"What's that?" Ned asks, craning his neck in response to the mysterious voice floating about his head. He doesn't see the woman right away, thinks he's perhaps gone mad and has begun imagining voices (he'd started to, down in the dungeons). When his gaze finally lands on the young woman with hair the color of copper and flame, there's something like relief that washes over his face. It's a person, it's a person who's spoken to him - not the shadows that had amassed in the darkness of the dungeon. He might still be mad for all he knows, but at least it isn't absolute. Not yet.

"I didn't think anything would -" He considers the fountain again for a silent moment; maybe there had been a silent prayer, sent up and out to the Old Gods (could they hear him here? find him?), about the rest of his family. Maybe he'd thought about it, realized it'd be selfish to demand their existence here - not for their own sake, but for his own loneliness and fragility. Maybe he had found his way back towards the fountain in the hopes that .. "What's it work like, then?" he asks, glancing at her from over the hill of his shoulder.