She could hitch her breath no longer. The moment she inhaled to steady herself, the air turned to poison in her lungs, sharp and biting as it curled in her chest.

The words pressed against her like the weight of an oncoming storm, but Takala refused to let them settle. His voice blurred beneath the dull, suffocating hum in her mind. 'Transported'. 'Fallen in'. They were just notions, as fleeting and nonsensical as a passing dream, the kind one would forget upon waking. It wasn’t real.

She exhaled slowly, the frost of her breath spiraling in front of her nose before vanishing into the cold. Her gaze dropped momentarily, the weight of the sky above pressing down in eerie silence. The world around them suddenly felt too vast, too empty, a foreign land wrapped in white and shadow, and yet it was not home. She did not recognize these trees, this soil. The air did not carry the scent of her kin, and the wind whispered in an unfamiliar tongue. A burning, revolting nauseousness welled in her throat.

"I... hoped it was just a bad dream," She muttered, words falling from her lips to the rhythm of desperate pleas.

No. She would not entertain fiction.

A flick of her ear, a minute shift of her posture—measured, composed. There was no falter, no hesitance in the way she turned her head away from Francis, as if she had already cast his words aside, stripped them of consequence.

"I'll make it home," The dismissal was smooth, final. "I have to." She turned her head, directing her gaze forward as if his words had already been discarded and trampled beneath her paws.