When he describes the meeting he'd attended, she recalls which one it must have been. She'd stayed out of the drama that day, watching and listening to the debates and discussions. "I don't think I met Nyx." She admits with breezy casualty. It had been too interesting watching Kaj and her father and the Wild Rose and Mirage and Lace to observe the strangers and barely-known who had gathered.
But their bright conversations were destined to be short-lived, for a deep seriousness permeated his demeanor shortly after, and she had a feeling she might have an idea of what he was about to discuss. Indeed, he began to tell of the darkness, and the repercussions therof. Deaths, the missing, the infected. It was a dark picture, one that had her drawing her wings tight against her sides, tail lowering to brush the grass that passed beneath her. Knowing that both her mother and her mother's lover, Semira had never been dumb about that, were missing was a hard blow. She'd been hoping, deep inside, that she'd find the Silverthorn somewhere. Now that that prospect was revealed to be a slim one, her spirits dampened.
But the silver child was a child of light and fire as well as darkness and air. Her scales were the color of the moon, a fire burned in her belly. She'd been raised in darkness and in light, and mastered the winds that passed beneath her wings. So even as she acknowledged the grim facts and silently sorrowed for those who had suffered and died, and those who had suffered and lived, hope still burned. Hope that she offered to him willingly. "Without seeing their bodies, or meeting someone who has, we have no proof that those who are missing are dead. And without that proof, we can still nurture the hope that they are living, wherever they might be." Fierce determination burned in her gaze as she looked up at her painted friend. "Dragomir, I cannot allow myself to believe that they are gone, until there is not a shadow of a doubt that they will return. Father and I and Smoke and Kimber could not have been the only ones to flee. And not everyone has a scout to keep an eye on the darkness' progress, or the will to return where so many bad things has happened in just a few seasons. The world changes, and we must change with it to survive." So much wisdom for one so young, yet she had been well-exposed to such discussions in her young life.
Even has she harbored her hope, she had not ignored the dark images he'd told her of what some had been forced to go through. And she resolved that she would do her best to help clean up the pieces of her world.