Solitude was unimaginable to Ffion. Some days, while bounding shoulder-to-shoulder down the corridors with Angharad and Blodwen, she felt like one leg of a larger animal. Her hooves would thunder in sync with her sisters, their sighs forced out by synchronized strides so that she imagined they all shared one breath, that it simply traveled between them out of one breast then into another. A single spirit. A single life.

Ffion and her sisters had entered this world as a trio. Though discovered by her parents in the slimy embrace of her twin, Ffion felt no less attached to the "elder" Angharad. Her parents were her parents by circumstance—it was a happy accident that Prothero and Howell had been the ones who loaned their essence to the clay, but anyone would have sufficed. Her sisters, on the other hand, had been molded from the same earth. They would have been together regardless of heredity.

She'd never been alone, in the dungeon or anywhere. Born to its darkness, the three sisters began to race the dungeon's capillary passages on their first day of life. They shared roles in their collective the way nerves do, sensing pits in the floor or presences in the dark and moving the body away by reflex. Ffion's instincts protected Angharad and Blodwen's flesh as if it were her own. The distinction was unimportant.