When a month had passed she set to walking, across the land from the Hearth to the Place of Despair. For many days and nights she searched for him, for her Own, but she did not find him. The driving snow weighted her limbs and the cold froze the tears she would have shed. At last the despair grew so heavy in her heart that the ice could not support her, and she plunged through into the chilly embrace of the black water. As she slipped, struggling, beneath its surface he groaned in his sleep, twisting within the confines of his icy prison. Her panic rushed over him, firing in his brain and warming him in his blood so that the ice covering him began to melt, dripping on his upturned face and soaking into his coat. His awakening traveled the lines of contact and she, feeling him awaken in her mind, pulled herself finally onto the ice with renewed purpose. Yet even the lifting of despair could not keep the ice from forming on her body, in her hair. The cold chilled her in her bones. She drove herself forward, each step an act of will as she struggled to keep moving, farther toward the bonfire of his presence in her mind. Eventually, though he still burned brightly, a beacon that called to her, her tired body could not carry her farther, though her will was as strong as ever. At last she lay herself down in the snow. Just for a little rest, she told his presence, though it was insistently calling her on.