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Heart beats fast, colors and promises, How to be brave?
How can I love when I'm afraid, to fall?
But watching you stand alone...
All of my doubt, suddenly goes away somehow...

One Step Closer...

-Christina Perri - A Thousand Years
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The night had become a time of reflection and contemplation, no matter how often I had curled in to sleep beside the warmth of my guardians, nothing eased the ache within my chest and little seemed to offer solace to it even with the joyful laughter of my most precious love.

The longer that I spent awake in those long and midnight hours, the more that the yearning and empty feelings I'd once suffered in younger days, continued to haunt me and drew with it the echoes in my heart, questions of 'what if' and 'what did I do?' followed my steps and the wake of the long train of the night slip I'd worn to bed the hours prior to my writhing out of being between the Realmwalkers and into the cool evening air.

The travesty of a heart torn in two was shared by them both and I had found comfort in their presence, but I did not find a place with them, they had each other, in not so many thoughts or words, but the feeling was there, they had an understanding with one another that I could not even begin to fathom, even though one stood as my bond, and the other had been there at my side, since before my son was born.

Out here in the summer night, I found myself feeling more than alone, my heart yearned for a time in which I had once found a love I could not live without... I had not found one whom had affected my heart so desperately as the one whom haunted me now, and though we were separated by distance and differences, it still did not give me peace.

I have died, everyday waiting for you...
Darling don't be afraid, I have loved you, for a thousand years...
I'll love you for a thousand more.
And all along, I believed I would find you,
Time has brought your heart to me,
I have loved you for a thousand years...
I'll love you for a thousand more...

The softly hummed lyrics of a song I'd learned in my time among the mortal planes had not done much in terms of allowing me some respite from my longing, though the emptiness was eased at times by holding my precious little one, it did little to wean my feelings and emotions away from the hardship and realization that I am, or possibly never was, important enough or desirable enough to keep... it made me question whether or not I had made the right choices in my life to find myself at such a bitter resulting end.

The sound of guardsmen walking the grounds of our encampment only heightened the ideal that I had little place in the world...

Not a warrior, and far from the material meant to make me a monarch, with traits that the people of my homeland found monstrous or looked upon with disdain and disgust. I was mother to a fatherless child, half-blooded for all intents and purposes despite the man whom sired me being of direct ancestry to Ashura himself, I was everything that the people had fought against for thousands of years... the bitter mix of mortal half-breeds, and pure youkai nobility... my own mother had shared this wanton sneer of aggression for fleeing the kingdom to follow in her heart's desire, and I found myself laughing bitterly at the fact that I had done entirely the same...

I had fled the kingdom that raised me... because I could not bear to follow in my grandfather's shadow... now here under the moonlit night of the Makai's glittering skies, I felt myself on the verge of breaking, with tears that hollowed themselves in the depths of my eyes, but could not bring themselves to surface, the stabbing pain in my chest making it all too hard to breathe, had I been wrong? Had the mortal world indeed been the reason all of this had occurred? If I had never gone there, I would neither have this doubt or anguish, but on the same context... I would not have my son... he who is most precious to me.

'What do I do?' I thought, asking the spirit of my long dead mother for guidance in my most troubling of times. 'What more can I give of myself to make things right? What game is it of Fate to play with me in this way? Why have I become such a travesty to Karmic retribution? What have I done wrong? What have I done to deserve it? Answer me...'

No echo or whisper of a deitic nature could offer its retribution towards my blaspheming question, neither too could they find more reason to strike me down, in my heart I began to think that perhaps... the only way to circumvent this war was in placating the enemy with exactly what he wanted.

Me...