Home was a beautiful word sprinkled with blissful connotations. Home was a sanctuary, a sanctum, a secure, safe world prospering beneath the sun, the moon, and the stars. Home was a haven built on stone pillars and marble columns, stretching past the horizon, glowing within a resplendent heart. Home was a palace floating on air, on wings, on taffeta, on canvas, painted and anointed with strokes of bright, brilliant hues, splashed against the backdrop of rapture, of reveries, protected and guarded by its inhabitants.
 
So she never understood why so many left.
 
Maybe their souls were torn in two, begging for absolution but incapable of finding it within the chilly, winter realm. Maybe they were tied and tethered to other strings, other pearls, other wishes and affairs, swept away by the course of time and seasons, forgetting and forgoing the taste, the sounds, the essence of snow and rime. Maybe they hadn’t found what they were looking for, grasped and tried and deluded their minds into clouds of smoke and ash, and finally couldn’t take it any longer, fleeing, escaping from the deluge and torment. Maybe it wasn’t for them, and they found no will to survive amongst the tundra and the glaciers, couldn’t push their determination beyond the mountain range, beyond the power, the glory…
 
Her theories melded and molded together for the benefit of afterthought, of reflection along their journey from threshold to the Aurora Basin, because she didn’t pry, she didn’t ask, she couldn’t form the question so carefully balanced across her tongue. Perhaps bringing it to reality, to tangibility, meant she’d have to face the notions of being left behind again, of gilded faces disappearing, of mysteries unraveling and puzzles withering – but Frost Fyre was not Roland, and she wasn’t going to force her being, her core, into the painful, bitter nuances plaguing her mind. Imogen glanced her way, and the Songbird didn’t do anything but stoically face the world ahead, gazing at the Sentinels and the crisp leaves falling around them. Too strong to break, too weak to reveal, plunging on as she always did, the same, sad pattern as before.
 
The nymph turned to the newly returned Scholar as if she were the sun, a remnant once lost, now forged back on the steps of her homeland, revering those who’d come to claim what they’d misplaced. Her head gestured towards the bounty, the lore, the manifestation of ivory, of beauty, of wonder, well beyond their frames, the playful lights blinking in borealis renewal, placing lavender and emerald beacons across the sky in a heavenly welcome home. The warmth of her smile radiated past her lips, out into the grandeur, the opulence, the blessing of the twilight expanse, the evening radiance, the tender nuances of an ice child’s reappearance. “Not much has changed since you left, I’d imagine,” and she winked, eyes sliding from the spotted mare down to the valleys below, freshly coated in white. “But I’m sure its glad to you have home.”


[Come welcome Frost Fyre home! ^_^]

 
The fairy laughed at Frost Fyre’s response, gazing up at the bright, vivid world and trying to remember the sense of ebullience floating over her now. Not everyone disappeared. Not everyone lingered in the void. Sometimes they came back, returned to the branches laden with snow, to the rising mountains and the frozen hills, to the wicked, wild tundra captivating and beckoning them back, again and again. She wanted to ask the mare why she left, what made her reappear, what snatched and beguiled and allured her back into the threshold of dancing, lingering lights and cold, majestic beauty – what caused her to stray, then waltz again. If she could do it, couldn’t others concoct the same?
 
Why didn’t they all want to stay in the first place?
 
She listened to the wind curl around the edges of caverns and stones. She watched her breath curl in warm, tender, lingering puffs, then dissipate. She simply existed, in between time and space, in between angelic figures and spotted whims, in between honeyed assurances of recurrences and sparkling wishes, like she could chime and echo them back into life.
 
I’ve never been happier to be freezing the girl had spoken, and Lena realized, snapped, rushed away from all those merciless, harsh, unrelenting blows to her sentiments, to her emotions. Shouldn’t she have been content too, to exist in this wide, open, barbaric plain, with monsters and sinners and dreamers and heartfelt soldiers, who clung to life with determined, resolute ministrations, who started the day fortifying their aspirations and ambitions? Shouldn’t she have been grateful to merely be in this magnificent, exotic world?
 
Before she could muster something, anything to respond to Frost Fyre’s beautiful sentiment, another appeared – another bright, undaunted speck glimmering and glittering on the horizon. He was like candy, sweet and pleasant, honeyed and layered with so many silly, wondrous things that Lena couldn’t resist the temptation to widen her grin, to embody and envelop everything the realm had to offer her. Why should she have been lamenting her losses when there was so much more to discover, so much more to do? “Johnny,” she laughed, a whimsical sound, like belles, like mellifluous strings, “I’m fine. And yourself?” She responded in kind, amiable and affable, reaching past the empty husks of her shell and proffering, bestowing, those pleasantries, those defining characteristics she’d always managed to muster despite any agonizing sentiment gliding her way. The sylph erased those withering, writhing sentiments now. They were of no use in this grand sphere, in this reverent glade. She said nothing more, stepping back to allow the sienna and ivory mare bestow her own introductions, gaze sauntering from beast to beast, from creature to creature, ignited and incensed and grace all over again – hushed in the cold, but exuberant, wild, and untamed in her heart.