The rain was cold, a sheet of mist and water that fell and fell and formed thousands of tiny rivers across the valley’s surface. The Lady has taken shelter in the caves near the Haruspex, watching from across the rain admonished valley the gleam of the mirror in the darkness, the blue hue of the scorpion where it sat poised and deadly outside the calling room of their God.

She had not always loved him, the bender of Time, because she had not always known him as she had the Goddess of the Moon. Mortals, she has come to observe, are strange in that they tend to align with what is most familiar to them; her son, for instance, had been granted the opportunity at the Veins to chose whatever shrine he wished, and rather than standing alone as Aithniel had, he had followed to where his dam had gone, the same familiar aura that permeated the land of his birth.

She understood both paths of her children, but to her surprise, it was Aithniel that she admired more during this lesson; the girl had gone to the stone of the Sun, and while she had received no answer, she had also not known the way that particular light felt yet. She had known, in some part of herself, that it resonated more completely with her soul than that of the Shock Lord; it had taken Illynx nearly her whole life to figure out that her Goddess had never been hers, to find the being that sang out most clearly in the tune of her own heart and soul.

The Moon did not understand her. There was no love from that dark bitch of the night, and perhaps there never had been, even when she had been small and lost and hopeless. She had felt it during the festival that Kahlua had held for the blackened face of their Goddess, while she sang the song that had once rung out from her lungs in the heart of the misty wood – the soul of it all was gone, even if she had been finally bestowed the chance at the magic she had yearned for.

The burn wounds on her hind leg from the flames of Lena’s kitsune had healed over for the most part, stark white against the golden pattern of her limb but for several dark, ugly and red rimmed healing scars. She hadn’t gone to the healer to get the damage removed for the simple fact that she was going to need proof she had felt fire to appease the stupid Goddess and also that she knew it would bring the Doctor pain – Lena was a gentle soul, and to have had her companion bring her Lady harm surely would cause the damsel stress.

So Illynx wore her marks, bitterly. They were why her son had done so well in the flight of the goats and she had failed.

A call pulls her eyes up and out towards the center of the land, wondering why in the four Gods horns that she was being asked out in such inclement weather and begrudgingly stirring her form out into the cold, damp darkness. Her ears are flat against her head to keep the water from trickling down into them, limbs gathering pace as they touch loam rather than stone as her armor clad form gracefully canters out towards the summons. It had sounded like Hotaru – but one can never be sure with the wind and rain muffling each chord, not when even her hooves seem lost beneath the dull din of the water striking the hard, cold earth.

She finds her there, standing amid the tarnished emerald of the grasses that die and wither in the chill that seeps in from the north, her body pale and framed by the white light that reaches with myriad branches through the shadowy sky. Illynx arrives with Kyst on her shoulders (miserable, mind you – neither birds nor cats care for cold water dousing them at any point in their lives), curiosity lighting her features and a dark distaste for the weather burning darkly in the depths of her eyes, carefully hidden.

It wouldn’t do for her people to think her so vain or too weak to wander in the fall storms.

Hotaru, she says, voice sweet despite the sourness that resides in her heart, you have called for me?