The child had recoiled from the light and the way it burned, the way it set everything ablaze.
The way it cast everything in a soft, haloed glow. 

(Too young, too sheltered to know that it was not the light that did this but something wrong with the eyes. Born too young, perhaps. Or skin too white, too reflective. A child born for a world gone dark, not this brutal light.)

She finds the father once, tucked away in the shadows, but the love that pulses outward from the center of her is not enough yet to counteract the rage that radiates off him in waves and she does not seek him out again. 

The pup crafted from shadows follows her as she explores the light and even this dark thing is ringed in a soft glow. The pup grows as she does, nipping sweetly at her heels, burying its nose in her tail and tugging. Sometimes it wrestles with her sisters’ pups while the girls nap under their mother’s watchful eye.

But their mother is gone now and the third daughter, Neuna, is alone, too. Maurtia is gone to the Playground and Decima has wandered off someplace and Neuna is thinking about the fog their father had wrapped them in the day he’d been afraid to touch them. (And she does not know it but the thin markings draped between her bright white eyes glow brightly when she thinks of her father and the fog and the way he had looked at them and whispered so softly to them.) 

There is such a thin wisp of fog that tangles itself around her ankles and she thinks that he must have sent it, that it must be an apology for the way he had sent her away the day she’d found him in the darkness. The pup at her feet lifts its shadow head and looks at her curiously.

“Hush, you,” she tells it, though the pup has not said anything. 

They are alone, the third daughter and the shadow pup, and then they are not. 
He is a small thing, this boy who appears from nothing all ringed in light and blinks so boldly at her and asks her things she does not know how to answer. 

(If she were Decima, she might have seen him coming. If she were Maurtia, she might have been able to stop him. But she is Neuna, creator of life, she has no foresight and it is not up to her to decide where life ends.) 

Her chest heaves once with surprise and whatever love she’d felt splinter outward from the very center of her is forgotten. And, as it disperses, the glow fades until it is gone altogether and the child’s pale brow darkens with confusion as she turns her proud head in search of whatever star he’s referring to. 

“Where?” she asks, though she knows that she has not seen a star and would not know to trap one even if she had. The wolf pop cocks its head curiously as the fog begins to fade, as well, as if the third daughter had been caught doing something she should not have been.

She is young just as he is young but she lacks whatever thing it is that makes him a child. She has never had the heart of a child, the third daughter. None of the girls have, the three sisters tethered by that red string of Fate. The three sisters raised by those two magicians, one such a brilliant white and the other such a devastating black. No, the three daughters were never meant to be children. 

She does not understand a child’s hunger for adventure. So the pale figure arches her neck when the boy reaches out to touch her, nostrils flaring. Because she lives to be adored, certainly, but no one has ever touched her without permission. Not even her father had thought himself worthy. And then the boy laughs, turns and flees, chasing a missing star and the pale figure exchanges a glance with the wolf pup. 

“The stars don’t come out until it’s night,” she calls after the boy, though she is not entirely convinced that this will deter him. 

Still, the third daughter is unmoved. Unconvinced, though the shadow pup has already begun to stir. (This child is more fun, more adventurous than the girl it is bound to! How the pup hungers for this sort of adventure!) The girl calls the pup back because she is wary of strangers still, even when they are children. Even when their eyes are bright. Even when they are eager and prone to childish whimsy.

The pup curls itself around her heels and she watches, always watches.

He asks how she knows and she glances at the sky. She remembers the darkness. The terrible, terrible darkness. And then her father’s terrible anger, how his fury was as black as the rest of him. How he cast them all away and now the only thing she has left of him is the fog that had curled sweetly around her legs and the pup that nips at her ankle, wanting.

“Everyone knows that,” she answers, though she’s not certain it’s true.

But she has never heard of fathers who are stars. Her father is darkness, impenetrable. The same kind of darkness that had descended over all of Beqanna. Her father is the opposite of a star, she thinks. He is a black hole, the reaper. (And yet she loves him all the same, the third daughter, because it is all she knows how to do.)

“Maybe he’s not really a star,” she challenges. Because she is a thing built for love, to command love, but she is her father’s daughter. She is her mother’s daughter. It is not said with malice but she will not be made a fool of either. 

There is a strange pulsing in her throat and she understands, quite abstractly, that they are on the edge of something. (It is such an unfamiliar sensation, this thing that itches at the meat between her ribs, nags at the base of her fine skull. She will not recognize it as disdain until she is much older because she is a thing built of love and for love but she is also such a terribly proud thing, a fatal flaw certainly, one inherited from her father and she does not yet know how to gracefully accept a challenge. Even a childish one.)

How strange it is to powerlessly stand by as two equally powerful emotions wage war in her chest! So desperately she wants to love him, as she is wont to love all strangers and yet she so terribly wants to chide him for daring to question her. 

Ultimately, she settles for a short, irritated snort (the very first of its kind). Should she have to ask everyone when it is considered a universal truth? But she says nothing further, just watches this boy haloed in light as he further questions her. 

“What proof is there?” she asks, though there is no trace of agitation in her voice. In this, she is only curious.