Halcyon
The girl spoke of her father's heart and how it had closed off after her own birth, and she felt a pang of empathy for the child. Such knowledge - whether it was true or only in her head - was a heavy burden for such a small soul to shoulder. The thought of a young child believing they were the cause of pain for their parents made her sad in a weary sort of way. It made her angry, too, but the anger was muted. Not because it was not appropriate, but because Halcyon knew she would only be the pot calling the kettle black.
She had left Hirka and Titus to their own devices when she'd broken. had shown them - albeit inadvertently - that losing Fritjof had been worse than losing them. But children were supposed to grow up and away. They were always meant to leave her, she'd known that the moment they were born. But Fritjof? He was her other half, and without her other half, she was a rowboat doomed to forever row in circles.
"It's not your fault, you know," she murmured softly, eyes misty as she turned her gaze back to the girl. "The change in your father? It's not your fault." Sometimes there were just things in an adult's head that they needed to work through, and sometimes children were the unfortunate observers of this painful process.
What followed next was a series of information that Halcyon was ill-prepared to take in, and she lapsed into stunned silence as she tried to digest what it all meant. The obvious information was easy to digest: the Shore was now "safe" and under the control of a stallion named Nahawi, who was an ass but not a bad stallion and a friend of Roamers.
The part that sent earthquakes rattling through her core, however, was the girl's casual reference to the stallion she had been staring at. Multiple thoughts crashed into each other at once in her mind, all flavored with equal parts desperate longing and doubt. Was she referencing Fritjof? Was that Fritjof? Had it really been him? If so, how? How was he still alive? And selfishly - why hadn't he come for her? There is no conductor at the junction of her thoughts and they crash into each other, leaving the carnage remains of her heart scattered around.
"You saw him, too?" The words are no more than a whisper squeezed between lips pressed tightly together, as if that pressure alone would hold her together as she fractured inside. "He was real this time?"