There is not much to her, in the end. She did not achieve much in her life, nothing that others would call awe-inspiring or courageous. Muriel had always been quiet, complacent, resplendent. Content in herself, the few that loved her enough to stay around. But to her, she had found Elysium itself the moment she'd looked into her son's eyes. And so she spit and cursed and carried on, what fight she had left burning like a solar flare inside her tiny, wretched frame. Doomed to nothing more than death and a snowy burial, forgotten. Because nobody had ever gotten to know her, and she mourned the fact that those who had would have to suffer alone in their grief. Mourned in those moments where he descended upon her all the events she'd never get to experience, all the little moments she'd miss out on. Brigand growing up, finding love, settling down. Grandchildren smiling up at her with big eyes and lanky legs.

It hurt her more than he ever could, to know that she wouldn't be there.

She screams beneath his blows, but she never begs for mercy or for an earlier ending. Perhaps it is her pride that keeps that away from her, no matter how delirious the pain makes her. She spasms and seizes, coughs and wails as he rips away from her the one thing that had always made her special. Her identity and her past rolled into one. He rapes, pillaging and plundering her body and her soul, but she never gives up that little pearl at the very heart of her being. She keeps it with her even as her blood gushes in hot, unending streams from her spine and shoulders. It melts the snow with how quickly it escapes her body, hot and disturbingly beautiful in colorful contrast with the snow.

As she begins to numb and fade away she is sickly pleased with the number of her wings, if only because it is sure to keep the beast's attention for longer. Though she is dying, she is victorious. Her head lies pillowed on the snow, untouched by his brutality - and perhaps that is a blessing, for if anyone is to return for her body at least she will not be too horribly mangled. She hopes it will make it hurt just a little less.

Everything goes a little fuzzy around the edges, the pain slipping away into a euphoric kind of apathy. She sees Leliel, his bandage gone and eyes aware and full of sight and beauty, smiling down at her with that shy lopsided grin. I love you, Muriel. And she sees Gull there beside him, that adorable look on his face, all recalcitrant child as he reluctantly admits that he cares for her. She feels their wings upon her back, goes through a dizzying spiral of every day she ever spent with the two of them. It's weird, they're walking with her, but they're leading her somewhere. And at the end of the line she hadn't known she was walking is Brigand. And she wonders what's going on at first, but she revels to see him, painted in the most beautiful and familiar of colors.

"Let's go, momma." She wants to ask where, but he turns and walks and she follows instinctively, and together they are swallowed by an intense light. At first she wants to turn away, but it fills her with warmth and love, and she cries to feel it flood into her. All her life she'd chased love, had followed it from Janat to Helovia in the form of Leliel. But she'd never gotten the chance to experience it, shy as the two stallions were. She cries in the face of it, and when she opens her eyes...

Far away from her, in a world too cruel to have harbored her innocent soul for even a moment, her heart stops beating.

But she's home.