"What do we do when we are lost, Chatter Teeth?" The source of heat to his left front side is someone the foal knows very well, as much as neither know what colors splay the other's pelt. It is his father, a similarly shaped eyeless being, who was born in the same burrow that Chatter Teeth was born to.

The foal's features scrunch up in thought, his father feeling the motions of his face against his shoulder. A gentle nuzzle crests the top of Chatter's head, tickling the sensory whiskers there, but it makes it all feel warm, and kind.

"N-..Never go up."

"Yes. In the majority of circumstance, never go up. The light thickens there, enough to scald your hide."

"And home is down." Chatter said, with the confidence of a child who's heard half a dozen adult voices say the same amongst themselves.

"Home is down." His father agrees, grooming the thin, soft fur in a miniscule layer over Chatter Teeth's leathery skin.

"... Y'said we don't always go up?" Chatter chirped, a few moments later.

"... Yes. If the tunnel - if the passage is collapsing down, you must go up." His father's voice was quieter, precise. "... and turn back when you can. The - the collapse, if it's on top of you - it can kill you, quick as anything."

Chatter Teeth nods his head, a motion felt in the air by the eyeless coursers. He is a good lad, who listens.

----------------------

The familiar earth under Chatter's hooves was slipping, pushing downwards. It took a moment for him to realize it was collapsing.

Heart pounding in his ears, he scrambled up and lurched for a ledge he could sense in the space, in the sound that filled in around it. He had scrambled up, just barely, he'd heard shouts, the tunnel crashing down into the tunnel below it, the cascade of dirt.

There was no way down that didn't lead into the same convulsing tunnels, old and marred.

'You must go up, and turn back when you can.'

Chatter had gone up, the pathing under his hooves untouched since at least two generations. He had hunted for a way down, a way to wind back. He had not found it, save more tunnels that started to buckle if he tried to push in from above. He did not smell his colony, his family.

Dangerous things with slick teeth in the dark would herd him upwards too, blocking passage down.

He went upwards. He went.

He began to forget his family's scent.

He had emerged, into a hot, heavy place, where the sting of light crossed his hide, and he was afraid. There was an adult shape, within the range of his ears and sensory whiskers to detect, but it was all wrong - towering larger than any of his sort he'd met in the tunnels. Thick ropes of ... roots? Fur? hung from it's gray head and tail like a cascade, and its whiskers were short and blunt, in the shapes formed from the sounds. He had hid from it, unsure if it would help him, or devour him whole.

Chatter was alone, and Chatter was afraid.