I feel like you just saw a ghost.
 
Perhaps she had. Maybe she waltzed in and amongst phantoms, as ethereal as the rest, blending through foggy fingertips and forgotten glimpses of what it was to be alive. Her heart felt wretched, tied and knotted and gnarled by the ashen taste in her mouth, by the tangible particles of aches and pains clustered around her lungs, her throat, her mind. She was nothing again, one more flower withering amidst the soil, lost without the sun, the soil, the earth to mind its tenderness, with naught but its own perseverance to rely upon – and when that too was gone, its little leaves and blooms curled in amongst itself, wilted, forgotten, forlorn. Abandoned again, an endless, desolate tune, if not in body, then also in spirit, because even small trinkets, ripened and glossed with symbols and adoration, blessings and benedictions, couldn’t make it past the wraiths and specters, shadows and ruins. The Songbird seemingly wilted there, without arias and melodies, without sonnets and refrains, tossed out into the wilderness, the void, just as she’d been so many times before (and each time hurt, each one more painful than the last, because she kept feeling, she kept dreaming, she kept hoping that someday the world wouldn’t be so brutal). He’d just left it, by a stream, cradled in the tides and tales of their ventures – with no meaning, with no reasoning, with no motivation but the stars and horizon. No more need to turn his ears towards a gentle trill or a harmonious whistle; no more need to follow whimsical notes or mellifluous keys, fancies and thrills and silliness gone. She tried to swallow the rush of emotions lingering upon her soul, to push and brush and forget just as easily as everyone else seemed to do – but the tears still stung behind her eyes, and the wishes, the dreams, the fantasies she’d once conjured died so swiftly, so quickly, that it was all she could do to simply stoic, composed, regal and defined even as the earth consumed one more of her aspirations. “You haven’t offended me,” the fairy proffered from the midst of her sorrow, quiet and serene, tucked against all the blossoms flickering and faltering their way. Imogen brushed against her legs, offering silent encouragement and dedication, while Lena polished away at her veneer, desperately scraping over the tarnished fabric and the salted wounds.
 
The truth, however, came across her tongue like the spring – gentle and wavering, kind and altruistic, delivering absolution when no one else had bothered to do the same for her. “I’d given that circlet to a friend.” She raised her head, gaze filled with tears, blinked away moments later, staring at the other maiden, then the horizon, knowing full well it had no more answers than she. Her questions had ceased anyway, locked away in the chasm of knowledge, in the bricks of sagacity that piled amongst her chest – she was nothing and no one to him, and while the notion was brutal, harsh, and tormenting, she wouldn’t be the same to another. “Though it seems he had no need of it anymore.”