In a flurry of moments, swift, tipping scales, beats of zealous, arduous fire, she swayed from delight, jubilation, and bliss, to a saddening mixture of repose, regret, and remorse. Frost Fyre’s introduction, her lovely companion’s calling, arrived before the burn of abashed confusion rendered itself across the sylph’s features, for as she parted her jaws to extend the salutations, the delight of meeting the other creatures collected within the Basin, the spotted filly turned away, sought to depart. A crushing stream of guilt and contrition flooded along her cheeks, puncturing her grin into a lamentable frown, a hint, a display, of her chastened heartstrings. Had she erred somehow, expressed herself too much, gave over an immense, intense glee, offending the femme to withdrawal and deviations? And if so, how could she amend the wicked arch of her miscalculations and mistakes? Deodat’s arrival back into their icy halls should have awarded and courted many well wishes, celebrated, conveyed with hope and joy, not hastening further divergences. Struggling to decipher an answer, her song captured a lamentable air, strife and requiems building a wild crescendo of desperation, drifting towards the fleeting frame, ardent, hopeful. “Oh, you don’t need to leave! Please stay!” But the plea seemingly fell upon deaf ears and stale shadows, hastening towards a wall, a void, of nothingness, a disappearing figure into the threshold of frost and rime.

The frown failed to disappear, and apologies hung through the chilling air, seized from each warm puff of air billowing from her mouth. Eyes became a downcast sentiment, Imogen a grumbling sector nuzzling between fairy hooves, while the nymph attempted to piece together Deodat’s words, distracted and fixated on the cause of her oversights and fallacies. She attempted to maintain a state of composure thereafter, postured one saddening sigh before lifting and tilting her tiara back towards the painted warrior, managing to curl one lip upwards at the notion that he was fair, that she need not extend another song to heal him from incriminating wounds, that he’d somehow remained safe on his wayfaring journeys. At the dominating ferocity entangled within his voice, however, upon learning of the prior abductions, she hastened a steady, valorous answer, attempting to assuage and soothe the ruffled plumes, forgetting to push hers back down. “Yes. They’re back.” Through treaties and promises of peace, armistice and good will, but Lena couldn’t hold back the notion that it couldn’t last, that something would break and they’d all shatter again, thrashing, scathing beings haunting the dusk for their lost loved ones. Silenced for a time, she merely captured the nuance of his words, the attempts at cajoling humor upon a foreboding situation. The nymph appreciated the gesture, but couldn’t forgo the feeling the fault had been her own. Apparently my ability to offend has improved since my departure. “Perhaps mine has grown as well.” A rasping, prying thread plucked at her seams, and her honeyed stare was rendered, returned, to his. “Did I err somehow?”

At his next query, however, she’s spun back into the hushed platitudes, a reunion of discomfort and dishonor. The only exciting portions of her life had been vile, searing, simmering decibels of violence, scathing and sinister, nefarious and irreverent. First, proffering onslaughts, terror, malice and menace upon monsters heading towards their homelands, and the second, for children, for a mother, exposing the maddening weight ire held within her soul. The nurse still felt the bits of shame curling and coiling in her throat, of vitriol and venom, of wrath and rage, she’d courted and flamed. It smothered, strangled, choked and suffocated, bore down upon her as a cumbersome secret, furtive, specious, clandestine, revealing far too many interludes and artifices she’d managed to keep locked away for swirling, passing seasons. She struggled with how to answer, respond, to the mere, innocent query: she was incapable of lying to her friend, of building and constructing deceptions and fabrications, and she knew she couldn’t truly ghost and coast over the ruminations, distract and divert his attentions. Her lips drew together in a serene, quiet command, brows furrowed, and voice finally roamed with mellifluous chords, an ambrosial hint within her eyes to drag him away from further discussion of her wicked deeds. To be reminded of her heartless, relentless, merciless exploit was a piercing, loathing juncture when she still hadn’t figured out how to overcome it. “Nothing I’d like to do again.” Calculated smokescreens and feints were established immediately thereafter, singsong and sweet, curious and serene. “How were your travels?”