The pattering of frantic feet on the quietude of the lacquer seems deafening in the tidy space of the hall.  It sounds like what it is; a disturbance.  There seems no way it could go unnoticed by the party in the lighted chamber.<br/><br/>Yet the music plays on throughout that terrible, long flight.  And the conversation only dwindles so much.  By the time Fern and Miaren have reached the enclosure, there is no obstacle to the menace of that light, the threats innate in the celestial music of those voices - the doors stand wide open.<br/><br/>Yet there is no pursuit: Not even a sharp tone or a figure stirred by the violence that Fern and Miaren share in their bare, vulnerable, panicked breasts.  There is just the party, continuing its languid traffic as though it were as constant a thing as the motion of the stars.<br/><br/>They hit the enclosure and flash into the jaded groves.  Butterflies flirt with clustering in the air; a melody of earthy aromas wends through the fever of their breaths; silence dominates in the motion of crystalline waters.  Nothing seems troubled here.  It all seems wrapped in the swaddling silks of some delicious dream, too indulgent to give notice to the moment of sharp dread where Miaren and Fern live.<br/><br/>Even the griffon, who had been stalking cautiously about the perimeter of his turf in searching, seems to settle to see his mate - and begins to stalk a circuit around her, staring with his bullet black eyes and wondering in quirks of his avian features.<br/><br/>Only the eggs in Miaren react, humming huge with their mother's disturbance, nuzzling anxiously against her womb in their growing.<br/>