The night enveloped the sky in its darkness as horse hooves trotted gracefully across the plains between the warring nations. The steed, sensing its rider's anxiety, was being difficult when it came to staying on course. However, as the night wore on, the horse learned to obey its rider's tugs on the reins, and thus trotted further into the shadows of the hours of darkness.
The girl felt her stomach churn with each thump of hooves on the ground, and the Dusk Stone pounded against her chest almost exactly in time with the increasing rhythm of her heart. She was nervous, but Etana forced herself to swallow her fear in order to fulfill her duty as spy, assassin, and knight. Lost in her stormy sea of thoughts, the rider almost didn't notice the second set of horse hooves galloping a distance away across the plains, and its own rider calling out her name.
"Etana!"
Etana whipped her head around to identify the caller, but already had a pretty good idea of whose voice it was echoing her name through the night. Though a little hard to completely clarify in the night, she could just barely make out the fair, moonlit facial features of Ivan riding toward her at twice the speed of her own gallop.
"Etana!" he yelled again, causing the girl to pull the black steed to the side by the reins and slow him down to a stop. Penum shifted anxiously below his rider as he watched the incoming pair approach them rapidly, not wanting to obey his orders to stop, but being forced to anyway by the bit in his mouth.
"Ivan, you can't be here," Etana scolded as the captain brought his own horse to a standstill next to hers. "I have to go."
"I have something for you," he persuaded simply, peaking Etana's interest.
"Hurry up with it, then. I really need to go…" The girl looked back uneasily through the dark at the beginnings of the silhouette of the Ilom fortress, tightening her shaky grip on the reins.
Ivan held his hand out and opened it, revealing a thin strip of satin with the top of a cornflower pinned in the center. The flower was real, fully bloomed, and freshly picked to boot, as evident by the way it softly glided across Etana's fingers as she caressed it. The satin was just as soft as she ran it through her fingers, and then against her face.
"Why did you-"
"If you're ever scared," the boy cut in, "remember what you have to come back home to."
Etana clutched the object in her grasp. "Thank you, Ivan. I-" she began, but was again silenced by the soldier.
"Now go. And make haste." With no more than a final glance, Ivan turned his horse around, and Etana, too, journeyed on to the place in which she'd always dreaded being: Ilom.