Luma and Noctis would have been proud of her determination, but less so of her motivation. She had won the race, but not the race Kendry might have expected. Her heart had been pounding in her chest, but she did her best to act otherwise. It took everything in her to ignore the thoughts: the angry, white tops of waves crashing down beneath a grey sky, the feeling of sand and salt in her mouth, her eyes, her nose. It was as if she could feel those very same waves inside of her...
Kendry. Kendry. She focused on the word, the name. It gave her something to cling onto, and she quickly rose to the surface of her own thoughts with a sigh of relief. She grinned over her alleged victory, delayed but present at least. "It's a pleasure...really," she managed to say with a small nod of her head. Elara felt breathless, and she immediately fretted over the idea of him noticing her restlessness. How could somebody explain something like it? Elara had never had to think so completely about fear, and she certainly never had to admit being afraid of something in the past. She wasn't sure she'd ever actually felt those things before: she just knew that her heart felt sick and heavy and she wanted nothing more than to never smell salt again.
Quickly, she realized she had...disappeared for a moment. When she came to, she shook her head lightly and flicked her ears as she caught up to Kendry's voice. "The Commons, and the Meadow...But there's more than that, isn't there?" She motioned over her shoulder with her muzzle, away from the sea again. "Islands...This is them, right? That's wher we...where I wanted to end up," her lip pulled back slightly when she corrected herself, and her heart lurched for a moment. Elara felt like she was swinging between 'fine' and 'a mess,' and she wasn't sure how she ought to approach her conundrum at all. One part of her wanted to wail and cry while another was angry, and yet another wanted to move on like nothing had happened. Bury the dead, and bury the thoughts alongside them.
"Thank you, Kendry. I...It feels good to rest properly. Who knows how long I would have kept walking otherwise," she said with the smallest smile she could muster, trying to swim to the surface again. "Is your herd nearby? I hope I haven't kept you too busy." She chewed on her lip, unsure of what she hoped for. Asking about herds...Wanting to run away...Elara might have known where she was, but she was just as clueless about where to go next.