"Do you ever think about going home?" Cairn asked between huffs.

"Less and less, now," Polaris replied. He grunted as he worked his way up a particularly challenging section of the ancient wall. "There's nothing much for me on the surface anymore."

"Oh," Cairn replied. "I think about it a lot. It's not that I don't enjoy your company-" Polaris snorted in amusement, "But the moors were my home. Are my home," Cairn corrected himself. "I don't know whether I'll ever be comfortable down here."

"You will," Polaris said with a certainty Cairn couldn't match. "Some don't have the stones for it. But I can see you do."

"That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me," Cairn said.

"Don't get used to it," Polaris' voice rumbled in a chuckle. "Watch your step here."

Cairn's hooves scrabbled on the loose stonework before he regained his footing. "Thanks."

There was a long silence before Polaris spoke again. "I had a sister," he started. "She's gone now."

"I'm sorry," Cairn replied. "How long ago?"

"We were young," Polaris said. "Had just started our first dive. She and I split up at a fork between two caverns and I never saw her again. I kept going back to the surface, to our old home, but nobody had heard anything from or about her in years by the time I stopped surfacing."

"When we met, you asked me where the exit was," Cairn said. "I didn't realise you'd stopped going up."

"Yeah," Polaris said. "I don't know why I asked, really. Maybe it was because you were obviously such a greenhorn- I wanted to make sure you knew your way out. You'll notice I didn't join you when you surfaced last time. I just don't see the point in it anymore. Everything I could need is down here."

There was a sadness to his voice that Cairn forced himself to ignore. The other Courser clearly didn't want to elaborate. There was a part of him that wondered if Polaris' sister had merely kept going down in to the dungeons, but he knew better than to voice the thought. There was likely nothing he could say that Polaris hadn't thought of himself.

"My dad took me up a tor before the entrance appeared," Cairn said. At Polaris' quizzical glance, he added, "A huge rock. Monolithic. We climbed it in such strong wind I thought I'd fall off it for sure. But then he told me about the ancient magic- it's not like I didn't know of it before, but I didn't realise how strong it still was. There was a huge earthquake, and then the tor split to form the entrance I came down from."

"Hm." Polaris replied. "Is that why you carry that rock?"

"Yeah," Cairn said. He'd pulled jagged pebble in his shoulder bag from the rubble of the highest tor. "But mostly I think it's because I don't know where Hardt is now. My father."

"I guess we have something in common, then," Polaris said.

"I don't think he's dead," Cairn replied. "But I also don't think he'd be down here- he was never the risk-taking type."

"He did keep the knowledge of the magic from you until just days before the entrance appeared," Polaris said. "Kind of sounds like he knew more than he let on."

Cairn felt a jolt through his whole body. "Yeah," he said weakly. "Maybe."

The pair scrambled up the last section of the wall and looked back. "This is what I'd wanted to show you," Polaris said. "If you ever lose your way, if you ever want to find the surface again, climb the highest thing you can and look for the pools of real light. Though it only really works if you can see multiple caverns from there."

"Thanks," Cairn said. It did help, knowing ways he could get out. Even so, Polaris' words echoed in his head. What had his father known? Was he down here, too? He shook his mane and banished the thought. There was no point speculating. There was too much still to do.