I'm not getting any better at my inactivity, for which I apologize to the both of you that are still active (Kirsten and Yi-wen). This is not yet dead; if it gets worse, expect a quick plot twist to use as a reason to cap this one off and start a sequel instead. Otherwise, I have absolutely no qualms against progressing with only us three, and whomever comes back.

= Joseph Faust =

"What in the hells was that?" Tryfan asked it frantically, fear and the frustration of being almost entirely inept against our most recent threat. I had to admit that the feelings rushing through my mind were not any less fierce, or straining, or frantic.

"The Fae," I breathed with force, water dribbling down my lips from our encounter, "know her." I wheezed violently as a bit of grimy water was expelled, tinted in the slightest red.

"How? What does this mean?" Tryfan asked, accompanied by an equal glance from Sara, expecting an answer of sorts.

I was fretful. I could not give them any answer that would be satisfying. "All I know is that they called her zhila; they may have even revered her in a way. Beyond this, I know nothing." I paused momentarily, and then turned to Lily, and asked her as a relief for the others. "What do you recommend we do Lily?"

She tugged at the hem of her shirt in a way that reminded me of Hela, striking me with the thought of where the fire child had disappeared to. She had the same sort of greasy feel about her, Lily did; had Hela rubbed off on her? She proceeded to respond, however hesitantly, "She came through the water..." It was all she could say, and in only a whisper. Had this threat shattered her enthusiasm so much? And then I realized... I was shivering, and not just from being drenched. It had crushed my own faith also.

I collapsed gently to my knees, grimacing slightly as the bruises met with hewn stone. "I have no plans." I told them all this, with some regret, and Sara frowned slightly.

To all of our luck, for it seemed we were growing closer as a team, Tryfan suggested, "The water, yes!" I eyed him warily at this revelation, fighting for all the will in me to suppress what I could so easily let slip to the surface in this moment of anxiety.

They must not know, yes, there was strategy coming to me. I had a feeling of dread, and the voice inside me asked, "Oh, back to your old ways so soon, Joseph? Letting yourself be exactly the bastard you've become, you are." The voice made the most of mechanical nicety, pronouncing perfectly on each syllable, and for all I could hear depicting my thoughts to a tee. I could feel that old hatred rising in me, and I fought back the words. The voice stated simply, "It gave you power." I cringed.

"Jo-" Sara stumbled and then managed to trip herself in midsentence, concealing her last syllable in a liquid-hampered splutter. "Mathias? Are you alright?" I snapped out of my reverie, and noticed that I was drenched further. I had been sweating, and my head was pressed to the chilled rock. I made attempt to recover, and said, "Just these wounds. I will be alright."

I saw with my peripheral vision that Tryfan would have none of these "wounds." He saw something in me, he could feel my weakness like he could feel the stones beneath us and the vines crawling stealthily. Never before I had met Tryfan had I considered the question, "When a tree kills in a forest, does it make a sound?" Now that question came to me like cold ice water gnashing over my teeth, frigid were my bones and my body. I was, in all respects, entirely spent; I could not stay weak like this. The worst case scenario would come to fruition if I fell to weakness- this watery enchantress- was it inevitable? And I knew it then, just as father time might know when the hourglass will stop pouring, that it would come. The day would arrive when they would know. I clenched my teeth at the thought.

"As I was saying," Tryfan said, with an honest sweetness and compassion for all of our condition, "we must avoid 'water' as if it were the plague. It is obviously part of her power." His words came to me with a broiling nausea, and I stood, swaying. I realized again that tone in his voice, and that look of pity in Sara's eyes, and that... charity... and I could scarcely suppress the desire to vomit the bird's pickings that I had eaten over the course of the last several days. Just to stain that oddly smooth stone... to create a blotch of wretched puke on that surface and to defile it would make me so satisfied. All the better, to get rid of the sickness entirely, and reassume the poise that my person usually exerted. I could not stand being on the receiving end of weakness. It made my confidence in myself drop remarkably, and my will to survive push all the harder to make up for it. I was obviously frailer than I thought, and though the group had not seen how finicky I had been eating- where they had their fill I had fallen into malnourishment.

