The shadow-mare watches intently, her call at first answered by nothing but the silence of the night. She wonders if she imagined hearing, seeing something. Perhaps the ghosts of her memory are being projected into the night, as though she would want to see them. Does she? She insists that she doesn't, but it is a reluctant insistance, and she knows that if the FrostHeart were to appear, she would not be disappointed. Oh, how she wishes to see his icy form appear between the trees, to approach her as though an apparition, to greet her with the old joke of theirs, for things to be as they once were. But she knows that even if he were to come to her here, now, he would greet her with a cold distance, would treat her as no more than a comrade, when once she would have been his Queen.

Would it have been an alliance of love or of the lust for power? It was no question - they would have reigned together as equals, striving for the same goal. There would not have been love between them - or would there? She was not a loving mare, nor was he a loving stallion, but they had shared a daughter. Perhaps it had been a hoax to forever bind him to her, but it had done the job nonetheless. But where was that bond now? And dare she admit that she missed him? No, that she would not admit, not aloud, not silently. It was a matter of pride; if she admitted that she missed him, admitted to her feelings for him, they would be the weakness that had driven her from Helovia, the weakness, too, that had bid her return.

A movement caught her eye, and she watched in silence as a mare of pure ebony stepped through the trees. They matched, she and the jackal, save for the ivory marks at the Lady's heels and forehead. The newcomer stopped before her, and for a moment was quite, seeming to appraise the Empress with soulless eyes. The shadow-mare waited. She had the scent of the herd, and must have been accepted in Psyche's absence; it was high time that she met the new members of her herd. "You called?" The words finally came, a raspy question, as though the mare did not use her voice that often. "I did," she replied simply. "My name is Psyche, and I am the Lady of the Basin. And you are...?"

[W/C | xxx]