Talis had heard the voices since she was young. 

Since her birth, perhaps?  She couldn’t remember that far back, but maybe it was all the same; what she remembered was darkness, and then the Furnace — hot smoke; uneven stone — and the dungeon’s voices naming her. 

Little one; new one; talisman of great things; they are born of us. 

They couldn’t feed her, of course.  She had crumpled on her long legs and bleated for help in a wordless baby voice until somebody — round barrel of a body, strong legs; a shape that Talis would later understand was synonymous to her own — swept down the corridor towards her, concerned and mothering. 

The Courser’s voice was different than the dungeon’s, had a sound, a weight; the capacity to drown out things like the roar of the Furnace and the distant baying of hellhounds. 

But they had never left her, not for very long.

---

They pulled Talis out of her sleep, now. 

She lifted her head from where she had laid it on a bed of moss and turned blindly towards them, although — save for Gwp’s faint green glow across the cavern — the dungeon was swallowed by shadow, anyway. 

They hear us.  They are listening.

She could tell that Nuada and Seren were still asleep.  Their breathing hadn’t changed. 

Little one. 

Little one?

They blended together, a noiseless reverberation, more feeling than sound. 

Talis listened without moving, her ears twitching without hearing. 

They are—

They had never tried to tell her anything, not since naming her; only repeated themselves.  Sometimes Talis wondered if the voices were meant for her at all, or echoes to which she became occasionally attuned; but that seemed ungrateful of her.  They had named her, after all.  They had found her before any Courser had. 

—of us. 

Her nose drooped with sleep, whiskers against moss, a passive sieve for the dungeon’s whispering. 

---

By the time morning came — measured by Gwp’s fungal glow fading at last — the voices had faded to nothing, too.