Çiçek slips gingerly from the waves. Every time she takes a step, her hooves feel like they weigh a thousand pounds; her stumbling pace slows to a walk, and her lids sit heavy on her tired eyes. She lets the mahogany blur beside her lead them both into the jungle, lips pressed to their strong shoulder to guide her way. As the spotted girl goes - without a fuss, without a care or a moment’s hesitation - into its cloying embrace, she barely has a chance to marvel at how much her one-time island home has changed in the past half-year.

They fall under cover of darkness, the shifting canopy draping its strong arms across her shoulders and pulling her in. No more than a few minutes under the soft brush of vine-strangled tree trunks and Çiçek is tugging harder on her companion’s mane, leaning her weight fully into their shoulder to stop them. “‘M tired,” she says simply, turning with a tilt of her head and nosing apart the long green tendrils trailing down alongside the path. Behind them grows a tree, massive, wide, and covered through with kudzu. Its branches arc high above them, holding up curtains of vines studded with droplet-shaped leaves and small pink-and-purple blooms. Pretty, she thinks dully, even as the colors swim in her vision and the whole world sways like palms in a hurricane. “C’mon,” she mumbles, moving forward and beckoning her savior to follow. Çiçek shivers - though whether it’s from fever, or the vines that drag along her spine as she advances, or the friction of the other’s flesh against her own, she can’t be sure.

The tree is near enough that she only has to go a few yards before her damp chest presses against it, papery kudzu leaves pressing delicately on her skin and sending her heart aflutter. She can feel her companion’s body heat, forced into closeness by the small amount of space, and she reaches for it greedily, like a moth flying carelessly toward a bonfire. “Buraya gel, bezelye,”“Come here, sweet pea,” Çiçek purrs against their flesh, hooking her neck over the other’s withers and leaning in close. Her weight shifts back and forth, her long white tail glancing across both of their hinds as it snaps from side to side, impatient. “C’mere an’-an’ help me feel better.”

She and her sweet pea could talk it out - later, when her body didn’t hurt like fire and lightning and her head was clear. Later, after she’d shown the Guardian of the Ridge how much she’d missed her, and given her all the pieces of herself she’d kept, like a fool, to herself for all of those long winter months.