The Sentinels grace in your heart, flowers in your hair.

In the beginning, The One had brought the universe out of its dark, formless void and shepherded it into the Divine Light. So why, then, does night still fall and velveteen blackness fall over the Earth for hours upon end? A common query floated by children upon their first Listen of the Great Story. It is quite at odds, yes, that the world should still be cast into shadow, so many eons after The One had liberated it from those shackles of nothingness.

But! — Ereshkigal only has to glance upward, find the glow of the waxing moon in her vision, to know that this jet state is not the same as the void before. The lunar orb, and the stars that are pepper'd around it, guide those who still travel past the sun's descent. The One will never let his planet sink into what was then; even the most tenebrous of nights is no comparison to the Time Before.

A sob; a shifting of paws. The Seductress blinks, ruddy countenance furrowed for a moment of brief perplexity, before she finally sights the girl upon the edge of a once-glorious woodland. She lets out a gentle call, a bark more flute than trumpet, and rolls into a trot, moonbeams bouncing off her well-kept pelt as she moves. Ereshkigal stops some several paces from the young woman and cants her head ever-so-slightly sideways, some semblance of warmth and perhaps pity in her normally dispassionate gaze.

Why do you cry, little sister? she inquires, her lofty auds swiveling atop the crown of her head. They come to rest facing forward, ready to catch any word the fae has for her — whether comprehensible or not. Ereshkigal is not one for shows of grief, save in sacred ceremony (when it is called for). She is at an utter loss, but to walk on by would be to deny her natural proclivity toward curiosity. . .and that, she could not nor would not stifle.