The speckled vixen threads unevenly through the undergrowth, messily stitching together the borders of Paradise and the Harbor. She slinks low to the ground, weaving to and fro, and while it might look as if she runs, cowed, from some unseen predator, her dark gaze glitters needle-sharp out from the depths. Titania comes fresh from her tryst with phantom-eyed Björn, pine and sweat and the Frost King's musk as much marks upon her skin as the ones lacing in silvery cords across her withers. She hadn't exactly planned to indulge her baser instincts - at least, she thinks, not like that, as the memory of Rougaru's blood turns her tongue to copper - but the Icelandic was powerfully persuasive, and though he saw the power crackling like static down to her bones, he never once tried to lasso it. Not until she deemed it so, her invitation held in the soft sway of her white-draped hips. Daring him to try and best her, challenging him, provoking him to a duel, however it may come, and to the victor go the spoils.

Titania smirks in the night, smug. Unlike the priggish wolf-king, she and Björn are horses of their word - and so, when the latter rose in triumph over the trials she'd placed before him, the prize he'd won was her. She gave herself freely, taking him upon her back as an equal, and when they had consumed each other thoroughly enough for her to feel, again, the gravitational pull of her firstborn's near-proximity, he let her drift towards it. Down in the valleys of Paradise, with the haze of tropical heat and swarms of insects clouding his field of view, perhaps Rougaru couldn't see the path of her orbit. Perched on the peaks of the Inlet, high above the clouds, Björn had no such problems, and saw the true shape of her trajectory, how it brought her back to him in its own due time.

It felt easy, then, for her to go when the moment was right, untangling from his embrace at the first blue signs of dawn hemmed the Eastern horizon. She had business to tend to, as did he, and the longer she waited, the more her chances of rescuing Cressida by herself shrank. Rougaru had to have been on his way back by now, if not already nestled snug amongst his dragon's hoard of mares. The fae had to find her lost girl, and fast, and once her and Rille's only child was back under her wing, she could fetch Faline from the Peak. From there it was only a short swim to Tinuvel, where the distance and the rough winter seas would keep even the most determined warm-weather intruders from nipping at her heels.

She had a plan, but she had very little time, especially if she stopped to find the herbs she knew would keep Björn's seed from laying down roots.

The sky shifts, drawing her closer and closer to the trees. The branches don't claw at her like they had on the Thicket, their arms lush and pillowy with leaves in comparison to her cherished brambles, but the earth is soft enough to leave tracks, especially as she creeps in further. Titania pauses, nares flaring over a pair of fresh, wet prints. That scent... familiar, somehow, stirring unease in her gut. No matter how hard she tries, she can't place it. Guilt shoots hot through her veins, forcing her to swallow it back. Really? she chastises internally, chewing on her discomfort. Had she really forgotten Cressida's unique fragrance so easily, so quickly? Had it always been this spiced, this cloying, this... grown up?

Movement in Titania's periphery yanks her back to Earth. Her head jerks up, crescent moons ringing the fathomless voids of her eyes - and when they finally find their target, the mare that appears like a vision in her path is not the one she's prepared for. The Criollo mix pulls up short, stumbling backward, and when her jaw finally lifts itself off the forest floor, so, too, does her voice come forth from its place at the back of her quivering throat.

"Vanya?" she blurts, staring at her in total disbelief.

She doesn't hesitate. In an instant she's moving closer, her gaze combing over the mare's caramel-cream body for signs of abuse. "What happened?" she asks, her brow furrowed with worry. "Are you okay?" She's slimmer now, but Titania remembers their last, fateful meeting, how Vanya had swelled round with child. How she'd tucked her young son to her side, whispering promises of adventure, and disappeared into the ether, and how she now stands alone, nothing for company but air. "Are your children okay?"

Titania glances up, catching scraps of cobalt peeking through the canopy. Morning knocks upon the world's doors, but it will not wait for an answer, and she only has so long before the sun's bright rays burst through the gloom and reveal her. "Hist," she says, tilting her head back over her pointed withers. "Come with me. The Harbor sits nearly empty," save, she thinks with a shiver, for a certain frost demon, and takes a few steps in that direction, turning with the ease of someone sure her friend would follow.

"We haven't much time, but if we're fast," Titania murmurs, "we can be gone before he even notices." Wickedness flashes across her features, just for a second, as she savors the thought of Rougaru losing his prized trinket yet again. Seething in his jungle prison, pacing like a tiger around the golden bars of the cage he'd so carefully crafted, and wondering who'd opened its gilded door, setting his pretty bird free. All this and more - the beginning of something great. The beginning of his end, once and for all, and the end of all of their problems... if only Vanya seizes the opportunity for her own liberation.

Titania has complete faith that she will. She had done so once already, years ago. Why not now?