The closer he came, the deeper the concern settled in his stomach. This wasn't the cold porcelain figure staring at him with cracks in her soul and the paint frozen on her vivid eyes—this wasn't a creature with her heart's cracks rimed together with ice. This was.. this was a creature worn out and down, to the point of something awful. Breaking? Going mad? He didn't know her well enough anymore.

Maybe he never had, either.

The thought hits him like a thousand blocks of ice through his heart.

She had come, elegant and curious and spitfire, sun-worship dripping from dark lips onto a scorched and ravaged ground (scorched and ravaged soul); vindictive, and young, her emotional storm witness to words that should've fallen on deaf ears, kill-command stops and laments of.. of... He didn't want to remember that day, and the startling white-and-crimson mare who had blasted her way into his life, subtle as a ray of sunlight and ferocious as a storm.

She was poetry in motion in his life.

He had watched her grow into something else, something more, those traits of youth diminishing but staying alive still, somewhere in the depths of her glittering eyes, and her presence had given him wings. Even when she had been bloodied in the aftermath of a war there had been something of that girl in her—something of the young, brash and headstrong woman who had come to the Edge that day, great enough to ask forgiveness for her transgressions and aggression. It had been humbling.

But then the darkness had come, and eventually, Mauja had disappeared. The last time he'd seen her had been at the Veins, blue flowers glowing in the absolute night, hope written in silent words across their hearts. That time, they had still been friends. Words had fallen freely from her tongue, some kind of concern written in her eyes and voice—he had factioned into her life then, somehow, been a part of it.

But who was she now? He had seen her confidence shatter in the face of his arrival back onto the stage of her life, he had seen her moment of weakness when she sought support against a black stallion's side, and he had felt the cold emptiness as she had turned away from him—there had been nothing of friendship there, just strings of memory, ethereal and fragile, slowly coming apart just like the knife in his heart did.

"It cannot be easy having to remember me," he rumbled quietly to her distant eyes, sorrow lacing his voice, his face. He still wasn't sure of all he had done wrong, just knew that it had been years when he'd found her again on that sand-swept arena (that place is destroyed, just as your hopes of a shared future; blown apart, a fine dust blown away by the wind).. years, and something had changed, and he wasn't sure if he was strong enough to fix them,

or if he even could,
or if it even was right anymore.

Maybe she wasn't his to fix.
Maybe she never had been.

”I cannot linger…” she said into the heavy silence, the words as awkward as their reunion, drifting out from an empty soul. Was this even real anymore? She shimmered in the moonlight, the unfamiliar contour of silver armor cold and sort of menacing in the bleak light. It felt more like he had stumbled upon the ghost of her.

"Then let us go," he urged her gently, not knowing where she was going or why, but he would follow her regardless.