She wanted her eyes to stop burning, for the gap where Psyche’s elegant horn should be to filled with its usual obsidian splendor, for the chasm that had grown into her heart so suddenly and aggressively to knit itself shut.

Her sides heaved with her angst, coiling and uncoiling a fist-like grip on her mind, golden eyes gleaming like tear dipped daggers in the serene little grove in which she had found her lost treasures. But she didn’t gleam as she once had, no longer was she a vast, silken cloak under which Illynx might hide. This robe had too many holes, it’s edges frayed and the fabric itself thin enough to be used as taffeta rather than a covering.

The signs all gleamed around her like ever so many broken promises.

For one, the woman hadn’t recoiled from her touch, merely accepted it as a mother would the weeping of a babe – the Empress would have shunned her, as much as it would have pained the golden minx further to be denied the embrace. The sorrow that repressed her vibrant tones was a stamp on the packaged image of the new Psyche, the one who had been shamed off of her white tower and forced out here, to the gates of the Edge.

Illynx was not angry.

She was disappointed.

Even as the words fell from her friend’s lips, she struggled to truly hear them. Ulrik had not lied, then – another knife slides its way deep into her chest. If they had not loved her dearest, then surely she was doomed. Who was more an angry soldier disguised as a queen than herself? Her tears rolled heavy and thick, more a river now than they had been even during her tirade of emotions. The Lady found herself pacing savagely by the end of the words, her voice cold and crisp as ice as it broke the thin veneer of silence that had enveloped that insidiously weak apology.

"Shut up!" she snapped, pinning her ears to her head and stopping so suddenly that her dark locks twirled around her, Spanish dancers writhing in a song of passion, "Just shut up! Apologize to your damn self! They stole your horn, not your soul!"

"Mauja was but a man! Deimos and Ulrik are but men!" her lips curled savagely, white teeth gleaming in the partial shade of their meeting place, "and you are the Dark Empress! You were to let them bend and kiss your hooves; instead of demanding their worship, you fled! You ran like a child into the wilderness, and left me to bare the weight of their arrogances!" Her face replayed all the lonesome memories of her life before the Plague, before the dark wings of protection offered to her by this seemingly plain black mare. I have defended you for this life you gave me, she thinks to herself quite bitterly, do not tell me I have followed a shadow all these years. Do not tell me that life is so hollow.

"Never return to the mountain, if that is your wish -" her golden eyes narrowed as she paced nearer her friend, pinned listening utensils like sharp little teeth against her crown, "but you are a Queen and this putrid display of weakness leaves me with a desire to knock the rest of your horn from your head. You are not a child, you are not a hornless rodent – cease acting as one!"