I can only drift among the tall sea grasses with no destination. I almost feel like I am floating but the sharp sting of cold air sends me reeling. My head feels too light and I hate to admit it but also too quiet. Without my shifting, I am lost in my own thoughts.

(the dead no longer speak to me)

I had tried to fit in with these women but they are loud with gnashing teeth and shattered glass dreams. They try to force spoonful of them down each other throats with relentless shrieks and spit addled lips. They do not listen but simply wait for their turn to talk. I move away from the group even though I was eager to help. I was excused as an idiot, dim and young.

(I never realized I could be invisible even when I was whole)

I wander from the shores of Nerine to the meadow. I long for Velis...for his touch...his breath. It was in this very space that he had come to me and I have been his everlasting and ever loving Night. I swore myself to him always under that blinding moonshine. I feel the empty ache of a desperate womb for the child that no longer resides. Nimfa, sweet child, is with Velis. They abandoned me.

(I am garbage)

I can not remain among the living and the dead have turned their backs to me. I have never felt so lost...unwanted...incomplete.

I can sense the chill of him long before he sees me. I am invisible in my mind after all. No one bothers with the living dead girl. But no, no ,no. The ghosts with their blistered and splitting lips are gone. The wind howl of torn throats can no longer reach me.

The gray stallion is upon me with a practiced ease that was unusual for a stallion of his size but somewhere in the darkness of eyes and soul I can almost make out Velis. Lashes fall over the pewter of my eyes as I simply watch the way his whiskered lips split and form the syllables that he tries to reach me with but for a moment, I am a moon that is shifting out of orbit.

Going, going, gone.

I can see his skin more closely now as I study it with disregard to his words. How can one be scared of death when they are so well acquainted with it? Death would at least allow me to join the others on the other side of the plateau and put my relentless purgatory to an end. The stallion is odd...unusual...and I decide I will meet his question with my own voice rather than just walking away. "This." I say with low tones as I give a minor toss of my head to reflect the surrounding area of the meadow. "All of this is wrong." (Beqanna is all wrong. On it's head and upside down wrong. Beqanna has left me naked and alone.) I do not care to elaborate but instead opt to look at him flatly with a single pricked ear. I draw a breath and taste frost on my tongue but also death. It is familiar to me and it manages to draw me a big closer while the faintest curve of a smile brushes over my lips like a lover's caress. "And you? Come to talk to little girls like me?" I am not a little girl but I am barely a mare. It is an odd place to be.

My reply is not of biting attitude. I do not spit it at him with rolling eyes and flirting tongues. No. I simply reply in the replication of his own question. I have no need to mouth off to this man for what would it get me? What would such disrespect gain me? Nothing more than the satisfaction of being just like every other mare I have ever encountered.

I was perfectly fine not acquiring that as a part of my character.

I watch him now with waiting eyes and notice the slide of glistening water as it occasionally drips from the points of his body.