"She would not be anywhere near the north," says the woman as she turns towards the paths that lead out of the snow and into the rest of the kingdom, "the north has been ours since the Lord Time brought us to it, and she knows as much; she won’t be anywhere near the snow. She’ll be west. As far west as she can go." Her features grow miserly with the notion of all that heat and sand, the endless void that is the sea. Even as a child she had not liked the ocean, how it seemed more blue than even the sky and just as unattainable; either way, she was not the best swimmer. She could float and wade well enough, but the thought of all that water and the rage it sometimes possessed left her filling chilled on the inside just as much as the idea of its endless sun made her want to peel her flesh off already.

At least she knows that Psyche is not in the Edge, or in the Throat, or even the Foothills; her sister did well on assuring she’d have no where to run but the dark hollows of the wilds, holding more enemies than sharp words on the tip of her tongue. Illynx’s heart ruptures in terror and concern for her Empress, her golden limbs flashing quickly in the speed of her power walk with little care given for whether or not Torleik was willing to hold such pace or if he even had followed her.

She’d talk to empty air all the way if she had to. It would just be nice to have company for once, she thinks, and Torleik is a good choice for such a venture. After all, they’d talked well and long enough already; surely it could carry on for many miles. Maybe they’d even find Psyche.

The thought makes her heart race all the faster, her golden gaze glancing over to the snow dusted stallion with a smile soft on her lips, hiding the hurting of her soul, though surely he knows it is still there behind her hope. "What do you already know of our heritage? I can fill in what the madman left out," madman of course in reference to her Engineer, about as sane as a tree with a spiraled, glitter dusted trunk, "we haven’t much. But maybe you could turn some of the stories into one of your stories?"

She hadn’t forgotten what he’d said at the herd meeting, and while she was a callous, hateful, and self serving bitch, the thought of music pertaining to the glorious sound of battle made her blood fill with enthusiasm for the rising of its notes. While she doesn’t say as much, she’d like to hear him sing them someday, the slightest reference hinted in how she mentions them, her fear and sorrow slipping behind the vibrant colors of the story of her life.

----- Elapse -----

Over time, she’d slowed to a less tiring walk, simply strolling alongside her handsome companion as she reiterated all she knew of the Aurora Basin and those who lived within it. She’d covered the families within the snow, individuals who had found one another and seemed to linger with one another through any peril they faced, the wars they had fought, the names of those her kin had slain if she knew them or their stories, how life was always perilous in Helovia; she had even highlighted the failed romances and some of the intrigue involving Psyche and the former Lord Mauja, some of her reasons for feeling as she did about her lost friend and the man who had broken her heart.

Whatever Torleik felt of the other men in the Basin, surely none were as pitiful an excuse for men as Mauja. Illynx says about as much with a delicate laugh lacing the air, the pair arriving in the sandy, golden grasses that spanned the distance between the willow grove and the first view of the sea; she can smell the brine carried in on eastbound winds, pausing where the sea of gold first rises from the dreamy, grey green maze of the willow wood to look over at the man who, while she did not know it yet, would come to replace the sociopath who had wrongly risen to a throne alongside her.

The sun is low, most of the day lost as they’d walked and conversed, and she feels the sadness start to rise within her again that they have come all this way and Psyche is still not here.

"I don’t know what I’ll do if something has befallen her," she says, golden eyes flashing fretfully and brows stitching together, knowing that her Empress is not safe in this world of threats that would hurt her in hopes to lure her useless ice king from the shadowy hole he’d fallen into, "I owe her my life, I have built it alongside her. Can a mountain still stand with its core devoured?"

She does not know. She’s barely aware that she’s speaking aloud, staring out over the rippling grasses into the brim of blue that is the sea, how the sun is bloody and hangs against the frame of the world and mocks her soul. Sighing, she takes a few steps forward and peers about her, hoping against hope that there, there in the distance, will stand a black mare with a white streak emblazoning her face, that Psyche will part the umber sea before her and fall against her as she always has in the past.

But she is not there.

"It’s late," she gives in, "we should look for somewhere safe to rest. She is not here."

@[Torleik]
[ OOC: Continued from this post; set in the end of Tallsun year 3 shortly after Psyche's departure from the Aurora Basin. This means, yes, it is set almost a year in the past! If you join in pleaseeee be sure to appropriately write out the timeline for the sake of my sanity. <3 ]

TORLEIK
Long is the winter of a man's soul

Her thorough pleasure at his agreement to translate some of their tales into songs rang through her steps from that point in the journey until her deflation at arriving upon the sea with few clues to guide her elsewhere. Occasionally there is her usual sweet and chiming laughter, her mask ever flickering from one pretty smile to another before dissolving into her unhappiness once more.

Perhaps she could have painted Mauja more kindly, for surely he had done much for the Basin and the unicorns within and he did have friends that were true to him despite his negative aspects, but she also sourly admits to herself that men such as Deimos find mates and that there is no qualifying a person based on the idiots they surround themselves with. And so she does not correct Torleik in his words or the implied uselessness of the man befitting them, nor does she feel much remorse for having smeared the speckled stag’s reputation so without him here to contest it.

If he had never left, Psyche would still be hers, a tender call into the mountain air away from her embrace. It sickened her to think of the Lord Mauja at a time such as this.

She slides an eye towards the bearded stallion alongside her as he gives answer to her mostly rhetorical inquiry about a metaphorical mountain. He makes a good point, she muses to herself, but that she cannot find her friends and there is only one within her vapid shell in all of Loorien she feels she can rely on or truly name such a thing. Horrifying, she shuns the thought away as she normally does, flicking her eyes back out towards the sea as her words slip like so much wind from her lips: "Perhaps it is so."

