For a moment, he doesn't turn. The voice must be a figment of his imagination, a cruel quirk of fate designed to make him suffer even more than he already has. The leviathan stays where he is, staring vacantly into the distance, hoping the voice goes away before his heart breaks even further. There's only so many times it can snap, shatter - the fault lines run like crooked smiles across it, and it's held together by gravity alone.

But the dragons are unleashing loud, raucous bellows of joy, their gleaming bodies soaring through the air as they cry their joy to the sky. Volterra pins his ears, disgusted that his own mind-companions can be so happy on a day like this. He turns to glare at them, and....there she is. It cannot be possible, it cannot be true, and yet she is there, solid and whole and alive. "V...Vezér?" His usually authoritative, confident voice is a confused stutter as he turns and staggers towards her, needing to touch her, feel that she is truly there.

She closes the distance first, pressing her muzzle against his shoulder, and the titan releases a clenched bellow of joy as he buries his face into her fur and inhales the sweet scent of her. She's alive. Never has such relief flooded through him, the grief lifting from his body like a balloon as he embraces her. "You're alive...thank all the Gods, you're alive." The dragons continue their symphony of delight as their mammoth bonded holds his daughter so close that he might never let go, as though he can absorb her into his body and ensure she is never endangered again.

What happened?

The words ring in his ears as he peels himself away and looks between Airlia's corpse and the dead child. Oh. But she'd vowed that it was their daughter that she killed! Had this all been an elaborate plan to break him? Surely, though, she would have realised that killing the Indomitable's daughter would sign her own death warrant? "I caught her with the mangled body of a child, and she told me it was you. I thought she'd killed you, Vezér." He pauses, swallows hard. "So I killed her."

He looks numbly down at the mare's shattered remains, and an unfamiliar feeling begins to creep through him. For the first time in his life, Volterra thinks about something he's done and wonders if perhaps he shouldn't have done it. This regret is entirely new to him - he lives and dies by the sword, and usually does not dwell on past actions. But this time...This isn't a simple slip, a word said out of context or an insult unfurled too harshly. This is life and death. He's killed a woman under false pretenses, for a crime she did not commit.

But she did commit it. That is still somebody's son or daughter ruined between the trees. She still slaughtered a child. It might not be his own - and thus vastly less important - but it was still a child. He stares over at the foal's carcass and blinks heavily, the regret weighing him down like a lead weight. He tries to shed it, focus on the return of his beloved offspring, but he can't. Other things Airlia said are weighing too much on his mind. "She told me she used to beat you. Is that true?" He feels his hooves gripping the soil as he pictures such a notion, his injured leg forgotten as he contemplates the woman hurting his daughter.