Her thorough pleasure at his agreement to translate some of their tales into songs rang through her steps from that point in the journey until her deflation at arriving upon the sea with few clues to guide her elsewhere. Occasionally there is her usual sweet and chiming laughter, her mask ever flickering from one pretty smile to another before dissolving into her unhappiness once more.

Perhaps she could have painted Mauja more kindly, for surely he had done much for the Basin and the unicorns within and he did have friends that were true to him despite his negative aspects, but she also sourly admits to herself that men such as Deimos find mates and that there is no qualifying a person based on the idiots they surround themselves with. And so she does not correct Torleik in his words or the implied uselessness of the man befitting them, nor does she feel much remorse for having smeared the speckled stag’s reputation so without him here to contest it.

If he had never left, Psyche would still be hers, a tender call into the mountain air away from her embrace. It sickened her to think of the Lord Mauja at a time such as this.

She slides an eye towards the bearded stallion alongside her as he gives answer to her mostly rhetorical inquiry about a metaphorical mountain. He makes a good point, she muses to herself, but that she cannot find her friends and there is only one within her vapid shell in all of Loorien she feels she can rely on or truly name such a thing. Horrifying, she shuns the thought away as she normally does, flicking her eyes back out towards the sea as her words slip like so much wind from her lips: "Perhaps it is so."

She follows him to shelter, finding that she feels more incredibly small on this day than she has in a long time; it’s a sobering realization, one that makes her reflect where she so normally avoids, and she ponders as she trails along after the snow flecked stallion if she might ever be able to love another as she loves Psyche.

She wonders if she actually loves her at all, or if it is just a guise to suit her purposes, if all this panic and sadness has risen from a personal affront at being abandoned or a hurt of having been left behind.

Could this man be her friend? How had she ever begun to feel in such a way towards the Empress at all, to begin to see anyone else as she did the prestigious black mare?

But, most pressing… what sort of fool forgot how to access their own heart?

”Where do we go from here?”

She could ask him as much herself, with so many different connotations than the simple direction or region he asked for. She sighs, golden eyes closing in the shadow of the rocky precipice they sheltered beneath, the weight of the world pressing her seemingly all the deeper into the soft sand at their hooves.

"South, along the outskirts of the marsh," she says from the inner darkness behind her closed eyes, voice misty and worn, "then east, through the southern arm of the Thistle Meadow and along the northern rim of the Heart to the Deep Forest."

She is oddly silent for a long time, simply existing behind the shutters of her mask and dwelling on the path she’d described. The Heart was too hot for anyone not half mad to want to remain in for any period of time, and the Caves beneath it too large to bother searching; either way, that room of darkness was impossible to find yourself in, much less a black mare.

They could camp in the old forest again, if Torleik would continue with her, and should fate leave her with nothing once more in stead of her efforts they would return home.

What she would do then… she did not know.

It ached, it throbbed and pulsed, behind her eyes and in her chest, like coursing fire entangled in electrical currents, and she let it wash through her again and again until she could bare the silence no longer and pries her eyes open to look back out at the sea through a blurry gaze. Blinking slowly, unsure why the world is a blurry mess that twinkles in the low light until she realizes that she cries silently for herself, a spoiled, wicked little girl forced into a role she did not want or prepare for.

Turning out towards the swaying grasses, she keeps her eyes off the gentleman leaning against the stone and attempts to contain herself as she allows her voice to trail out into the twilight.

"Is your homeland as beautiful as Helovia?" the distraction slips forth, a simple question muted by the somber tears she does not want to reveal but that he has likely already seen, willing them away with tactful questions to fill her with images of a land that do not remind her, in every way, in every place, of what she has lost.