The night sky was open overhead, only the faintest wisps of clouds trailing like smoke curls over the rich, black blue face of heaven; through their transparent bodies, the star’s white light pierces, sometimes as individual, bright beacons, and in other places, clustered and seemingly bound together by each other’s shimmering auras.

Laying in the dry grasses of the meadow in a rare moment of still peace, Duir is nestled alongside me, our gold embellished faces turned up towards the night sky.

Some not white, he says of the stars; he’s right. Some of them are yellow, or red, like rubies. Others are more subtle, rippling in faint blues and pale gold. It’s interesting to me, how the colors are all so different, yet similar; I’d even asked mother once why they weren’t the same, but she hadn’t known. Maybe she actually had, but I think she had foreseen the question for what it truly was: a means to justify the love I felt in my heart for my adopted sister, and the ease with which I found I could befriend those who were, according to all I was being taught, despicable.

You know why? reiterates my buck, wondering if the flashing images of the mountain vale, my mother, and the pale, gold and ash marked maiden in my thoughts have anything to do with the colors of the stars.

"Perhaps the Time God knows," I tell him, answering both his question, and the one within my heart; I also avoid the much loathed statement “I don’t know,” in the process.

He does, answers the sometimes eerily vague cerndyr, earning my gaze back from the Moon’s twinkling comrades, as his peculiar statements often do. How the hell does he know what the Gods know, if that’s even what he means at all? I mean, he barely knows what he wants to eat for breakfast most mornings.

I don’t have time to ask him what he means, though, as I usually do; entirely distracting, the wind rustles through the meadow, carrying with it a familiar perfume, mere seconds ahead of the chocolate and azure apparition herself. I’d know her anywhere, even without the tell-tale trail of water wriggling along behind her. Nudging Duir with my nose as I get up, he follows me more slowly, with a loathe-to-move stretch, and I trot towards her slowly.

"Good evening, Ming Yue!" I greet, my voice seemingly louder than it is in the almost silent evening; closing the distance between myself and the familiar mare, I offer her a friendly exchange of breath, dark neck arching. Duir slowly arrives alongside me, his sleepy green eyes lighting up with the faint smile of greeting that blooms on his face. Wondering why she's not settled somewhere for the evening (and knowing all too well the things that can go bump in the night out here), I also can't help but notice how very pretty she is, like always. "The night suits you. What brings you south so late?"