Faolain has spent so much time alone that the disembodied voice of the Ridge was all she could hear. They had become background static, something she hardly paid attention to but to which she had become accustomed.

As she had sidled close to the Shire stallion, the voices had begun to quiet. Her deaf ear flicks a few times as it seems to deafen further, a strange sensation. When Tyr speaks, the voices halt altogether, and she suddenly feels as though cotton has been stuffed deep into her damaged ear canal. She shakes her head roughly, and misses part of what the stallion says, catching only “…other desires.”

Her lips press into a harsh line as her head begins to clear. The presence of another is grounding, but she isn’t sure she likes the sensation. Behind the cotton in her deaf ear is a harsh ringing sound, and it makes her nauseous, but even that seems to quiet a bit whenever she hears the deep baritones of Tyr’s voice. She remembers a bit; nothing concrete, but bitterness and anger surface through the head fog, unanchored by any specific memory but undoubtedly tied to Tyr. Her ears tick back, but without knowing why exactly she has felt these things for him in the past, she is unwilling to act upon them.

“I can’t,” she answers matter-of-factly, her voice quiet, for Tyr alone. “There was a landslide some time ago; part of the mountain cleaved away into the sea. I was on it, the part that fell; I have lost many of my memories, and much does not make sense to me. I feel… as though I am tied to this place, now. If I leave, I will die.” She knows it doesn’t make sense. She also knows that before the fall, she would never have given this much information away freely, except maybe to Rivaini.

The memory of the silver bay mare is sudden and shocking, and she winces under its weight.

The calm voice of the dark Ridge stallion — not Wulfric, whom Faolain sometimes thought she spotted in the shadows but to whom she had not spoken since her return — breaks through the delicate little bubble around Faolain and Tyr. The black mare’s eyes sharpen as she looks over to him, hooded eyelids narrowing in suspicion, though Drogon had never actually done anything to her. He is mysterious, and she assumes that he is cunning, someone she might have been able to keep up with intellectually before her fall, but no longer. This intimidates her, and although there is still enough of Faolain left to know that it is not his fault, it makes her bitter and — to some extent — insecure.

She shies away from his gaze, feeling very small beneath it, and shrinks a little bit behind Tyr. Faolain assumes that Tyr is equally intelligent, but her fractured memories are of a straightforward character, and not one who might try to trick her. Misguided as these assumptions may be, the gaunt black mare cannot shake them, and she retreats into herself while the stallions speak.