Fairspell Meadow you were caught in the crossfire of childhood and stardom

The stroke of midnight would mark Maegi's second birthday, but of course, she didn't know that. 

She spent the eve on the edges of the meadow, marking what was ostensibly to be their new borders. Their new home. It was chilly, and the wind whistled over the open land in ways it didn't in the first. Cut through her still-thin pelt; she trembled, but not always due to weather. 

Maegi was taking stock of all she'd lost since birth. All the faces once here, now gone. Euron. Ramsay. Cicero. Miraak. Cassiopeia. Anansi. . . And while there were things to hold close, wolves that remained, it seemed on this bitter night that the positives were still outweighed by the negatives. That the net sum of gains and losses was not in her favor. 

How many more deaths and departures before she, herself, rotted away? How many more fissures could her heart take? Best to just close it off entirely, let no one else in. Nothing could hurt if it didn't wound her to begin with.

But that was not her way. Beneath the ice, Maegi was fire; beneath the affected coolness was a child crying for its mother. She wanted to love, wanted to be loved. . .even if that love would eventually, inevitably, end in tragedy. Or, worse somehow, fade away, like it had never existed at all. 

Hitching a sigh through tired lungs, she squatted, urinating. The soft hiss, the acrid smell. . .she felt more alive in this moment than she'd been in days. 

And, yet, with the newfound spark of being came the pain again. It was one or the other, apparently: agony or apathy.