"So I was saying," Tryfan repeated with no further patience, "she seems to get her power from the waters."

"Of course she does," I snapped. "She is the River! She brought us here! When we drowned and entered this world, it was her all along? Could you see it!? Could you not see that gorgeous temper, and the glory of the waves in her eyes? She was a walking storm... an awakened beast."

Sara trotted gently across the stones, and approached with some caution. I could tell by just her step that she had all her own person back. Her mind was again full, and I was gladdened of it. The gray of my mind, however, darkened the stage so that only the faint song of the nightingale called me back to her. My senses were at the same time brightened, and I could not understand this place anymore than I could existence. Sara caressed my shoulder, and then both, with finesse enough to make a small shock of pleasure tingle through me; I allowed her to do so for a moment, before she chose a good a time as possible to draw away from me.

"I don't think she will come back this night." Tryfan said, with some doubt, but not so much that the suggestion sounded senseless.

"You're probably right," Sara added, and I nodded quietly in assent.

"We stay here then." I uttered it with such a finality, and equal banality. I moved away from the two of them towards the cave mouth, and snapped two of the branches of the unperturbed alder sapling with ease. They were brittle to my touch, as sinewy as they should have been in a growing plant. I could smell Tryfan's wince at the plant's pain from here, and the insides of my heads flared with brimstone and fire, and I felt a small and otherwise unnoticed cackle emit from my lips. There was a quality of this new and terrible world that caught my amusement, snagged it with derision, and tossed it around. I could only join in this helpless metaphorical jig. I felt it all, quite suddenly... a new foe amongst it all. I drew in the fragrance and nodded again and again, until I was so certain.

"Here we are," I stated, approaching the other three with my head down and my hair a mangled mess over my scalp; it obscured my eyes.

"You are going to start a fire?" Lily muttered it so naively then, and further uttered, "With sticks?"

I uncharacteristically tossed one branch to the side, and looked at her with a single feral eye. It glinted, so briefly, in the moonlight. I threw back my head with the same gesture that had seen the branch to strike the cave wall at my left. I guffawed with some meter to it, rhythmic in the sort of way that the gnawing of flesh is.

"Aren't I?"

"Lily would- er, I would think so," mumbled Lily.

No one had the perception enough to follow my motion as I reached for the metal warfan that had clattered to the floor some time ago, when she had been here. It was fluid movement; it was as water.

"Our group doesn't want to be cold, does it?" The question was ambiguous in the face of a hunter. For it was, suddenly, predator and prey. The chase.

"Oh, of course not..." and I flicked my wrist nimbly, sending the metal fan careening towards "Lily." She could hardly see its iron shape in the flickering brightness of the cave, nor could she sidestep quickly enough. It was not that time froze, no, not at all. It was that everyone besides myself was far too sluggish. Sara gasped at a speed that made me scoff mentally. Tryfan drew back, horrified, but I heeded not to this, nor could the fan. It was a weapon meant to hurt. And hurt it would. She would most certainly bleed, and I would strike with unerring accuracy.

"But you aren't part of the group..." Oh, no, she most certainly was not. I had been studying her, her maneuvering, and her poise, and her scent. She was just off, and I knew this was not Lily. I did not know what happened to Lily. If this "creature" was impersonating her, she could very likely be dead. The thought was sobering, but not appalling.

And I finished coolly, with an inflection that instead suggested murderous fury. "Are you?" There was a delicious and most ghastly "slice" as weapon connected with victim. As it nearly embedded in shoulder bone, but instead scraped it away with a blow boasting razor teeth. There before us stood a shifter, a gray-skinned woman with mucky hair and a mouth gaping wide in what had not yet reached anyone's ears in the silence that pervaded my reflexes. It was the precursor, this silent mouthing.

Then, time came back to itself and her savage scream echoed gruesomely off the walls of the grotto.

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Oiyg is brutally injured, but only on the shoulder, and is still capable of fleeing with some difficulty. It is equally possible for her to be captured before she can return to Eleiamae, defeated, and find the stone statue that she has become.