Northstar Vale salute your solution

As she seemed to examine him, he stood calmly on. She didn't seem to be a threat, nor did she seem particularly malignant. Merely curious, and perhaps unusual, but then he came from a family that spun words from the air like it was the simplest of acts and he could hardly carry on a conversation without feeling a fool. As she drifted away from him, he reached out to graze her passing side with his muzzle, in affirmation or mutual greeting. She stopped before him, and he took stock of her — she was dark all over, all of her fur and her eyes, and her features were as serious and closed-off as her demeanor. He followed her eyes as they darted around him and then back to his face, as though asking a question, and he responded with the only thing he could think of to fit the shape of the silence she'd left. "I'm alone."