She follows him to shelter, finding that she feels more incredibly small on this day than she has in a long time; it’s a sobering realization, one that makes her reflect where she so normally avoids, and she ponders as she trails along after the snow flecked stallion if she might ever be able to love another as she loves Psyche.

She wonders if she actually loves her at all, or if it is just a guise to suit her purposes, if all this panic and sadness has risen from a personal affront at being abandoned or a hurt of having been left behind.

Could this man be her friend? How had she ever begun to feel in such a way towards the Empress at all, to begin to see anyone else as she did the prestigious black mare?

But, most pressing… what sort of fool forgot how to access their own heart?

”Where do we go from here?”

She could ask him as much herself, with so many different connotations than the simple direction or region he asked for. She sighs, golden eyes closing in the shadow of the rocky precipice they sheltered beneath, the weight of the world pressing her seemingly all the deeper into the soft sand at their hooves.

"South, along the outskirts of the marsh," she says from the inner darkness behind her closed eyes, voice misty and worn, "then east, through the southern arm of the Thistle Meadow and along the northern rim of the Heart to the Deep Forest."

She is oddly silent for a long time, simply existing behind the shutters of her mask and dwelling on the path she’d described. The Heart was too hot for anyone not half mad to want to remain in for any period of time, and the Caves beneath it too large to bother searching; either way, that room of darkness was impossible to find yourself in, much less a black mare.

They could camp in the old forest again, if Torleik would continue with her, and should fate leave her with nothing once more in stead of her efforts they would return home.

What she would do then… she did not know.

It ached, it throbbed and pulsed, behind her eyes and in her chest, like coursing fire entangled in electrical currents, and she let it wash through her again and again until she could bare the silence no longer and pries her eyes open to look back out at the sea through a blurry gaze. Blinking slowly, unsure why the world is a blurry mess that twinkles in the low light until she realizes that she cries silently for herself, a spoiled, wicked little girl forced into a role she did not want or prepare for.

Turning out towards the swaying grasses, she keeps her eyes off the gentleman leaning against the stone and attempts to contain herself as she allows her voice to trail out into the twilight.

"Is your homeland as beautiful as Helovia?" the distraction slips forth, a simple question muted by the somber tears she does not want to reveal but that he has likely already seen, willing them away with tactful questions to fill her with images of a land that do not remind her, in every way, in every place, of what she has lost.

TORLEIK
Long is the winter of a man's soul

If it had been a ruse to kill her, a fictional hand of aid that hid a dagger up its sleeve, it would have never crossed her mind to be wary or afraid; she rarely felt these things, repugnant and ugly as they were, and to feel these things of a herd mate seemed foolish in more ways than one, mostly that she was daft enough to remain among people she expected to kill her but also because there was little point to binding together if common ground could not be stood upon. In her mind, the act of Torleik’s kindness was as it was, and if it came to be that it was not, she would deal with it at that time; while she plots and plans and pulls her strings, she is often reckless with her own life, especially when overwhelmed by a current of emotions that so rarely breaks free of the thick, time crafted dam that binds them back.

She feels his eyes heavy on her, even when they watch the sea; it is a self condemnation of her tears and her pain, that she has let another in beneath her skin so far as to allow this level of agony when the hollow is noticed. That he notices something even she does not on her face as she turns her tear streaked features away slips her notice, her mind too weary to search for the hidden clues in facial expressions and changes of tone as it normally thrives in doing, her heart too sore to find delight in a game she has played her entire life.

It is only a game. It is part of what cost her everything.

It fills her with bitterness towards herself, another hot wave cresting over the cold, unbearable undulations of her sorrow.

Perhaps there is not so much shame in being kind, as Torleik is, as so many others she has met; in his stoic way he helped her more than a thousand words and a million tears ever could, and in her heart, she sets aside her games and makes a vow to try and be… kinder to those she knows in her life, even if she owes them nothing and cares for them even less. If her herd is willing to reach out to hold her above water when they know her as vaguely as this man knows her, she owes them much more than cold manipulation by which she has honored them until this point.

It’s a shameful thought, one she is glad to let go off when the conversation turns to a chilly, wonderful sounding place that the snow dappled man had been born to. She listens with interest on her face, the tears slowing welling into nothingness as she is swept away to a place that does not know her or the name of her lost love, it could be a realm pure and sweet as she wished it to be, untainted by failure or dismay. And it sounded so, the way he painted it with his words, even when sadness ebbed into the dreamy landscape he had colored for her.

She understands feeling that way, perhaps too well; she had been young when she had learned to stay abreast the violent currents of life without the aid of others. Torleik would do fine; her smile is warm, her eyes gleaming, and they say as much even before she speaks. "There is a future for you still," she says softly, one of her many mantras following her gentle words of comfort (so small in comparison to what he did for her now, the night lulling the sounds of the sea into a song that rang with highlights of crickets and night-birds, the silvery ring of fish rising up and back into the water), "no one lives who serves no purpose. I lost my home once, too, as you heard through our tales. It becomes easier to bare as time passes. All things do."

That she speaks of truths that could ease her own soul does not pass her, her smile becoming one of shy humor that she mocks her own pitiful condition in the present. An ache in her knees seems to make known its presence as the dark stallion begins to lower himself to the ground, his words elaborating on the action that was in itself obvious. She knows it’s a gesture of politeness to explain, but something about the inanity of it all makes her almost laugh and she mimics his movements and settles against the earth with a smile on her face, almost sweet in comparison to her usual seductive and mynx-like grins.

"The gulls will assure we’re awake," she says with a breathless laugh, feeling sleep tugging at her with its warm, blurry fingers, "they have a riot in the morning over the early schools."