She was good company—in the sense that she was quiet and reserved without seeming meek. He didn't think it was shyness keeping her voice from slipping out between dark lips, but rather the simple fact that she saw no need to speak. Mauja had settled silently in the lead, a whitewashed guide on a path due west, and she had fit comfortably in his wake, her silence occasionally punctuated by small mutters and mumbles. The first time his head had swung around as he walked, but it had been obvious her quiet words hadn't been for him; her attention was elsewhere, milky-white eyes lowered to the ground. After that, he hadn't acknowledged her murmurings beyond one black-rimmed ear turning backwards—a habit that was hard to kill when you had been raised a soldier. At some point in his life, Mauja had realized that he was always alert, always listening, watching, thinking, interpreting: the world was a catalog neatly contained in his skull, and whether he was aware of it or not, every damn thing that happened around him got entered into it, sometimes on a blank page, sometimes associated with something which already existed in there.

Lourdes—or Ghoulface, as he still called her—had been a blank page, but now she was tangled up in the fine web of Helovia. Threshold, World's Edge, gardens, plants, murmurs—she intersected with those he had "stolen" her from, owl magic, Alysanne, and other little tidbits like Skullface One and Skullface Two.

“It looks like home.”

He wasn't sure if he was just imagining it, or if her voice sounded .. not livelier, per se, but as if something which had previously been missing had been restored to her. Perhaps their rest, taken in a copse just on the eastern outskirts of the Thistle Meadow, had done her good. She had seemed a bit haggard in the Threshold. His breath rattled out of his chest in a hum as he crossed the broken remains of the glass wall and stepped into the too-warm embrace of the morning fog. Water droplets stuck to him, to the fine, long hairs on his muzzle, to his eyelashes, his horn, his face; it glittered like a string of pearls along his back.

“What now?” One black-rimmed ear turned back again as her pace quickened into the two-beat rhythm of a jog. "Now we find Alysanne," he said once she was beside him, blue eyes tipping to the side to watch her for a moment. "She is the head of the Moon Doctors, and I do believe the garden I mentioned is hers."

The trees parted slightly around them, and he left a trail of frost in the dew-laden grass before coming to a rest in the center of the small glade. Irma was already circling the Edge, looking for Hemlock, or for Alysanne herself; Diego had remained upon his back during their travels, talons safely locked around the crystal staff.

"Is there anything in particular you wish to know?" Might as well pass the time while we wait.

[ @Alysanne @Lourdes ]