Lake Rodney I was dead when I woke up this morning

Hela shared her reason willingly: the woods were not safe for her. Venamis furrowed his brow as he pondered the meaning behind her words, then his features softened. Her mother had perished there, beneath the very tree that fate had opted to drop on top of him.

Sometime between the accident and his presentation of the body to Maegi, Hela must've found her.

He remembered the absent look in the speckled wolfess' gaze, lifeless as she looked right through him. The raven Melonii chose to say no more on the matter, as her reasons were her own.

"I felt like it," he answered simply with the raise and fall of a shoulder, as though it was no nig deal to him. He found himself unwilling to share how insignificant his family had made him feel, yet still parts of him ached to be close to them again. So he changed the topic back to her: "I won't tell them I saw you here, if that's what you'd prefer?" Maegi and the others were surely looking for her, he assumed, in a manner that his family should've hunted for him.