She watched him from the trees that overlooked the mouth to their home, the shadow of the boughs cloaking her golden back from the light that would cause it to glimmer and shine beneath the Sun’s kiss, her eyes broad in wonder as she watched the Engineer work, the bronze plates sliding over iron bones, the wires snaking like vines throughout its hollow core. She had seen it rise, slowly, a statuesque and fearsome thing, all in glimpses and stolen moments when she was sure the man was so lost in his tinkering that she would go unnoticed so near to him, watching.

How many hours together had they shared, this way, the three of them? The Golden Lady, the Mad Engineer, and the Bronze Guardian; once, it had been only two, and an idea that had lit her eyes with the fires of her imagination, the one part of her that had not died with the rest of her innocence. That the beast now stood, silent and foreboding as Death – nay, the black silhouette of an army arriving to burn your village down – rising from the emerald doorway to symbolize the amassed strength they held when all within worked as one.

She smiles, perhaps in perfect time with Ulrik’s brush against the button that brings the metallic devil to life.

Her laughter, wild and joyful, is captured and torn into nothingness by the roar that cascades from the automaton, the beat of her hooves swallowed by plush earth and mechanical booms and whistles until she is almost upon the Wildman and his splendid creation.

For the rest of her life, she will remember the first lighting of those bloody eyes, how they shone like rubies beneath the moon. She will remember this moment in which two minds unified and created a force that would make even the wretched dragon bitch Mirage cower and balk in fear, and she slides to a stop not far from the master of mechanics with this truth writ all across her cheerful and glowing features.

She’s still laughing, a light and happy sound that mimics the dance of the immensely enthused crafter, and she is soon twirling and bounding about the mechanical beast to admire it in its stillness, mind bursting with the images of the bronze in movement. "Oh, Ulrik!" she says, nearly breathless and cautious not to trod upon his hound who lingers nearby, "He’s so beautiful!"