If Holly's ears weren't so sharp, she may have missed that soft, squeaky noise that sang out quietly through the trees. She was resting on the forest floor, beneath the shadows of the berry bushes. Normally, she would have napped, but she still carried a fear of being attacked and she forced herself to stay awake and alert. She didn't trust the villagers and she didn't trust she'd be safe to fall asleep during the middle of the day. The sound reached her ears and Holly jumped to her hooves.

It was the ocarina. Of course, it didn't sound anything like the way she was used to it sounding, but she recognized it faint tunes in a heartbeat. Her ears twitched, trying to locate the direction that the music was coming from. It didn't take very long for her to pick up a location and she started to walk through the bushes, into the foliage and into the direction of the noise. She started with a slow pace that quickened the closer she got. Within a short while, she found she was sprinting through the woods, trying to get to Tarek as quickly as possible.

When the noise stopped, so did Holly. She found she was frozen in place as if her veins turned to lead in her body. An overwhelming fear of the unknown crept into her throat and she slowly melted back into movement, taking slow, careful steps at first. Worried that perhaps Tarek had brought dangerous company, or that he'd dropped the ocarina and lost it and moved on. Holly took off sprinting through the woods again, headed in the direction she last heard the ocarina's tune.

When she came to a small clearing in the woods, she found Tarek. It was certainly good to see him again, and even better to see he had brought with him no weapons (that were visible) and no suspicious humans. When Holly approached him from the shadows of the trees, she took a whiff of the air that surrounded him. There were many new, strange smells on him now. A mix of things that Holly didn't have the vocabulary to recognize or identify. She approached.

"You did not bring any weapons..." She stated. Idly, she began to pull some twigs and leaves from her hair with one hand, while with her other she wiped the dirt from her fur. "Tell me, did you find the information you were seeking? Certainly you found it!" Holly found her excitement was growing with each minute she spent breathing his unfamiliar scents. She wanted to grab his hand and drag him deep into the forest. However, she simply stood in front of him with her tail wrapping around one of her legs as she stared at him with bright, curious eyes. She was hoping that he'd respond that he found the answers and that he'd be with her in the forest, so as to keep her company so she'd never be lonely again...

But who was she kidding? Tarek said he couldn't live in the forest like she could. That probably meant he didn't eat flowers or scratched his ears on tree bark either. They were so different, it got Holly to thinking, to thinking that if only he were a faun, or she were a human. Things would be so different.

"You came back like you said you would!"