Exhaustion, sleep was insistent. Exhaustion, he’d collapsed from; sleep, murmuring at his lashes. A deep, unending Sleep that seemed more forgiving, more lenient than Death.

Death, that always knelt over him, whispering at his shoulder, his cheek, his ear. 

He was more terrified of an abysmal Slumber than the promise that Death brought. Unlike Aurëwen — beauteous, gleam-of-cold, terrifying Aurëwen — who had sought sanctuary with the heavens, he had slept.

And slept.

And slept.

Slept, until he’d been re-animated as such; had become Repose personified, just a more forgiving avatar than Death. From there on, he was velvet-voiced and just as heavy-lidded; an eccentric drowsiness nipped at his hocks; something more imminent mouthed at his marred chin, and caressed the marred of him.

He fell into it, between it, into all of it, on crumpling legs and arced spine. All he knew was that he was in the mountains—and dreamed of Rhaesuial. And then nothing.

After a few heartbeats of insistent touching, the pale wanderer roused, blinking glazed eyes as a notch began to form in his muzzle -- but it melted away into a look of scrutiny and weariness when he saw the darker male above him. Thought better of greeting his... witness?... with a snarl, as he might know of hospice or such to rest himself.

His eyes shuttered again, brow furrowing in an attempt to gain his bearings, before he painstakingly arced his neck and tilted his head to look up at the sterling male. Unable to find his voice for a moment; which was unmistakably, foreignly worn from travel,  "Where am I?"

How did he feel? "And I fell into your lands?" Vonn craned his neck even further, to the spires thrust up from the earth's bowels. His pale gaze a tad bleary as they attempted to discover the site from where he'd tumbled from. If he'd known this peppered stranger's inner musings, he might have agreed -- and for a moment, like so many other times, he wished and wondered how he hadn't died yet. And why. "As well as one could feel after plummeting to an incomplete death."

With a rasping breath, he haltingly, achingly began to rise to his thorn-tipped paws; pressing his weight into snow and ice, muscles straining in the column of his neck and shoulders. He felt light, too light; the effort made him tremble. Snarling at the frost as he pushed himself up, and up -- and with one last stagger, he'd risen. 

"I apologize for such an intrusion." Left with his heavy chest heaving, despite his stocky bearing, he was of middling height by male standards; nowhere near the height of this Diasporian... ambassador? who he cast a shadowed gaze up to. 

For one, he appreciated the lack of praise; if any were have been spoken, it would've needed receiving. In Vonn's case, he didn't exactly feel like he'd lived up to anything worthy of admiration; the last thing he wished to do was giving thanks.

"Moi? S'allonger? Non, merci. I will sit." At the ambassador's next words, Vonn shook his head, more in disbelief than disobedience, for he'd begun to stiffly recline to his haunches while speaking. The plume of a tail tapping about his haunches, he continued, "I value your helping me, monsieur, but how will it be done? For me, I am in ze middle of nowhere." The fallen male gestured to the snowscape about them, to the smatterings of blood beneath his great paws - which he noticed only now.

"I suspect a concussion will creep upon me soon enough, however." He took the sight in of his own blood, faint across snow, with a flickering of some muscle near his jaw.

The tone of voice that followed Vonn’s previous words made his ears flicker back; if he stumbled through the misty memories of his mind, he would’ve said that his lord-father only spoke to him in such a way. Soberingly, he realized the tone of this ambassador was completely justified—whether that or some other sort of representative of Diasporia, he’d fallen into their claims. And, it seemed, into their good graces; at least a little bit.

”You are a generous one,” he confessed, and for a fleeting, rare moment his own eyes creased into crescent moons. At the question in his eyes, the porcelain traveler merely acquiesced, ”When I am healed, allow me to repay you in some way. In a hunt, in a bargain.” In his bleary mind, this made sense, too; and yet, he had no clue what he was trying to say.

A dull ache had begun to creep behind his eyes, and a wary groan slipped from him. Opening them only to give their surroundings another look, they slit on shelf of stone, curtained away by ice and hollowed into the mountain. ”I would stay there,” he nodded, face solemn again, ”for ze remainder of my time here... However long that may be.”

He merely bent his head in further appreciation at the other’s words, and then watched as the overcast male pitched himself over the snowy terrain, and was soon out of sight. Moved... so, he was to be taken to this Diasporian encampment, then.

Licking dry lips, the pale wanderer turned his gaze to the earthen shelter instead. Getting to his paws this time proved to be significantly less harrowing; nonetheless, he was labored by the time he got there. He’d planned to settled down with some dignity, but ended up losing balance, and landed with a disconcerted huff on his ribs.

Mon dieu, I feel ancient.

Vonn simply hoped that when he arrived within the pack’s heart, the bairns wouldn’t be too disturbed by his appearance.