Her apology would've, perhaps, amazed him, if he'd been able to hear it properly. The word slipped out at about the same time as Mauja noticed the darkness—at the same time that his blue eyes sorrowfully, longingly, traced the beauty of the leaving dolphins, before turning dark and cold with the terror. He sat there in the darkness, on his ass, and stared dumbly at the approaching doom, the end of the world, or whatever it was. Certainly it was nothing good, if the mad pounding of his heart was anything to go by.

For a moment, they were all struck into dumbness, stillness; Mauja sitting on the beach, Roskuld half-lying beside him, and Oxy in the shallows. Three downed horses on a pale, contaminated beach, death and destruction coming closer with every wave. If the gods had time to watch, they would've been laughing.

Slowly, Mauja's eyes were drawn down, to the more tangible shadow flailing in the shallows. With the same spectacular lack of coordination as he previously exhibited, Tiny managed to get to his feet, after a lot of flailing. He was enough of a distraction, for a time, taunting Mauja with the incredulity of his existence: how could he function? How come he wasn't dead? How come he got anything done when he couldn't even walk a straight line? Then the mare was partially blocking his excellent view of the fabulously perplexing behemoth, replying to his rather solemn statement of self-preservation with a kind of vehemence he hadn't expected—and least of all had he expected the voices ricocheting around the doom-riddled beach. First came Tiny's loud, resonant voice, and Mauja's ears flipped back as he returned to, sitting, sourly watching the darkness roll in. Then Loudmouth was yelling too, and Tiny said "Deep Forest", as if it mean vamoose, and took off at his wobbling stride.

Mauja watched him go. Sighed. Clambered to his feet as if he dealt with this kind of shit every day.

"Kind of pointless to beg for defeat, isn't it?" he inquired mildly of Loudmouth, walking up to stand next to her much smaller frame. "You can't do much good if you're dead." All of a sudden, he had the incredibly absurd desire to laugh—to break into merry, semi-bitter guffaws, and then dance away somewhere and hide his head and cry as the world fell down around him. In the end, he did neither; just snorted, and promptly turned to stand perpendicular to Loudmouth. "Let's get out of here." But what he really said was, you're coming with me. And he wasn't going to go after Tiny. Tiny was going.. very much the wrong way. It sort of seemed he'd gone off south in his confusion, instead of heading more east, towards the land he'd mentioned. Well. Tiny wasn't Mauja's problem anymore. He'd taken himself out of Mauja's district and someone else would have to deal with him.

Without further ado he simply started walking, which meant that, yes, he meant to push his chest against Loudmouth's flank and bodily force her with him. He couldn't just leave her here for the darkness to swallow, though if she insisted on dying, he just as well might.

[ This was amazing. <3 We're continuing elsewhere, so in regards to the SWP, we're finished here! ]