Her expectations, while laden and courted with notions, ideas, and sentiments of what could likely transpire, she never imagined or stroked the anomaly of a King bowing his head to her in shame. For a few moments, all she could do was stare, jaw slackened, eyes widened, and affable smile dissipating for a more token befuddlement, rendered speechless and torn into an impasse. The frame, the mind, of this sovereign and her own would likely never see eye to eye, nose to nose, and only in idle, passing times could they ever beseech one another much more than loathing, passing glares, but Lena was not of this carnivore affliction, and struggled over what to do, what to say. They’d been at odds when he coaxed desert and sand, when their young were targeted, then absconded, when the empires longed to topple one another over and over again, and she’d played some minute part, begging for salvation and absolution when none could be found, playing the role of soldier on the boundaries of glass walls and stolen chambers. She swallowed a foreign feeling down the back of her throat, pictured the burning edges of those bright, brilliant invitations, Mirabella’s tears and tribulations, the constant suffering and agonizing between their herds. Even when they’d come to them, creators and rulers of falls and pools, offering civility and allegiance, they’d been refused, and an unsettled fixation boiled and brewed inside her, crooned to the surface, a choked, bitter, rancorous taste settling across her tongue. She didn’t like the flavor, the simmer, the scorching malice, and instead, tempered it into regality, into finesse, into a building crescendo she’d been longing to say for so long, with no one to hear it. The nymph crooned, stared at the curved form and the ashamed cranium, breathing composure instead of wrath, truth instead of melancholy, deliverance instead of damnation. “Our world responds so readily to rage. Sometimes we corrode our fears with ire, and it becomes infinitely more dangerous.” Her gaze wandered over to the valleys, to the outstretches of verdant fields and clover-ambience hills and peaks away, believing in the foundation of her words, of how many wars had been fought for a just cause, smiting the other side until hypocrisy lingered and chaotic traces kindled. “Then, it’s always the innocent that end up hurt.” The babes, with their tender blamelessness, with their genial outlook on life sundered and ruined, either when they’d been abolished, denounced, relinquished from the mist, abducted and stolen from their homes, or had their beckoning drawings drawn into fire right before their eyes. She spoke again, a smile laden back across her lips, fair, honorable, benevolent, and majestic while the rest of the earth threatened to crumble. “I hope you take more consideration into your future actions, Lord Midas. I appreciate and accept your apologies – I will pass them on to the children.”