of it, of whether he will understand the idea or rebuke it, if he will turn his back to them as many others have or embrace and attempt to heal as Lena does.

She wonders, mostly, why it is she seems to care if he is bothered by the truth or not.

He draws nearer to her as she admits her loneliness, her eyes quickly darting towards his frame to observe his intentions; she refuses to be groped by any man she doesn’t know, no matter how handsome he is or how sweet the companion that rides his broad, muscled back. He pauses almost immediately, however, his own awkward wonderment writ throughout his body language as she stands still as stone and watches his attempts to console her.

Their gaze meets and his blue eyes hold her own golden ones steady and still, a stare that is mostly uncomfortable for the steel hearted wench; she knows what lies behind the glittering lenses of her orbs and she is not sure she wishes for him to see that much of her. It is this way with most, she has discovered, a thing she had studied in her youth after hearing the phrase “the eyes are mirrors of the soul;” if you looked long enough, you could see the being there, in the deep lights that burn and flicker within their eyes, and many times it had helped her manipulate more soft hearted individuals.

Torleik’s heart was not one of these.

”You don’t have to be alone…” he tells her, with those eyes still holding hers as if a gaze could become laced to another, and she sees the rolling sadness and contradicting warmth broil through their sharp blue depths for only a moment; for some reason, she feels as if hers have reacted much the same, an unbidden reaction from the tender tension of the moment.

She does not rebuke as she usually does, a stoic silence and a mind full of opposition that denies she will ever have anyone near her for long enough to truly feel a part of something. Her mind doesn’t seem to be working as quickly as it normally does and she finds that she, too, is stepping closer to the stallion, though she does not recall asking her hooves to move.

Except for Psyche, she has always been alone. Why is it so hard to admit this to others? The last time she had tried the man who’d heard the words had presented her his back and a cold indifference, and she cannot recall any time before that other than her small allusions she had fed her friend. Her parents were dead, this her dearest knew, but how or why was only a mystery that could be assumed; that her loneliness had nearly killed her before Psyche had come into her life was something she would never share.

It showed too much weakness on her behalf, and that was one thing she definitely wasn’t.

"And you would accompany me?" she asks, sparkling laughter rippling behind her eyes that does not breach her lips which curve upwards in a bemused expression, "I am much more work than I appear at first glance."