[center][h2][b]Ophelia[/b][/h2][/center]

It was with an eerie stillness that Ophelia had gone about her business in the Dream before returning to the Waking World, her face mostly blank and expressionless as she went into the shop and retrieved another Bulward for Farren, as he'd asked. She immediately handed it off to the little ones, returned outside, and conferred with everyone just enough for them to agree on their plan and execute it. Ophelia didn't hand Bulwark off straight away, though, just giving Farren a slight smile and a nod as greeting as they went on their way. During the walk she mostly seemed to focus on navigating and getting lost in her thoughts--about how, when it came to it, the only things she really had left of either of the two lives she'd lived was knowledge and now the runebrand... and how when things had gotten tense and those two things had felt called into question she'd crumbled almost immediately. With how much they'd done and how much they'd learned it was easy to forget that they'd woken up transformed scarcely three hours ago--and she let some darkly prideful self-flagellating feelings go after examining them for what they were. She was permitted, she thought, to have those moments of personal crisis given the circumstances. There was no alternative: the fraying fabric of the life she'd had before the treatment was gone, and this was all she had now. She would have to forge herself a new identity to reconcile the parts of her that still ached with grief and loss, to find who she wanted to be and what she wanted to put herself to... to find whatever purpose had drawn her into the Dream in the first place, she supposed. 

Farren's sudden line of inquiry broke her from her reverie, and she paid close attention to it. It all seemed rather ghastly, though Gerlinde was cheerful enough when recounting it that Ophelia reckoned that her suffering had been buried very deeply indeed to permit her such levity. The seeming lack of empathy did weigh on Ophelia's mind heavily, but it paled before the welcoming embrace of conviviality that only two practicioners of the arcane could have... and it was useful to have someone blindly attacking things with no regard for their safety, it turned out. The thing that intrigued her the most was [i]why[/i] Farren had asked, though, and she waited diligently for his response to begin to piece it together in her mind before she opined verbally.