Hyori steps gingerly alongside him. They make many stops and starts, pausing where her tired body threatens to collapse on itself anew, but slowly, eventually, they make it off the beach. Every movement feels like agony, every bend of her knee and press of her hooves on the hard-packed ground slashing into her like daggers. Blood drips from her wounds, seeping into her fur and speckling the white snow red.

The stallion shifts alongside her, now, and she follows his gaze to the trees just ahead, shifting course to match his strides. After passing beneath the boughs, Hyori stops, panting from the effort but grateful for a break from the wind. His warmth quickly starts to fill the space between them, easing the stiffness she feels from the cold so that it gives way to the deeper, duller ache in her bones. It’s this that keeps her from recoiling when he comes closer, though her instincts towards flight make her tremble all over again, and when his tongue scrapes against the raw flesh at her knee her ears press back against her poll and a low hiss of pain pulls involuntarily from between her lips. It stings, but ultimately, her wounds do feel better without all the grit of sand and salt from the beach caked into them. The pale mare watches him warily, dark eyes wide and rimmed with white, her black-rimmed ears sliding cautiously forward at the sound of his rough-hewn voice.

The Lost Islands? How fitting, she thinks bitterly, for she, too, is a lost thing, a creature taken from the comfort of her own home and dumped unceremoniously elsewhere. “Thank you…” she finally manages, her voice still gravelly from overuse. She clears her throat, wincing at the discomfort, and continues doggedly on. “...Kendry.”

Hyori falls silent again. Even under ideal circumstances, the tall mare would be shy and unsure around strangers. All her life, she’d been surrounded by those she recognized, those who looked like her and acted like her and knew all the same horses she did. They were all so connected to each other, she almost never had to directly tell anyone anything, as easily and quickly as things spread amongst their ranks. She had been born in the flock, was raised in the flock, and - until today - was sure she would die in the flock, never having left.

How naive she had been.

Starting over from scratch is as foreign to her as these Lost Islands. Kendry’s already seen so much of her that it feels wrong to try and initiate meaningless chatter, not after the state he’d found her in. The silence, though, feels worse, especially after the intensity of their initial meeting, and Hyori is so exhausted that words are one of the only things she feels capable of in this moment. The question that rises in her throat is simple, barely over a mutter, and delivered without much emotion at all, for fear the aftershocks of her grief rip open the earth at their hooves and swallow both of them whole.

“Are you lost, too?”