“Have you been here often?” His tone, so often a mask of jovial pleasantry was faltering as Fetch responded, “Have you been here often?”

Smudge did his best to smile politely, grateful that Prosper for all of their oddity at least knew how to carry a conversation. “No,” he responded, and Fetch hummed as if that was more than explanation enough.

The Moor held an eerie quality to it that Smudge supposed fit Fetch better than any of the other seasoned adventurers. She seemed to float through it as if they were just one more ghost in this ancient battlefield. The thought caused a shudder to ripple through him.

“You should let your mane out.”

“Huh?”

“You’re going to trip.”

Smudge blinked, politely baffled before wondering if perhaps he had been wrong about Fetch. Maybe there was more to their seemingly inane commentary than he had first believed, and this was meant to be a metaphor for –

Smudge tripped.

Fine dust billowed up around him as he coughed, his legs folded in a strange position because of his own carelessness. He wasn’t even sure how it had happened, and felt foolish for being taken in by Fetch’s prophecy that had simply been an observation.

He meant to say as much, turning his head towards her when his eyes locked with a sight far more ghostly than even Fetch.

Smudge froze, attempting to parse what it was that he had found.

The pieces themselves were all too familiar, they’d picked their way across the bones of men but Smudge had never seen them so inextricably intertwined.

“Do you…” he began to say, and then trailed off knowing he was better off than asking the Courser what she thought.

“Love transcends.”

His head tilted, trying to place flesh and blood ontop of these long-dead bones, knitting them together as they had been in life. It might have been love, that put them here, or maybe it was simply desperation. The specter of death had seemed to trail behind his every movement lately, this pair might have known their time was short. Rather than suffer alone, they suffered together.

“Maybe it does.” He said.

What is love if not a sharing of the burden in both life and death. The picture filled him with unease of his own fragile mortality. If they died here, would he place his forehead to Sproing, sharing with the toad their last moments to be bonded for eternity?

He did not know.

He would certainly not be curling around Fetch who was already moving on, leaving him alone with what remained of a Courser and their man.