He had never heard of any of this. The Reaches he knew was the sky, and even then, no one he'd ever encountered called it that. It was simply what the word made him think of. The Great Break seemed like a place trolls would avoid, which might explain his lack of knowledge of it. But not to have heard the name even once seemed strange. Trolls wandered by nature, not forever, of course, but when you were as large as they were, living communally was not easy. Most spent several years finding a territory to call their own and slowly gathered a family around them. It left very little of their world unexplored, insofar as he knew, anyway. If trolls made maps, which they admittedly didn't do, most would have been able to place, approximately, the forests and rivers and large lakes and mountains and edges that marked their world. All the landmarks were there in the stories they'd shared when they crossed paths and the steps they'd taken themselves. 

WIlhelm's brow furrowed further as his thoughts mired themselves about this notion of new land. He was old enough now to have learned a great deal about where he lived, and he knew he had not walked nearly far enough to find anywhere that no troll had found. Still, he did not interrupt the full answer to his question. He understood that there was a pattern to the way a conversation began. When trolls argued, legends said the earth shook, though Wilhelm understood only that too many deep voices at once made everything unintelligible. Hap had no such problem, but the troll afforded him the respect he should have for offering knowledge. Besides which, awake enough to listen did not promise he was awake enough to be coherent, and he found himself struggling to make sense of everything he was told. 

Light did not live in a house, she was too bright and sharp to be limited to any particular space. And he did not like the idea of his Mother being held within walls as though she had some definite shape. In truth, the only part of the answer he understood was the practicality of catching food that would otherwise go to waste. But he had to answer the question put to him before he could continue his own rickety learning. He was not even sure he was aware enough to remember this later. "I was walking until I could walk no more." A low note rattled in his throat as though death was trying to escape as he spoke traditional words in a tense they were not meant for. You did not tell someone you [i]had[/i] been walking until you could not, because there would be no breath in your lungs to speak, no flesh on your bones and no spirit to recognise the question in the first place. You'd be dead, and the dead had no use for words. You told them that you would be, or you were. "I should not be here, but I think Mother called me."

The words slurred heavily, each background grumble of emphasis or added meaning mixing them further, and he said more than he'd originally thought to. "Why do you keep her there like that? She does not like it, she shines too brightly for living with. She has forgotten the kindness she tried so hard to learn."