I have not talked to either of them in quite some time. It has been months since I have asked for them, or felt their presences about me. And that is why I stand now before their door to their suite of rooms in the Hacienda that I gifted them years ago. I am too embarrassed to summon them.

I touch the circlet I wear on my head for reassurance, then I knock on the door.

As I touch it, the door swings slightly open. I poke my head in. “Hello?”

“Get over here,” Balthazar says. He sounds impatient, though not annoyed.

I step into their white, white room. They have changed the decor since last I came, but it is still one big room, with a sumptuous canopied bed in one corner behind the door, and a sitting area by the fireplace at the opposite end of the room. The floors are made from a pale pine and bleached to within an inch of their color. White walls gleam behind white draperies of silk and netting. Polar bear fur rugs and white downy blankets litter their sitting area, along with a settee and two wingback chairs, all in stiff white-on-white brocade. The fireplace is white marble now, lightly veined with blue. A fire crackles there, and the room is colder than the rest of the Oasis, as if it were the dead of night here, not twilight.

(more…)