What is your favorite time of day? Why?

Noon, when the sun is high and shining down and lighting everything and making the world glow. We've lived underground for nearly three millenia. We come out, but not often, and usually at night. Once a month we have the Wild Hunt on the night of the full moon and we ride through the land by moonlight. We dance in the glades and we celebrate the earth and Danu's bounty as we always have. But that is at night, and everything is silver and bathed in softness.

We have fire and light and color and beauty and gems you could not believe underground. Our palaces are immense and we can create the illusion of sun and light and laughter. There are canyons to ride through and we can move to the Otherworld to play when necessary, to visit. Some of us have gone there permanently. But those of us with charges in this world...We move between Realms, but it is rarely the light of the fire in the sky that warms our skin.

On those rare occasions when we are able to walk the land in the daytime, it is truly a gift. To feel the sun. The air with it's freshness of life and growth. The warmth. The light. The smell of sun-warmed skin and grass. All of these things were ours once, but no more. Our sojourns in the sun are far too short.

But I've walked in it for many moons now and find myself remembering what it was to be a creature of light rather than darkness. To live and love among mortals. And yet there is a sadness when I remember that it is no longer my place. That they drove us out and took the sun away.

That we let them.

So I stand in the sun and I remember who we are. What we are. What was ours. And what could be ours again someday when the Otherworld and this finally meet.

What is the one thing about yourself that you don't want anyone to ever know?

Private

It was my fault. I knew what she was. I knew what she was capable of. I had made her, after all, had I not? And yet I brought her, an innocent, into that den of depravity we called a home. I thought she could change it. I thought she could change me. I was heedless of her safety. Arrogant in my ability to protect her. Selfish in my desire to possess her.

She was mine and the rest be damned.

I had a wife. I didn't tell her that. It didn't matter. I didn't warn her of the danger, because if I had, she might not have come. And Danu, but I couldn't allow that.

Not to have her sunlight. Not to have her warmth. Her smile. Her innocent joy in the act of lovemaking. The way she made me feel like I was capable of being more. Reminded me of who and what I had been before life and battles and eternity had corrupted me. Before we got bored and decided to see what we could make of my each other if we played a bitter game. Before darkness seeped under my skin and lit my natural cruelty and coldness, before the cruel games of my predecessors became mine, before I descended to a world where my wife, my once love, and I lived to hurt each other and took pleasure in the degradations we could inflict.

I knew she would hate it, that I'd brought another. And part of me reveled in that. Replace her with something bright and pure and shining and watch her wither in the light. The ultimate defeat.

Only she didn't wither. She burned. She lashed out in the heartless fury that we had perfected in each other. Her revenge was perfect, as I had taught her. Take away, curse, but don't kill. Make me live with the agony of salvation just out of reach. How dare I desire something more when we had made our lives such a perfectly cruel game? So she continued the game through the millenia.

But I made the first move in that game. And so, ultimately, it was my fault. And I pursued her through time, always triggering the curse.

All my fault.

And yet, still, I am selfish enough to want her. To declare her mine to possess. To never walk away and just let her be happy.