Halcyon
The Forest was beautiful, she would admit, and she was grateful for the ability to look at something other than the stranger at her side. Things had never been this awkward with Fritjof, but then again, they'd been little more than lovestruck children just fumbling their way through their first crushes. And then lovestruck adults, navigating their way through their first child and through the first flush of power, and through the struggles of growing a herd. She'd never been forced to meet with someone she barely knew in the hopes of kindling... something.
Was that even what she wanted?
She'd been loyal to the memory of Fritjof for so many years that the thought of giving anyone else space in her heart seemed like a betrayal, and yet how could someone betray a ghost? It wasn't as if he was going to randomly show up someday and begrudge her for moving on. He wasn't ever coming back again, and she knew it, though her heart still balked at the acceptance of this fact.
"Well," she began, blinking slowly at his question. "I was looking for a new home, and that is typically where one goes, no?" She offered him a faint smile, but her gaze slid away from him again. "I'd wandered the Crossing for a while without much luck, and figured the Commons would be faster, despite their risk."
And it wasn't as though she were risking much. After enduring Psychedelic's rule over the Shore, there wasn't much anyone could do to her that would be worse from the brief fragments she remembered. And at least, even if her new claimant proved terrible, it would at least be a sense of belonging somewhere. Of being of somewhere again, rather than being someone who was clinging to a life that had long since ended.
"Why did you end up in the Commons?" She asked, her gaze flicking briefly back to him and then away again.