The Ice King was a few steps ahead, his black-rimmed ears flickering back to catch the sound of the Doctor moving, the scuffle and pause as he said 'goodbye' to his children for now. He'd see them soon enough again, but Mauja paused where he was, to look over his shoulder at Snö — she was displaying a lot of qualities he'd rather she didn't, an almost haughty air around her. Then again, this was a crowd. Few acted themselves in crowds. They didn't see eye to eye on several things, and he'd literally turned his back on her when she lingered over Monster's broken body, so he guessed he deserved that. And his other child... Mauja's blue eyes fell upon d'Artagnan again, feeling a stab of self-pitying envy that he had all his children around him, alive and well. Where Tamlin was, no one knew, least of all Mauja. Had Snö "disposed" of him while he was gone, unable to protect the appaloosa boy he'd never really meant to conceive?

You do a lot of things which you don't mean.

Mauja sighed, and as the steps of d'Artagnan revealed that he was moving, the alabaster friesian moved again. The sun beat down on his back, and with another flick of his seldom-still tail, he set out for the nearest slope, where he knew they'd be able to find some sort of cave, and shade. Again, his ears flickered to the sound of his friend's voice, and his immediate reaction was another humorless smile. Lotus, of course, hadn't been at the meeting, and he'd not yet been lucky enough to see her and demand to know what the hell had happened to his son. "She played well, don't you agree?" he answered with a slight hint of mischief in his voice, picking a path which seemed promising. It'd been easy to say, I'll tell you later, but now that "later" was actually approaching... He felt the words settle like rocks in his throat, and he kept wishing someone would cry out for either of them, or that a giant bird would swoop down and carry him off so that he wouldn't have to speak. How would it even sound? "Oh look, I was off in some alternate reality with alternate personalities!" He ground his teeth together. Could anything, short of living in it yourself, describe the stress and terror of never knowing how someone would greet you, of never knowing how the real horses were faring..?

Snorting, he led them into a slight cave, nothing more than deep enough for a few horses, and the clipped noise of his hooves against the rock floor ceased. Whipping around to face his friend, Mauja briefly let his eyes scour the mountainside, but found nothing out of order. It was as if he'd do anything, still, to put off talking about it: sigh, flick his tail, cock one hip and rest a hind hoof on its tip... Most of all, he was afraid it'd come out sounding like a horribly stupid thing, or not at all traumatic. That d'Artagnan wouldn't take it seriously.

"I was talking to Psyche, actually, when it happened." It was rather suddenly that he began to speak, and he felt that if he didn't just force himself to start talking about it now, he'd just shut up and never get it out. "I don't know what she told you, but for all I remember, something dark and cold just.. took me away. It grabbed me, and... when I figured out what'd happened, I was alone. Mostly, I was in a Helovia which looked like ours... but aside from that, nothing was the same." He sighed, struck a crag in the floor with his frosted hoof as if to distract himself. "Sometimes, the inhabitants knew me, sometimes not, but one thing was certain, and that was that they kept changing. Their stories and futures kept changing. Sometimes, Psyche was all warm and loving, sometimes she was demented, sometimes she didn't exist at all. I think Deimos came looking for a home twice in a day, having different backgrounds both times. I thought.. that'd I'd fallen into a coma, or something. Irma was with me, but then, something happened, and our bond went silent... and I was fairly sure I'd died, for real." He shook his head slightly. "But I found no release, and after a while, Irma came back to me. She kept denying I was dead, but it's hard to believe when you're stuck in time. Sometimes, it teleported me back in time. I've seen the Throat was a lush forest, the ocean lapping closer to shore.. trees, out on the Steppe..." A small smile curled his lips. "Once, in the Throat, something happened and Onni, their shaman, could see me. I think I recruited a mare in the Threshold, too.. Her name was Vy, but I haven't seen her since, so I was probably hallucinating. And then, one day, I found the mirror cave, walked into the mirror, and came back. It was the most anti-climactic return ever, for I'd just been toddling around in my desolation and whatever kept me out there decided I could come back." Some part of him would've preferred to perform some feat to be let back, but no. Moping around was enough.

Slowly, Mauja craned his head, looking at d'Artagnan from the corner of his blue eye and wondering what he'd say. It was probably for the better that he'd left out the part of breaking down and crying in front of Psyche.