...but you're the same.

Once, in a long line of legacies, Bylah had watched white things float about, little bits of snow.

He'd always liked the white - because it was so much of what he wasn't, something simple, sure, pure and clean.

Bylah had never thought himself unkind - he never thought of emotions like whittled worries, something stirring in his head, but...

Nine had been white. Nine had been the first innocent thing Bylah had found worth his while.

And now, now, he watched the white wither, fade - it reminded him of parchment paper, of the way the old man's eyes go rhummy.

And one day, a once white thing waltzed by, and

"'I like you calm, as if you were absent:
distant and saddened, as if you were dead.'"

The deer paused, pondered, and turned his head to consider the horrific filth of the Beast.

Was that how the world saw him? As absent, gone? He cast the summer-sky of his eyes down, frowned, wondered what the world was coming to.

"I was absent," he agreed, well enough. "I was, perhaps, but the passing clouds.

"But now I am here - for here is where I need to be. What if I left my lovers? I'd rather be here, on the ground, than up high in the sky, leaving behind those that need me."