"Are you ready Oz?" Roisin’s voice was soft as she cast her gaze back to the young stallion. Sometimes when she looked at him, she still saw the bright little colt he had once been, tottering along at Oswin’s heels. He hardly resembled that long-legged, knobby knee’d boy she’d known. He outsized her by multiple hands and hundreds of pounds now, but she still felt fiercely protective of him.

So protective, in fact, that she was willing to take him to the Ridge, to expose herself to Tyr’s betrayal, all to ensure that he made it safely back to his family.

She couldn’t tell if he was worried about the journey (or what they'd find once there) or not, but she exhaled a warm breath of comfort against his shoulder anyway and reassured him (reassured herself, too, if she were honest). "I’ll be right next to you."

For as much as a swim could be uneventful, it was. Roisin was so invested in making sure Oswald was on the right path and close enough for her to reach should the worst hit that she didn’t even have time to linger on where she was going, or who they would meet when they got there. This was just as well. She’d spent a rather embarrassingly large amount of time ruminating on it already, and would risk riling herself up if she thought about it too much more.

About how her long-time enemy had stolen both her childhood home and her found family. The way his presence in the Ridge would forever tarnish her memories of her home, reminding her of the patent unfairness of life. It was not enough that fate had forced her to spend half her childhood with her mother caged away on another isle, for it to send her father away for years at a time, for Iscariot to fade from her grasp, for her to fail at the mantle she’d taken upon herself in the Peak. No, it had to ruin this last good thing she had, too.

Roisin’s pale hooves scrambled to touch bottom long after Oswald was standing on his own, and she was grateful when the waves finally pushed her far enough out of the water that she could shake the seawater from her skin. The air smelled as she always remembered – the acrid tang of Tyr aside – and she could not stop her blazed face from raising, her nostrils from flaring as she drank it in deeply. She had missed the Ridge, far more than she had realized.

"How are you feeling?" She asked as she turned back to Oz, her gaze gentle as she took him in. She knew his own feelings regarding this move were likely complicated too, and while she’d promised herself not to pry, she couldn’t help but open the door if he wanted to divulge.