The world, Raeden was learning, was a fragile place, sinking under the weight of lies and broken promises, purloined secrets and stolen moments forged from nothing but hope and frail wishes. Every day, every second, the world is sinking, suffocated by forgotten ambitions and high aspirations that have fallen, crumbled to dust and cobwebs. She has been crushed, bones cracked, ribcage curling in, squeezing her heart, by words that have shattered her house of glass. For all her dreams, all her stubborn, resolute beliefs, they are all too easily crumbled beneath a careless word; still, she perseveres, too afraid to be her own person, to be more than the mirror reflecting the expectations of her. Expectations she was born from, assumptions she was molded to, clay folded perfectly, all the cracks hidden by a clean coat of paint, still there; are they still spreading, cracking, just waiting for the right moment of heat or cold to ruin the statue? Like the dog born and raised to the hard, ham-fisted grip of the master, she does not know a path different than the one she treads now.

Swept in by a hasty wind, the wraith of gold and cream appears on the threshold of a dying doe.

Out of her league, drowning, lips hardly above the water sucking her in, she flounders, wallowing, alone at sea despite the vultures crowding in around her. Coats of cream and ocean-foam white surge in around her from the darkness eating the world, the utter blackness that swallows everything in it's way even if the grass flows up from the earth, sparkling blades of emerald, little warriors fighting the dead soil, bursting forth with life from the rotten earth. Feathers whisper in her ears, murmuring stories that she cannot understand, and the filly pitches forward with eyes wide and stunned, questions bubbling up at the tip of her tongue, witnessing her first death so different from the starved, ancient and ceremonious repeats of battle after battle in a drawn-out war of blood and gore.

Lithe, slender, a many-tined doe, blood a hard and heady scent in her nostrils, broken and battered.

Raeden is scared, wishing to recoil, flinch away from the scent of death that begins to seethe in the air, the rich stench of the brief moments of utter oblivion before the bugs come, and the cycle of life turns on. She is afraid, petrified of what might have made the graceful animal so utterly different, and she treads silently, hooves making but a ghost of a whisper on the grass. Light by light fades from the sprawling array of antlers, fireflies winking out, and her head is spinning, swirling, an empty wasteland. She is dying. Something wet dripped from the doe's damp nostrils, something that gleamed angrily in the delicate light cast from those luminous eyes and shining horns curling in magnificent, graceful loops. So frail, delicate and long-legged, something that reminds the filly unpleasantly of herself, but such different circumstances. Help. Raeden swallows the lump in her throat, steps forward with a gentle tread, thoughts spinning, twining together and falling apart as she tries to enunciate grace, repeat the same elegant movements of her mother.

Right now, she only feels young and clumsy, a child dressing up in a business suit and pretending to work with daddy.

[Wishlist: Originally wanted Fennec Fox companion.]