Alone. Caneo still remembers begging the Moon God to wrench that feeling from his heart and fill the hole with something else. The memory trespasses through his better thoughts on limbs fleet as a deer's, at once taunting and reproachful. Why had he gone then, with Tandavi at his side? Why had he never been content to cherish her? Even here, even now, looking back upon his younger self with pity stirring in his heart, he thinks: he feared to lose her. The serpent stirs upon his brow, and sluggishly he returns to the present.

        "I know," Caneo murmurs. She burrows her blunt face into the sparse folds of his mane and pangs of regret shoot through him. Is he better off now, with her here? He recalls the expression on Ampere's face all those days ago in the forest, and he wonders. All the same, her tail tightens the loop of its hook around his ear, and the gesture speaks wordlessly into his soul — not alone. Not anymore.

        Perhaps the consequence is he now finds it difficult, sometimes, to seek out the companionship of his own kind.

        Caneo stalks the beach because it breathes something tranquil into his soul. This place, unlike so many others, reeks of no bad memory. No; he remembers meeting Roland here, remembers glimpsing the sea for the first time and quaking beneath the weight of his ignorance, but he tastes no bitterness as he traverses the sand. His steps are light as always, his gait a dancer's to match the silver singsong of his resting voice. He thinks at Ophiria how he is sorry, but now he understands affection for the sun he can't quite abandon it for the dark. His eyes travel the vault of heaven calmly, though only the seabirds cross his vision. No stars; no hanging moon. The serpent would have liked that younger him, who dreamed to fill an empty world. The Caneo of the present dreams so rarely; the world is always crowding in.

        It crowds in now.

        Something catches his eye. It hangs dark before the horizon, floats like kelp above the water. The moment his attention readjusts, Caneo recognizes the shape as equine. But more than that — he knows her. The jolt of recognition burns pure as joy, and he stops dead for just an instant to judge again his luck. "Essetia!" Her name is a song; his voice is glad, more glad than the birds on the wing overhead, than the surf dancing through her hair. How long has it been? He must have thought her gone, the way so many others went before. Now, seeing her again, Caneo forgets the burdens of thought and picks up a swinging trot to bring him closer. There is no hiding, now; night is too far off to shroud them.

He tucks to a halt long before he reaches her, of course. In Caneo's language, touch is the most intimate of words. He reserves it for so very few creatures; distance is courtesy. Distance is safe. But his eyes alight as he looks at her, so full of joy to meet another he has known he looks almost a creature other than himself. She isn't Roland, but she is the one who spotted him on his return. She is the one who led him to the Dragon's Throat (to home). Does she reside there, still? If she stepped from the waves, would he find the dust and heat upon her skin? "You look well," Caneo says, and though his voice twists the words into something ironic, he means them sincerely (he has so little practice with the truth). "What are you doing here?" he wonders. That is a safe question to ask; much safer than all the others he has, much safer than the desire to call her friend just to taste the word on his tongue.