She barely notices as the mystery pair pull themselves from the earth and leave. Purple words fall on deaf ears, white eyes mean nothing to the girl, whose heart is ember, straining to burst to life. She does not feel Lace's embrace, does not feel the flames which seep from her nostrils to find his face, slinking, unbidden, across his skin and searing away the remaining infection, flickering and dancing and vanishing in the light. She is oblivious to the electricity which crackles in the air, the conversion of dust motes into tiny silver sparks. She fails to notice Oxy's magic leave her as Lace's flows in, a river of fire and earth and sun.

All she can see, all she can hear, and all she can feel is Amaris.

There is nothing in her eyes but a still, cold fire. Tandavi; the girl flinches at her name, the melodious voice that once soothed her in the night piercing daggers through her pain. Motionless, speechless, she watches the hybrid and does not react but for the flicker of an ear, golden spire falling back at the memory of Mirage's voice, of her mother's. Inside her mind is a torrent, a scream- No! it howls, You left! You all left! What cruelty, now, that they should come back just as the girl is finding her feet; what providence, what wickedness, that the stability carefully groomed should be so carelessly swept away.

I thought you were dead. "No." The girl balks at her cousin's approach, stepping back against a tree, feeling the reassuring scrape of bark on her rump. She is not unconvinced that Amaris is real, that the golden scales will not fade into nothing should they come into contact with ashen skin. "You left me," she whispers, and beneath the ferocity a well of sorrow threatens to spill forth, anger a thin shield for misery, loss, betrayal and hope. Had her mother not told them that she was alive? Kali had found her, given her gifts- did she never reach Rishima, never convey the truth? Or worse-

And she stops here, unable to go on, unable to face the possibility of her mother's demise. Tears again well at the edge of her eyes, hot and unwanted, salty and cruel; her mane flies inelegantly as she shakes them away, and even as she still she finds she still trembles. She wants to wake up from this horrible dream, to return to reality where she is alone- and she needs to touch, to be close, to find out it's true, that her cousin is here and she's not just imagining, hoping so hard she fools even herself.