She glides through the path of kings like a ghost. There is nothing for her here. There is nothing of love in that smoke, there is nothing of beauty in these crumbling monuments. The path carries her forward like an ice floe along a current, as if it too was rejecting her presence here. 

There had been... something of her, in all of this, though she cannot recall ever having walked as a King. The very idea of it seems preposterous to a lifelong wanderer like her, and yet something at the corners of her heart feels the slightest tug as she passes. It pulls her neck, if nothing else, to watch the sweat on the backs of the Fallen and see the starless sky baking them like clay. It calls her to notice the crumbling and unrecognizable edifices all around her and wonder vaguely (and a little sadly) if she ever read about any of these people in a happier time. 

It calls to her to watch her scout. Her scout? Her scout. Her soul, her lover. Re. Da...

Anxiety she cannot name and does not understand stabs at her every time they part in this place. Her Heart loves to wander, and the girl's own body warns her that this is a terrible place to become lost in, worse than all the others they have crossed by far. This is a place where if you stop you will never, ever leave. Forward is the only way forward, and that is that. But her Heart longs to scramble, to leap, to explore, and sometimes only with the deepest reluctance seems to feel the tug on her leash and come trudging back to make her reports. 

Often she comes back with gifts. Apologies, she calls them. Dedications, the girl corrects her. The scowl is not for the sake of her wayward Heart, but for the feeling crawling up her spine that something is slipping free inside of her. Soon it might slough off and fall away, and she might not even recognize it to pick it back up. For the first time that idea scares her. For the first time she can feel the rattle in her soul that sounds and smells like sickness. But she takes these Apologies, these Dedications, one and all. She does not need to be begged to wear them, hold them, smell them, kiss them. She does it all freely, and forever. Her hair and her dress are full of the things. The weight of them is her pride.

Her pride. She feels that flicker at the base of her neck again, where it meets the shoulder. The girl's gold-and-red eyes turn and watch the shadow of Aphrodite as if he were the sun in the sky. He does not meet her gaze, but hides from her inside a cloud of impenetrable smoke. The foulest thing she has ever smelled. Her nose wrinkles with disgust, and she turns her attentions back to the sad creatures tending to the stuff he makes it from. Her pride. Her pride. Her pride.

Down this hill and into the path of kings lies the final resting place of vainglory. Here toil who, in their mightiness, took their insecurities as threats to be stamped out. So much effort, and for what? All that talent. All that work, all those lives ground into dust to raise statue after statue after statue. Empires raised and shattered while petty hearts screamed their names to the gods in the vain hope that when they passed their majesty would linger after. What did it buy them? Only one god listened. 

All. All the others... abandoned them. Only Aphrodite paid them any, any heed. She closes her eyes. Pathetic. None of these people ever had names to begin with. If someone else had risen up in their place, how much more might have been done? How much greater heights could have been reached, how much more of the glass and the rain could have replaced the scorching plantation they now float through? 

But she understands, at last. She reaches for the sword now sitting at her hips. Not an especially sharp blade, not a special blade, but a very pretty one. One of her favorite Dedications, of all those she now wears. The girl glances at the strange and lovely face in the blade she sometimes doesn't recognize as her own reflection. And then she lifts. It has blade enough for this. 

The girl slices a single braid out of her hair, one that has sat on her head for countless ages. She tosses it down into the valley for the mighty to contest over. The expression of disdain ruins any smile she might have had forming.

But her body feels lighter than the air around her, all of a sudden. And when her Heart next asks her if it's ok to go exploring, she finds that it will be a race.