She wandered through her home on a glimmer of stars and a song of hallelujah, begging for exaltation, craving for absolution. When she didn’t find either, she poured through the sanctions and constellations, begging and pleading through virtue and bliss, tying and tethering and knotting together all the bits and pieces she’d left behind, trying to secure what she’d lost so many times. When they coasted, when they dreamed, when they were magnificent again – Imogen and the Songbird; a fox and her nymph – she trilled with the bounty of Orangemoon and the luster of the dawning sky, a blinding glimpse of sanctity, of tranquility, of serenity brutally, chaotically, ruptured. There’d been a time, a place, where all her steps were wonderful and all her strides elegant, before wars, before shadows, before the endless persecutions; but so much agony, so much torment, so much upheaval had belittled and wound her into a hypocritical mass of beneficence and misery. Left with naught else, she turned to the juvenile form of her growth: a forced happiness, a system of pretenses, a curl, a line, a sketch, of what she wished she could be again. Lena was simply a healer who couldn’t mend herself, a little shell of christened, anointed ignorance, a contorted mixture of burdens, sadness, and decay, quietly folding her frame into the essence of cold and chilling rapture, always seeking and never truly finding – because when she thought she had it, when she thought her heart was enlightened and free and golden, matching gilded frames and generous bounties and a handsome, disarming smile – even that left.
 
The maiden was too strong to fall apart, but she knew she was at least fractured.
 
They rustled past the border, lining up for distraction, when the scent of another coast through her nares, and she ceased all movement. The notion of a predator, of a trespasser, crossed over her sentiments, and her eyes were immediately riveted to the cold, argent metal of the Sentinels and their guarding, warning stances (even when they were rusting, they still looked intimidating, conspiring, eager for the fray) – but they did nothing. Imogen narrowed her eyes as her companion proceeded, closer and closer, locked on the thoughts of someone wandering amidst their grounds, searching and scaling heights, immersed in threats and desecration, that she gave no thought to her own perils, to danger lurking and striking at her. Not dauntless, but resolute, determined, bewitching in her elegant essence, in her calculated, refined air, she wandered beneath the eyes of the sentinels and the rapture of her home, glancing past boulders already lined with snow, at rocky trails with pebbled outcrops, at a pegasus bright and aloof, dotting the horizon with his spattered hues and collecting formations. Her head tilted, her curiosity piqued, her ears tilted forward and her brow arched, still and sure, the epitome of strength and endurance, fortitude and might, warm despite the constant presence of glaciers and rime. “Can I help you, sir?” She asked across the abyss, the void, Imogen standing at her side; and they were like two more sentinels, guarding the keep from the unknown.