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Time ticked away with the tapping of trees against the glass ceiling. Every sound was agony, and she squeezed her eyes shut, wishing she could howl the sounds away, order them to shut up and let her pretend to sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, the vision of her mother’s half-rotted corpse danced like a puppet behind her eyelids, taunting her with the undignified nature of death. The entire moment was captured by her mind in flawless clarity, giving her the ability to relive over and over every smell of decay and every bug that crawled over her unseeing, milky eyes. She clenched her jaw, tearing her eyes open again to stare at the marble structure, panic settling into her bones like a thousand ants shaking her bones.
Tinek saw her before Phi did, sending her a mental image of a pegasus with a shifting coat color standing just outside. The shadows were deep, but she could make out a silhouette from the reflection on the water nearby, and she waited quietly. A click of hooves echoed through the hall, and Tinek snuck inside, curling around a pillar to watch nearby. Neither believed this mare who offered a small sound in greeting to be a threat, but Ophelia was not going to be surprised again – not by a pegasus who might have an unfounded and irrational vendetta.
Phi heard the quiet query and lifted her head slowly, eyes awake, alert, and disturbingly vacant. “I do not mind,” she replied, her chime like voice hollow and void of emotion. Surprisingly, she felt no irritation at the company, and she was unwilling to search inward to find out why. Perhaps, though, she could start on this test that the God of the Sun had given her? This mare was a complete stranger, someone she had never seen before, so she had a clean slate with which to start.
First, she had to discover a flaw. Why was she here, alone, at night? Certainly that was enough reason to be flawed. Ophelia was, and here she sat. Alone. “You come alone. Why?” Schooling her tone was harder than she had anticipated. The sound was far away and humming, like a lost songbird or a dreamer, and she was neither. “Surely you have some place to return to – someone you call home?”
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