As he mentioned the shadow-creatures, the mare's head lifted and her ears folded to lose themselves in her ebony mane, a small snort leaving her nostrils and creating a cloud of steam in the cold air in front of her. "Did they get you?" Even as she said it, she winced at the stupidity of the question. "No, forget that. If they had, you'd be all...rotting flesh and drool." She shuddered, not considering for a moment the idea of a delayed reaction to contact with one of the zombies. Her own transformation had occured right away, fast and violent, and the memory caused her pale eyes to flash. "They got me, you know," she said, her voice cold, haunted. She was unsure why she was talking about it, about the most traumatic and demeaning experience of her life, but perhaps she felt that she owed him some knowledge he may not have, in return for everything he had given her during their last meeting. She had tried to file it away and forget about it, but the mere mention of the shadow-creatures was like opening Pandora's Box.

Again her eyes dropped, as though afraid Mauja would be able to see some remnant of the infection behind her frozen irises. "I returned to the World's Edge, to warn my father about the demons. One came up to us, coughed at us...I should have ran, but I stupidly tried to play the hero and lure it away. I felt it...trap my mind, take over my body. It made me do the most horrific things." She thought of the two pegasi she had tried to infect, simply because she could. All the deeds she had commited during her infection were lost in the depths of her mind, asking to surface at any moment; every so often she would get another vicious flashback, to the time when her body wasn't her own and the only thing wrapped in steel was her own humanity. "I was ugly as sin, great strips of flesh hanging from me, eyes black, blood in my mouth...and don't say that would be an improvement." She laughed, a shrill sound in the silence of the cave, attempting to smother the seriousness of her words through humour - her most ancient and favourite defence mechanism. She found herself absently nuzzling the egg, as though the cool shell could offer her some modicum of comfort.