The Songbird was wary.
 
She didn’t want to be – she preferred sunshine to clouds, she honored virtue above apprehension and immorality, she loved watching the dawn rise over dusk, a sprinkle of hope and buoyancy, crisp, wonderful ebullience to cover over the cloaks and daggers of yesteryear. But she’d seen what Gods could do; theirs and those of other worlds, coming to blows, severing dreams, wreaking havoc instead of prosperity. She could remember every moment of battling against monsters and heathens, of chasing after wounded comrades, of watching her own beloved brethren fall apart, splintered and segmented, because of battles that should never have occurred (and even then – it felt the same, raw and real, tangible and grating, grinding down over her senses because she’d been just as vehement and violent as the rest, trying desperately to save those she cherished). There’d been murders and mayhem, pounds of flesh taken for lands not truly theirs – all regarded for slips of sunshine and dunes, long, unwinding grasses with enigmas for stories and bones for myths. Her heart wanted to trust in the echoes of what the sea creature had to say, all those fantastic proclamations of a dead earth cleared and cleaned (the Spectral Marsh; once filled with something more than a pernicious name), but her mind balked, halted, ceased and buckled against all the patterns of the past.
 
So she watched, listened, stood along the shoal and bridge with Imogen, uncertain, unsure, of what to do or where to go. The young seemed eager, fervent, ready to help and assist, because they hadn’t lived amidst the seasons of chaos and upheaval, when friends were monsters, when strangers were destroyed, when they all came together, united only to celebrate destruction and terror. The others, those who’d grown beneath plots and marauders, between wars and stages, alongside players and minstrels, seemed just as concerned as her. Her brows furrowed, her lips smoothed out to a crisp line, and not a whisper of a smile, not a trace of a grin, conformed to her regal features. She didn’t give a note, a lyric, or a stanza woven by mellifluous harmonies; instead, she simply waited, basking in the flow of the wind, wondering which primrose path they’d be led down next.