How could she exist in this clean, warm, dry den, brooding on the complete fiasco that was her personal life, while he was gone?

When addled energies had flagged at last, the hollowness began. Being attached to anyone is a poison, much less this boy not of her blood, whose recoiling steps had drawn her down into murky depths.

She was in a shock, and could not take it all in. The whole thing seemed like a nightmare, yet here she was in flesh, chasing after a halved shadow, tonguing fear from her spying roost. Any time she found herself thinking it an illusion or a dream of some kind, the cold took form and ravaged her heels. Yakone obliterated all with sea-hunter jaws— fighting so on, and so forth, spinning the emotional torrents to Trygve.

Meanwhile, the end of their species was taking place before their very eyes.