Yes, we know you.

It becomes easier to filter out the hissing, incessant voices and hear only the boy’s. The more he speaks, the more his voice seems to merge with the others, but not in a way where they become jumbled and unintelligible. Faolain is reminded of waking up after her fall, or after her battle with Cullen, and the way the world was two different ghosts in each eye that slowly came together. The way she saw the colt, at first; two shapes, and then one.

Two voices, still separate, but making sense together, one speaking into each ear. Her tired mind makes the vague connection that her deaf ear is hearing the Ridge’s thoughts, and the dark colt is speaking for the Ridge aloud; it’s a foolish, delirious idea, but she cannot let go of it. She is too tired to fight, so she resigns to seeing the boy as the avatar of the Ridge itself.

She is not the same, he says, and Faolain’s small ears tick forward and then back anxiously. She knows he means the Ridge and its rivers, though this doesn’t make any sense to Faolain. No force could change a river… could it? no force that you know of, she thinks, the thought small and quiet but inexplicably loud in her tired head. there are always other forces.

She shakes her head, screwing her eyes shut. The part of her that is still unwaveringly Faolain knows that it doesn’t do to dwell on the hows or the whys; the only thing that matters is what you do now. So the rivers have moved; she must go out and find them, wherever they pulse now.

(has the heart moved as well, pulled out of place by the veins?)

Faolain blinks her eyes open again. She had asked him a question, and he answers her now, reminding her that she had asked in the first place — she feels guilty for forgetting. He says he is no one worth knowing, and this brings Faolain’s tired eyes to seek out the face of the boy, still so tucked away into the shadows. There is something holding him there, she thinks, keeping him from coming closer, and she wonders if he is afraid of her. She takes a step closer to him, into the dimness of the jungle, the cool, damp air a welcome gift after all the time she spent in the dry sun on Salem.

She can see the scars on him, but she almost thinks nothing of them, except for his strange comment. I am nobody worth knowing. Faolain doesn’t know what might have carved him up in such a way as his scars describe, but she doesn’t flinch away from looking at him, tracing the damaged flesh with eyes that continue to adjust to the darkness.

“What else does the jungle tell you?” she asks, her dead ear flicking a few times as though to rid itself of the undulating tide of voices like flies landing on the thin velvet fur. “If the veins have moved, has the heart moved with it?” The words come out an inaccurate reflection of the question she had meant to ask, which is does it tell you of fresh water? Faolain shakes her head, frustrated at this mistake, but she does not fix it. She feels there is a chance the colt will understand her anyway.

What will you do next?

Faolain considers this for a moment. “I will find the rivers, wherever they have gone,” she says. Her eyes flick up to the scarred colt’s face. She still cannot figure out if she has seen him before; something about him is familiar. Maybe he is familiar because he speaks for the Ridge, she thinks, and Faolain knows the Ridge.

“I think that I know you,” she says decisively, despite her inherently uncertain word choice. There is no name for him in her mind, but she doesn’t need one for a distinct identity to have formed in her mind for the colt.

She takes a tentative few steps deeper into the jungle. She is unsure where to begin her search, so she simply picks a direction and begins to walk. She casts a glance over her shoulder to see if the scarred boy will follow, and she pauses a moment, in case he wants to; but whether or not he accompanies her, she must find water, and so she eventually picks up her hooves again and makes her way slowly into the darkness.