No, the thing that threatened to drag me down completely into depression in the old days wasn't that I'd lost my high-strung silver Arabian mare... it was that I'd lost a lot more. Dad's alive now, and that's good. That almost makes up for the rest. But neither he nor anyone else remembers the others, and the other place. Argentum is a fiction in my head now. Mine and Christoph's heads, but Christoph wasn't there in its glory days, nor was he there long enough to grow to love it.

Argentum... my lost land. And my brothers and sisters there, all gone-- rather, never even existed. Lost to a past that never was. And of those dozen faces like my own, I will truly miss little Victoria, and my dear Silver.

And then... Eve.

I thought she was my daughter, perhaps my granddaughter. I guess I had it backward-- when I believe what Justin told me. Not that I think Justin would lie to me about that, but still. Most of the time, I guess I can accept it, even understand it. She was the incarnation of the Unicorn. She came to Amber to save us, to save the Universe from certain destruction. But does that make me miss the past I remember any less?

I don't know what that world would have become-- that world with Eve and Brianna in it. I know only what this world has become... and I can live with it. I even enjoy it.

And there is so much that is the same. Bodies passing in and out of the doors of time, and yet none of us have really changed. We're a little sadder, a little slower. But all that passed did happen to us. The good, and the bad.