She makes it back to Atlantis in one piece. Time has escaped her during her stay on Salem, and her memories of the Desert blend together into a languid pool of shifting sands, spinning slowly as it consumes itself. She does not remember Rougaru, but his scent lingers in her nostrils. She retains the atmosphere of death the silver bay had possessed, though his face is nowhere to be found in her mind, and she shies away from this ominous silhouette.

Physically, she has recovered, a bit, before making the swim. Titania’s oasis coincidentally was the type of paradise her breed is built to thrive in, though mentally the black mare is… not entirely accounted for. She reaches the ivory shores of the Ridge with all of her limbs intact, every gleaming black hair in its place, but inside Faolain is consumed by the voices whispering into her dead and deafened ear.

She is lucky to arrive when she does. The dry season is on its way out, the rains still a few weeks around the corner. Faolain suspects she might have fallen ill had she been hit with the rich humidity of Atlantis after so many months on Salem, parched and withering. She is no longer dying, but Faolain is still weak, and not in the correct state of mind to care for herself through such a drastic change of environments.

The ivory sands of the Ridge are soothing on her aching limbs as she keels over into them. A ragged trail of hoofprints tether her to the sea behind her, a string of crescent moons connected by the slender lines of small hooves dragging. She makes it into the dry section of beach before going down, and there she stays, sides lifting steadily with each breath. There is something wrong with her, she thinks; her ankles are swollen, hooves aching, body moving with far less spacial awareness and coordination than the black mare is accustomed to. It is a familiar collection of symptoms, but her mind is too scattered to make the connection, and were she to be confronted with the need to give a reason for her ailments, she would have chalked it up to a simple concussion.

Vertigo causes the black mare’s world to spin nauseatingly for a little while, but eventually it goes away. Her eyes close, the sun-baked sand lulling her into sleep, but the shadows of the Ridge are calling to her. She has not known true darkness since her fall, not even in sleep, where it seems the moonlight soaks into her dreams and reflects off the sinking sands in her head. She struggles to her feet, eyes aching for relief from the persistent sun, and stumbles into the jaws of the jungle.