It's easier than the hunter expects to guide her to his home. As soon as he mentions a healer (though he'll admit to himself the only one he knows is Resplendence, and she doesn't know this form) Aquila seems ready to follow. It feels a bit cheap of him to dangle medical care, but if it's what she needs then he isn't about to leave it out of the conversation on the table.

So, decided, they walk. They move through the night so that dawn is approaching when the Hidden Falls appears, glorious and seeming exactly like home. Whether it really is or not, well... Knox can't be sure. He's too preoccupied with the mare's last words, all so haunting. Her brazen renaming of his son to a word he can't even say, her invocation of a name for herself, her own kind, that seems so outlandish that Knox can't even comprehend where it might originate from, but above all...

She has branded his disabled son as wise. And what is wise about a hindrance, about dumbness, about hobbling around looking sad and dejected all the time? His son is no hero. His son certainly can't be wiser than he is, so why... why does Aquila think he is wise?

The hunter could hide the haunting in the dark, could conceal the shivers of doubt prickling across his skin as he led the mare who'd bested him in more ways than one to his home, but now that the morning light peeks through the trees he knows it is only Cem's stoic figure that saves him from physically breaking down. That oldest ancestor of his isn't even capable of looking weak, though, not at that size, not with that firm posture and that dead-eyes gaze.

"Welcome to the Hidden Falls," he says softly, his voice not carrying the enthusiasm that perhaps Archibald would want it to. But the hunter can only do so much, especially now as he battles with the understanding that this mare sees his son as an entirely different child.

"I'm sure one of our healers will be along shortly," he adds, lying through his teeth and leaving silence where he might have once prayed to the gods for some sort of luck, "they're accustomed to healing herd members upon homecoming, and do much of their work at the borders."

Another lie, another figment. The truth is he doesn't know a damned thing about the healers operate; again, he only knows Resplendence. He can only hope he doesn't make a fool of himself in front of the monster that has follow him this far.


""