Her legs walk without her permission like a machine's.

There is a narrow space, a crevice, a sealed room tucked within the maze of her subconscious in which she stows her pain. She can feel it, nearly touch it, as if it were an existing, tangible thing, but she does not go near it in fear of placing a key into the lock, for there is a part of her that yearns to set its contents free, to reach out into the emptiness and pull back the other half that forever grieves as if her world has died. The dominate part, the part that you see, is hardly a part at all but a foreign mask, intricate and strong and smooth and imortal, the layers and layers of chalky white wall that sits between her room and the wide wicked windows that dance with the movement of curious glances and covetous hands and noses smearing sweat along their wine-lacquered skeletons, and how she adores to play in this worn and sun-bleached face as if she does not know that it is ugly. She sees the chipping paint and fickle color of this room only when she remembers her son; it is he who holds the key between his fingers, and he who sneers with a blaming tongue as it is turned within the embrace of a mechanical chamber.

He has turned it now, for she remembers, and her body falls into darkness.

Her body had sliced through the ivory flatness of winter that lies behind her despite the very summer sun that shone in southern elsewheres, and though her skin had tingled and prickled with the movement of life beneath it, her eyes were lackluster and danced not for the beauty of the lands they devoured as they should have; as they would have if it were a soul intact there behind their autumn lights, the gossamer shell that framed them. She had wandered for the sake of wandering, of discovery, and she ceased only then that there was something looking, only then that she watched from hollow sockets her own hollow-socketed reflection in this wall of ice, for it was an arch of a lip of a cave that ice adorned, and it was this that had so obstructed her view of hollow-socketed nothingness, and she tilted her head so deeply to the side as she studied and was studied by what the frozen crescent hid, and saw her neat and chiseled face warp into the softness of Zelos's; into her child's, for he was all and everything that had once sculpted the lines of her.

She is absent, now.

Her shoulders quiver as if she in fear and her lips twist into awful knots as she assembles the rusty images of her boy in her head so that she may see him smiling again, but he does not smile, for in the few and broken beats of life that he was alive he had naught the time, and her ears and cheeks and breast sting with his despair. She sees his death as it was never meant to be seen and her heart lurches against its tethers and she hears a desperate rapping between her bones, beneath her skin, slipping into her birdcage chest with an echo like an angry sea's churning, and there, right there, in a place that binds her spine to nothingness, to the darkness pooling in the fleshen dips above discs and chords and the oblivion that marks her back with tattoo-kisses that scar like poison, there is a piece of something alive, something beautiful, something touching her insides with golden feathers as it flutters, and she watches with screaming eyes as it ceases to be and turns to ashes at the floor of her, at the end where she once began, and her legs walk without her permission like a machine's.

It is not often that she allows these pieces to die, for it is not often that she ventures far enough to find this room, but she does find it, and after she does, after her lungs do not ache and the ties to her vile woman's nerves have severed themselves, she appears the same as she had when the piece still breathed; an unquenchable carcass with a soldier's thirst, the near-man with the iron skin, a would-be, a halfling, a product of sensationally rotten breeding, and so is how she bequeaths upon the earth her chaos.

She stands before this cave, this mirror, the bitter voice of the air coaxing her eyes to release, drawing tears that would never come, lusting to see her crumble, but she is fleshed from metal and the ways of the gladiators, and no body of her lord father's making would so quickly besmirch his name.

The wet and fragmented sound of her fickle heart striking against her bones is lost to the calm, sullen trickling of quiet. She is still despite the screams of flame that leap from the skin he has grazed, the cheek he has kissed, the tangled mess and disrepair he has wrought upon her insides; he, perhaps the last of whom she will not mind loving. He has left her for the near-winter that dug into her now, ravaging and ruining, and save for the gentle stirring of his cruel, dark eyes in the frost and marble of the timeless walls, her child so fresh, so rosy, and so despicable gave her naught to silence her aching mind. She dares not think ill of him even as he so ignores her pleas, her prayers sent upon these vile, spiteful raven's wings; it is not Zelos who denies her a son but his murderer, her king, her blood, and it is not he who she could think ill of either, for to forsake her lord father is to forsake his word, which is to forsake all that she is, all that is known, and so her enmity is saved for another. With a last, longing pull to the boy's reflection she thinks she sees, the cutthroat Liriope turns away to instead allow her ire and loathing befall a second reflection, a second son, and though he is too tall, too old, too careful, a hot and forceful breath catches in her throat at the sight of what once could be, and she is envious.

'Hello,', he has said with beauty in his voice. 'Are you okay?'

