Andarin: The Mountains: You ;

She watches from the winged swathe of dead trees that line the valley floor of Andarin, the stretched and bare expanse through which the survivors fled; indeed, she watches her mother and her brother (Loki, not Indio – she knows not to where he has vanished, though oh, she misses him!) walk into the cold, freed of the land that burned in ashes and snow. The wind shifted through the damp grey of her mane and the thick pallid fur of her winter coat, guttering the glowing fire that flickered in her eyes – and she wonders what it means, to have her element stilted and stuttering within her, dying as the land died and the Stone withdrew to its own wretched subsistence. She had never been so connected to it, as her mother had (doubly so, for her shard-scar and Simurgh; Accendare has always wondered, with some admiration, how Astarte had remained sane, with the voices of a seer streaming endlessly through the earth), and her sorrow for her fire’s loss was distant and somewhat unmoved, for she had never sought greatness through it.

No, she thinks, and with considerable bitterness; only He ever truly moved me. Even now, parted by years and destiny (and, even more so, as she thinks swiftly of his ashen-grey son, as grey as he, as grey as she - oh no, Accendare, form not your thoughts of might-have-beens!) and now by the death of the lands that had bound them, the thought and phantom scent, lingering still in the high blowing boughs, set her pulse racing within her veins afire. Perhaps it is better, she reflects, that it end now, here, before she whittles her life into the ashes that grind at her hooves – and yet still she lingers, watching her mother’s and brother’s commingled footprints (a curious contrast themselves – hemicircles of grey ash in the smooth background of fallen snow).

She turns away, finally, from the ruined tongue of the valley and the wolves that stream down it to safety – Accendare, safe enough in her beloved mountains, His cave and trees and boulders still remnants nearby of what she had loved and lost: she turns her head to the distant passes that still remain, unblocked by sundered life, and she watches, timelessly, and always with that tragic unflinching hope.

She can wait a little longer.