Vocha is lackadaisical at the best of times – more an animate nightmare with her pinball ribcage and dark dead eyes than any sweet, day walking dream – and it takes more than it should to rouse her from those wakeful stupors she falls in to as easily as others might fall asleep. A far cry from her mother then, sweet, gentle, Corinth, they are opposites in every way but one. Despite the harsh angles of her body (Corinth had been all curves, tiny, such a petite little thing, but shapely nonetheless) Vocha’s face retains her mother’s likeness – the wide eyes set deep in her face, a particular high-blooded flare of the nostrils, an aptitude for saying the right thing at the right time.

“I don’t mean to sound rude,” she says then, skulking up from the side (she seems to melt sideways out of the darkness) but not pressing especially close to him, “but I think I might know you,” she doesn’t, how could she, but she is smooth as melting butter, her voice a husky rasp that drags and catches but one that is not altogether unpleasant, perhaps, “or, more apt, my mother did.”

For no-one was as splendid as the Ikari her mother talked about, telling tales of her past adventures to darling little Evander while Vocha stood nearby, watering at the mouth. Oh, what she would do for such misdeeds to tell her children of! What she would do for friends such as he! She sighs to herself and ceases circling – too predatory, too forbidding – to stand awkwardly next to him and eye him curiously from far below. She had heard the stories yes, but she had not expected this – he is magnificent.

“You are Ikari, or perhaps I presume too much,” she sighs again, a brisk exhale, and lowers her eyes, “you are much too late for my mother, I’m afraid.”

Not that she knows what had happened to her – Corinth was fleeting just as much as she was steadfast, an enigma and a wonder to be lost on strong breezes and it is something that sticks in Vocha’s head, something that sends waves of repulsion shuddering down her spine.

“I shouldn’t be here either,” she muses to herself, but her voice is so quiet that it could have been old spirits whispering hoarse secrets to the mountain.

The last threads of sunlight hang behind his shadow as if to illuminate him, and it is with equal measures of awe and amusement she speaks then: “if it’s not too bold of me to say – you don’t disappoint the way most bedtime stories do when they’re told in the light of day,” and then she grins up at him, wickedly.