"No," she says with bitterness, and the soundless air ensnares the word in its equally bitter embrace.

He is a sharp, jutting creature, long and gangly and so very boyish that it pains her to peer directly into those luminescent pearls he must call eyes, his knives for legs and the daggers in his skeleton and the pull and slice of his taut, gleaming hide, but she finds comfort in the ice and glassine pedestal that looms, albeit timidly, from behind his silvern brow, and of course in the fact that he is at least not a woman, and so when she does find the strength to look upon him she looks upon him gently. She is pleased when she finds him handsome, capable, a potential soldier perhaps, if not for the way the light seems to pass right through him, and she silently judges him worthy as if she would have ever judged him as anything else, a hum, a short, staccato purr bubbling but not breaching in play against her lips as he is critiqued. There is an air about him that unnerves her; innocence, tenderness, all those prettier, easier things whisking about like poppy petals across his lantern face, soft and lilac colors neither she or her heir reflected, and she cocks her head to the side as if in confusion, as if to see a man without lines of war carved into his flesh or something harsh and beastly spilling from his tongue is the stuff of fairytales, of dreams, and it takes a rounded handful of unnerved moments for her to remember her manners, her duty, her reason.

"Young lord," she suddenly breaths, and her knees are slipping down to the floor, her chest against the jarring edge of her toes, her hair bleeding into the rock and snow, and she kneels to him, crown-less, name-less, a common girl for those few and heavy fractals of time she is low. When she stands she does so slowly, patient, wishing for him to savor, furling into a mercenary's framework, the mold and gilding of a gladiator's riches, and when she speaks her words are bold, iron and metal and armor from a fearful place in her her throat:

"From where do you hail?"

And she may appease his avaricious inquiries as an equal.

'Caneo', he has said, chimed and hummed in the the chirp and vibrato of a child crown, a halo of lilies and chasteness and spring, the pink of a sugared tongue sweeping away the taste of dust and ancient notes of silence with a single, fragile lyric; a name of which belonged not to a king. Luster and alabaster in rare twinkles of sun was the thin frame of he, the rosy gild of armor-lacking arms, summer soft intention, contrived of such dulcet whispers of winter, of gossamer purity, a luminescent presence against the tendrils of wickedness that was she, soiling, tarnishing, ruining what would have been so beautiful, so easy, the contrast of their stances, their sways, their essences jarring. She sees his unease as she kneels to him, the questions boiling, the dark lines of apprehension drawn deep into his folding skin, and immediately she finds herself distressed, for his displeasure must be directed towards her act, her pose, her still dance of worship, and she thinks herself wrong, too eager, perhaps, but then he speaks again, and she is reminded of his child's mind. A curious mind. An unknowing mind. No; not a king.

Prince Caneo.

His voice paints her skin with an odd, diluted hue, muted and tender and so unlike the garishness of men that she is startled, confused, and she moves carefully toward him with the side of her head bending, arching, careening, a single tulip-petal ear flittering gently with the push of his breath, devouring greedily his silk and cordial sound as if it glass and porcelain, so easily breakable, so easily wasted. Her eyes are awake now, and they roam and carve into his silver cape and silks until he is stripped and bare and bone, whittling into the dark places between his rosy cheeks, the malleable discs of his spine that bend now with uncertainty so as to decider this act of boy, this mask of ivory and feathers and innocence that so hideously adorns him. He commands not, but asks so sweetly to know her; to know that they are herd-mates, to know that she, too, possesses a mortal name, a title embodying no more than a father's whimsy and ill humor, an echo of the harsh, death-branded word that is her own. He asks, his song a woman's plea, as if there is the option to decline, as if, it it were to please him, she would not have given him her identity, her crown, her flesh, her humble, soiled knees at the sight of a frown pulling upon his lips, and she looks up to him (for he is taller, a man after all) and narrowly shakes her head with pity, for he recognizes not even his own might, and to live as such for surely as long as he was indeed a pitiful tale.

For the fates to bring him to her was nothing short of miraculous, and with a heavy heart, she tasks herself with enlightening her liege, the little prince.

"Yes," she bestows upon the air, coming forward another step so that he may hear her clearly, and she is close enough to smell the freshness of him. "Liriope; I am a soldier of the Basin." And so as to hear him speak it himself, so as to ask him to paint vividly his very weakness upon the air, his flaw with his lovely, lovely breath, she trails her fire and liquored gaze up his paper chest, his ghostly hips, the hollow sound of his ankles' clinking, and adds:

"Are you not a soldier, too?"