Arrow Lake we'll do it all, everything, on our own

The girl hadn't really even had a chance to tell Stigmata that she had found her way back to his claim in the mountains. She had trekked and trekked until her limbs quivered from the effort that it took to move them further. All that time, and she had found nothing about Lucas. Piper could not help but to feel like an awful failure. She thought back to how confident she had been when she'd told Indra that she would find him, or find out where he had gone, and she was not certain that she would have the strength to confront how wrong she had been.

Still, the Redleaf girl had learned an awful lot in her time away from the rest of them. She had learned how to exist on her own, and that had been valuable enough. It didn't meant that she hadn't missed them; she had carried the stone that Rannveig had given her on the beach all the way back to Diaspora. She had every intention of giving it to her mother, just as she had promised on that day beside the river.

When the call sounded overhead, Piper's ears lifted and her heart raced wildly. She turned to where the sound of it had come from and raced in spite of her weariness. Nothing could have prevented her from being reunited with her family. When she saw the reddish fur of Indra and then the liver color of her mother's cloak, she could feel tears pricking at the back of her eyes like needles. She jetted forward and dropped the rock at her mother's feet with heavy breaths. “Mom...” the Redleaf girl breathed softly. For once in her life, she was speechless.