She steps out into the open, leaving the safety of the red-rock cave and the curtains of peace that Tiercel had crafted for them. She is feeling restless, and even though she disliked the heaviness of this darkness (it did not feel like night — night was feather-light with the silver threads of starlight, while these shadows were thick, nearly suffocating), she also could not bear the confines of the cavern right now. The child that grew inside of her was equally restless, seemingly no longer content with her continuously constricting living arrangements, and she liked to make her displeasure known by constantly moving. Islas, already so unaccustomed to the endless torrent of emotion that the child sent coursing through her, wasn't sure how much more of this she could take.

She had thought that the wide-open space of Loess, dark though it may be, would ease the edge, but instead, it seemed only to sharpen it.
Because stepping out into the dark she is again reminded of what she is missing.
With eyes turned skyward, she is reminded that there are no stars to be found, that this dark stretches on forever with not an end in sight.

Still, she cannot help but to try again. She reaches up through the dark, reaches to where she knows the stars should be, and tries to pull the tendrils of starlight down just as she has a hundred times before.
And she is met with the same resistance, that same feeling of sinking into something but being unable to move it from where it rests. That feeling of knowing something is there, but it lies just beyond her reach.

And, for the first time in her life, she feels anger—anger of her own making and not something projected onto her by Tiercel or their unborn daughter. Anger that blooms of its own accord in her chest and flashes like electricity through her veins, in such a way that her ever-dimming glow suddenly flashes brightly in the dark, like a spark, though it dies just as quickly. 

In its wake, her glow is all the more subdued, but so is her anger. She is left with her usual hollowness, with that darkness that fills up all the empty spaces of her just like the dark in Beqanna. 

She hears movement, and that is the only thing that draws her mind back to earth and away from the lost stars. “Hello?” The dark seems to swallow her voice, and she stares into it with purple-black eyes, and she is suddenly reminded of the unearthly things that lurked in this new endless night.

She was not accustomed to feeling anything even similar to fear, and she finds the emotion unsettling. It creeps in during those brief moments when her greeting is met with only dark and silence, and she does not know if it is emotions radiating from the child inside of her, or fear has taken root because of the child inside of her. Islas did not know much about motherhood; not in an instinctual way. But she knew that she had to protect her and Tiercel’s child. She knew that it was her responsibility to keep herself alive for the sake of their child, and in the heavy space of time where she remembers the creatures that lurk in the dark it occurs to her that perhaps being out here alone was not the best idea.

But the voice that greets her is clearly equine, and she feels herself exhale slowly, silently, as the tension that had built beneath her skin evaporates. “The flash was me,” she answers the mare that has now walked closer, her figure slowly taking shape even in the dark. Her own glow, dim though it was, was still brighter than anything else in this endless night. She knew it was fading, though. With each passing day her inner star seemed to weaken, and in response so did the glow she radiated; these were things she noticed, things that she felt. What she did not realize was the way her color was beginning to turn—that the dark was bleeding into her white, starting at the tips of her ears and along the crest of her mane.

That soon she would be as dark as the sky above them.

“Sorry if it startled you,” she says the apology, though her tone is still a touch flat. Though her unborn child seemed to possess Tiercel’s ability to project emotions onto her, it had not changed her entirely. She still had moments of emptiness, moments when her voice again rang hollow and the purple-black of her eyes went flat.

She does not want to imagine how dull she will be once her starlight fully surrenders.

“Oceane?” She repeats the mare's name, recognizing it, and a brief smile touches her lips. “You are the queen here, then.” She had not often interacted with Pangea's kings and queens; had never been tempted to. They were all the same to her, as many of Beqanna's residents were. She likely would have gone years without ever crossing paths with Oceane, either, had it not happened just now. Her understanding of kingdoms and their dynamics was still novice at best, and it would never occur to her that a queen would want to know who her residents are. “My name is Islas.”

She seems kind, which to Islas feels like a rarity. Most that she has met felt sharp, or at the very least guarded. Everyone seemed to be surrounded by walls that they had little interest in letting anyone over, and for someone like her she of course did not try. She was fascinated by their emotions and the way they did things, but she did not care to know them.

They were not the stars and this was not home.
(That last part would have had more conviction behind it if it were not for Tiercel, and for their child that continue to grow and swell within her.)

Still, the queen draws from her lips a rare smile, though most of it is lost in the dark. “The stars are gone, too,” she adds, and there is the first color of emotion to her voice. A haunted kind of sorrow, a different kind of hollowness, the kind that came from losing something cherished. She has learned that many of the mortals here loved the stars; they loved to stare at them, admire them, spin dreams and stories for them. And Islas would smile and nod, but she would not try to explain that none of them could ever begin to love the stars the way that she did.

She does not tell Oceane that, either. She trusts that it is there, in the silver-wrapping of her tone, that she did not need to state the obvious that she missed the stars more than the sun.

The mention of Tiercel’s mother is perhaps the only other thing besides the stars that can bring that faint flicker of curiosity to her galaxy-dark eyes. It is noticeable the way her gaze seems to suddenly focus on the mare, as if she has blinked away a haze. “I never met Lepis, no,” she says with a shake of her delicate head, and without realizing it her head just subtly tilts and her eyes glance at the swell of her sides. “I know her son, though. Tiercel,” his name is the most familiar thing she has ever said, the only name she has ever really bothered to learn the shape of, but she is still surprised at the strange warmth that flushes beneath her skin.

She is sure it must be obvious; sure only because everyone else seemed so adept at reading emotions when she was not, but she does not try to explain anything. Instead, after a pause, she asks, “You were friends with Lepis, then?”