She had not been able to catch Isengrim before he left the Bay. Haleth had taken far too long to figure out where he had gone, and she was far too small to catch him up in the rough seas the day after he had left. She had tried, though; the little night-sky filly had fought the sea bitterly to close the distance between herself and her brother. In the end, she had arrived on the Bay just to crash in the nearest bed of rough beach grass and sleep.
By the time she woke up to search, he was gone again.
Frustrated, but with the bolder child’s lack of situational awareness and fear, Haleth had set right off again. Not once had she stopped to think about why Grim had left, or why he had come to the Bay specifically (she thought it kind of sucked). Hale didn’t care. She felt so out of place on Salem without him. She missed him so much it didn’t even occur to her to be angry about it; she had simply set off, into the ocean, without a second thought.
The air begins to warm as Haleth once again nears land. This is not the sweltering, arid heat of Salem, or the still-sharp bite of Tinuvel spring; this feels like a happy medium between the two. The lanky yearling bobs toward the shore with much more vigor than she had managed on the black sands of the Bay, so desperate is she not to miss Isengrim a third time, and it pays off. She kicks the waves spitefully as she bursts from them at last, and clambers up toward the familiar, pacing shape of her brother.
“Hey dumbass,” she barks, now too proud of herself to be angry at him for leaving her. “You thought you could ditch me, huh?” Her leggy trot becomes lofty as she nears him; he’s facing inland, and as she arcs her path to come up on his side, she catches his face right as it smooths into the void.
She knows that face, and she feels it, too. She hasn’t met their father, but she knows — who doesn’t — that he is full of monsters. Hale doesn’t know what Grim is full of, but she is full of nothing: a great silent shadow that she desperately covers with snarky words and bitter laughter and explosive anger. Anything to bury it down, to keep it from swallowing her whole. It works for her, most of the time. And in her yearling naivete, she assumes the same will work for her brother.
Seeing the void in Grim’s face had sent her slipping into one, but she claws herself out of it now, barely missing a beat as she bounds around to face her brother. She’s tired, out of breath, simultaneously leaden of hoof and bursting with frantic energy. She plants herself squarely in front of Isengrim, nose to nose (she has to reach a little still) and stares boldly into his face, as though she can chase off that void look by confronting it directly. “What are we doing here?” she asks, as though ‘we’ had never been in question.