If she'd like to keep it that way? Beltane blinked. She'd never heard it put like that. Keep it that way, like she had a real say in the matter at all. In that moment, Beltane had decided she liked that choice. In that very same moment, she had decided that she trusted the stranger. Had her sister known she had a choice, perhaps she would be more than just a deafened ear and an occluded eye. Beltane had been given it though, and she seized it shamelessly.
Beltane followed Ember closely. She took her time, ensuring each and every hoof was placed deliberately and carefully. She breathed in slowly, deeply, taking the opportunity to learn what she could about where she was. She could smell the ocean, the salt, and the forest too; there was an underlying sickness that Ember had made her aware of, a certain kind of foulness that seemed to linger far, far away in the wind. Beltane could smell the soil beneath them too, and Ember herself seemed alive with the scents of other, more foreign places. Strangers, too. It was a good distraction for Beltane. It was easier to focus on the mundane task of walking, breathing and being when somebody else did the leading.
At first, she did not quite understand Ember's meaning. Make it? Sustain? She blinked again, looked to Ember and then down to where the woman's eyes had been lingering. Grass, water. Ah, did Beltane need those? She breathed out, a rattling kind of breath somewhere between a sigh of relief and unwilling acceptance. Food hadn't even crossed her mind, and water...She had been given plenty of water in the ocean. She could still feel it somewhere in her stomach, churning away. It was a relief to eat, though. Beltane had steadied herself, stance wide, in order to do so and when she did, she did so ravenously. Although her mind might not have realized it, her body still had enough instinct left.
Beltane heard her speak, but it was her dead ear that flickered towards Ember. It was not for another minute or so that Beltane truly rose to meet her. When she did so, her head was tilted slightly, a hm of thought below her breath as she searched the woman's face. "They know part of me is," she remarked plainly, having glanced briefly up at their winged companions. It was faint, but Beltane grinned nonetheless. "Beltane, I am. Yes, Beltane. Part of me...Lughnasa, my sister." Beltane mulled over the words for a moment, quite literally so. She chewed on nothingness, as if tasting how the words themselves tasted. They tasted strange...Strange to admit Lughnasa was part of her, gone but not, there but not. Not, not, not. Beltane was not Lughnasa. She had to remind herself of that.
"Lughnasa's...dead. Ah, she is," she said with finality, tilting the right side - her dead eye and ear - towards Ember, so that she might understand better. She was dead, and so was a part of Beltane because of it. "...You are?" She suddenly asked, turning her good eye to Ember and taking a step forward. She extended her muzzle, so close to Ember's chest that she could feel the warmth in the air between them. "Warm, alive, light. Like a sun." Beltane hadn't meant to answer for her, but she could not help herself. Like a moth, she was drawn to those very things that existed within Ember.
