The door opened from the other side.
The world around them heaved like the land was breathing, bridging two impossible distances, but Nimeda pulled back, and like the wild abandon of a waterfall leap everything sped to rearrange itself. She deposited them nimbly in the surroundings of her own choice.
The suspended doorway opened now, not to Tristan’s cottage or to Ice Land, but to the scooping basin of land from which she had come.
Such maneuverings passed in a blink. She went to grab for his hand before she recalled what he was, and reared back as if expecting to be stung. Or perhaps bitten. Not from fear so much as a brief flicker of disappointment that swept away to leave a pause of confusion in its wake -- much as she sometimes remembered on the cusp of action that the grimnir did not care for her affectionate manner either. By the wide guilelessness of her eyes, she was unsure of her reception.
“Vánagandr,” she murmured to herself, like a talisman. Her bare toes scrunched in the scrubby grass. Out of consideration for the discomfort he had shown before, she thought the sleek fall of her wet dress to an appearance of dryness, though it felt no different to her. For a moment her scarred palm curled over the reminder of a small pebble, and it’s weight spread her through with calm. But Noctua could not help with this; his was a realm too human, and he would not understand -- or if he did it would not move him, just as her distress over the Wheel’s new turning did not move him. When her hand opened again, the stone was vanished safe once more.
“I think you are the only one who will understand.”