Where do you go, child, when the sun rises?

Her mother might have been frantic if she were any other (better) mother. But the child had been born in the dead of night, dark teal with stars in her mane and tail, and the mother had resented her for so strongly resembling her father (just as the brother had before her). 

And morning came, taking the moon and the child with it, and the mother had awoken to find the child gone. Perhaps carried off by predators, though there was no evidence of this and the mother was glad to be rid of her.

(Where did the cruelty in Karina come from? She had cared just as little for the child that had come before the girl, though she had at least bothered to rear him, teach him, even if she had not known how to do it kindly. But when she woke to find this child gone, she had felt nothing but relief. There would be no need to craft her playmates made of light the way she had for the son.) 

Perhaps the child watched, invisible, as the mother had left. Perhaps she had called after her in vain, begging her to come back. (Would she have come back if she’d heard the child’s cries?)

And the child was seized by panic when the faeries found her as dusk settled and the child emerged again, this time the same color as the coming twilight. Pale blue, pale pink, a pastel sunset. They coaxed her to her feet and she followed them dutifully to the den, where she curled in on herself, smelling faintly of apple blossoms.