She tried and failed. It was a foregone conclusion almost every time.
 
She’d summoned her flames and watched them blister away, into embers, into nothingness, frayed and flailed off of bones they’d managed to summon, collect, and turn into a monster. She’d watched as children tried to do what was right (or was it wrong?), to proffer violence in the stead of so many faults and flaws. She’d witnessed a mother turn herself into a martyr, and she might have screamed in the midst of all of it – trying to forge the will to twist against demons again.
 
But here, here, the Songbird knew her strengths, knew her fortitude, knew what she’d meant to do for her entire life, and there was no way she’d simply stand and allow another to die.
 
Something burned inside her, churned and restless, boiling and brewing, a cauldron of vows and oaths, assurances and fervency, passion and upheaval.
 
The Time Mender ran immediately, no forethought, no attention paid to the crackling mass of bones, all thoughts pinpointed and segmented on healing, on assuaging and conducting and concocting the means to stitch, to sew, to assuage the broken, beaten, and the damned. Her eyes fell to the fallen femme, who’d strived to protect her child, to the youth begging and pleading, to the waves of ruptured portions and bleeding lacerations. Then she knelt, not to pray (to who? she might have wondered later, when no Gods could answer for the sheer audacity and boldness emitted by a abhorrent cretin, by a monstrous ogre, by doom and oblivion), but to restore. She summoned, she called, she heralded all the might, all the power, all the conviction bestowed within her body, within her soul, within her essence; a fairy, a fey, a bird striving to fly. Her eyes closed and her lips moved, uttering songs and tunes to soothe the restless filly, and then chimed, called, for the hours to slide away in a gilded age, in a tilted slate of passing moments, striving to stitch and sew and tie over what’d been ruptured and lost.
 
She’d try and try and try again, because Lena had long since forgotten what it meant to quit, no matter the ominous doom corroding their sights and sounds. She was a beacon, a golden, blooming serenade, proffering salvation when so little could be found at that moment, at that instant – because someone deserved it.