An amused smile plays across my face as she correctly assumes who Erebos’ dad is; I guess I get so caught up sometimes in my stories that I forget others may not know these people. It’s worse when they are from the Basin, because it leaves even more room for assumptions, and even more so when she’s pretty and distracting. While she admits she knows little in so far as what Helovia was like before she came, she openly shares what she does know.

It’s my turn to laugh when she accuses Deimos of having a cold shoulder. Maybe he does, but he’s always been that way to me, and I’ve come to know him better than some. While my mother had wanted to reap the Reaper, either to place him as artwork on her cavern walls or simply to say she’d done it (it was hard to tell with her), I’d always thought of him as big Uncle Deimos. Grumpy like every adult ever, and certainly aloof, but he wasn’t really mean in the way it takes to just ignore someone.

I would know. I am mean in that way.

"He’s not cold at all," I say through my chuckles, which ripple into submission as I hope she doesn’t think I’m laughing at her – rather that everyone seems to be afraid of my thoughtful Uncle, me included, "he can be a bit… imposing though. I guess it’s a natural side effect of having the death touch."

“Death touch” is given a verbally dramatic flair to accentuate the danger of the magic Deimos has without blatantly saying as much, adding silliness to something not silly at all, as Erebos and I had done most of our lives when it came to our parents.

I want to add that Uncle Deimos is a good man, a good man in all the ways that Thranduil is a fool, or my mother is a conniving bitch. Duir looks up at these harsh sentiments with a curious and offended expression, glancing back down at Remy for a moment in disbelief that he’s been bonded to something so bitter, and so young, before his game continues. Between his look and the jilted cries of my better self, I keep these thoughts to myself.

“…extra bit of sanity,” she’s saying. Duir is trying to help Remy not fall over, not blaming Remy a bit for not doing the same for him, probably because deer are so much bigger than polecats, even when the deer is only a newly hatched from a shiny orb fawn. As soon as the buck is assured his new friend is fine, the game continues, Duir occasionally poking a hoof into a hole, rather than his nose, now.

I don’t know if its sanity or the absence of it, as I try to cope with the incessant barrage of my thoughts against Duir’s elated flow of feeling, a pressure slowly building at the front of my head that signifies I’ll probably have a headache tonight.

"Anything is possible," I say next, genuinely thoughtful in its tone. I truly believe this, with all my heart, and I say this while looking out through the shadowy slits between the bamboo, leading to where She lies. Mortals could share their souls with other beings, pull the heavens into disarray, and slay Gods. If these are only possibilities in Helovia, the Nightwalk, or lands of equal magical magnitude, I am not sure why anyone has ever lived anywhere else, or would want to.

My wink makes her giggle, which makes my skin burn around my neck and face. Unlike some lighter pelted things, though, my black nose doesn’t burn brighter in any significant way but its temperature, so Rexanna probably won’t notice. Still, I keep my eyes for a good while on the groves of sun dappled bamboo, feeling her gentle stare bore into the side of my face until I can bare it no longer. Her eyes, inspiring yet another smile as they meet mine, are blue like the rivers I’ll be waiting for her by; a young man’s sentiments, promises cast in the midst of the moment that, for a brief few moments, anyway, might even be true.

She speaks about Mauja, a figure who looms in my own history like the mountains themselves, a voice I’d never heard, but which has always been present; his name dapples the history of my dam, and it makes him, in this way, part of me as well. The Frostheart is named alongside Tembovu, who is less magnanimous but no less present in my memories. Tall, freakily so, and King of all the Edge, making three great men listed from her lips in less than ten minutes.

Just who is this girl? Even the pressure of the headache seems less as I look at her for the first time as more than a doll to be admired. Maybe I should have expected as much with her ease of tongue, how her laughter has seemed to string me along with the gentle grace of a tacit professional, but I’m too damn arrogant and foolish to really notice these things until they are obvious.

It’s time you grow the hell up, I demand of myself. What good it does, who knows.

"Magic doesn’t really help if you haven’t the heart for war to begin with," I parrot from the lips of unicorns much older and experienced, and my own small well of experience against the Gods of the Rift and the few mortal enemies I’ve bested. However, despite my attempts to hone or utilize the art, I do have a natural talent for acting (or so I think), especially if it makes me seem better than I am, and I really have thought about how bad war is once or twice. "People die. Even worse, sometimes they don’t. They just have to keep on living, broken in ways even Gods cannot mend."

I think of Erthë, and her hobbling pace, and it makes my heart clench in pity of her. It aggravates me that I think about her at all. I think of Aunt Psyche, the Dark Empress of the Lord Frostheart, another mountain of my life, and the tale of her severed horn, left in the desert with the last of her thinly spread sanity, broken clean away by a raven colored mare. I remember the distant sight Mauja himself, weeping over the body of an owl, seemingly dead, though I hadn’t stayed to see, and how he had also falling over the bleeding, broken body of a pretty girl, a dead girl that was colored like rusty dust cast over snow.

It makes me swallow the saliva that has taken on a sour taste in my mouth. It makes Duir stop his game entirely, watching quietly from his distance with ears lifted.

"Still, magic surely can’t hurt, either," I distract myself from the topic just as she did, finding that, now that I’ve looked at it, I’d rather shove it back wherever it was before. I’m not ready to know that the world is often dark, and terrible, though it never ceases to throw these truths in my face. "I have some tricks, too."