Oh my... I haven't posted for this long? Lordy.

= Joseph Faust =

We found the cave Tryfan suggested with little difficulty. With a simple manner of speaking, he managed to beseech the sapling guardian at its mouth to move to the side. The two of them shared a strange similarity... as if they knew something. I hadn't an idea what it was, and I hardly desired to know. They trials of the last several days had been more than enough.

Lily, admittedly, had giggled profusely when Tryfan had talked to the tree; he had pretended to keep himself upright, tall and manly, but I saw red come to his cheeks. She couldn't quite explain it, just as she had difficulty explaining what had happened at Hela's home. She merely voiced something similar to "Hela merely wanted to be alone. I needed to catch up to all of you, too!" She was lively, cheerful, and light-hearted through it all; even when it began to drizzle briefly again, she merely guffawed at the rains, and danced. It was lifting to have such an optimist with us, and I thought I saw Sara's eyes flash with a bit of spirit again during Lily's escapades. It was still a little awkward to have her with us again, but there were few qualms about it amongst the group; I believed this strange feeling to be nothing more than a product of her leaving our presence for a time.

The cave was not uncomfortable, to say the very least of it. The floors were smooth and polished, unlike any natural cavern I had previously witnessed. It was almost entirely circular, a wonder of erosion and the formation of rock, with a small pool (no more than five paces in diameter) at its center. I must say this particular source of water made it difficult to start a fire, and so we huddled in the larger back end of the cave, which was more or less convenient.

I could hear strange trickling sounds in the walls the whole of the time, I imagined some larger force of water- possibly an underground stream. We were now on the edge of the mountains, as this cave was.

They were not towering, as they had seemed, but were actually relatively short. Climbing them would not be profusely difficult, and it was likely that it would not be hard to find a pass that was neither cool nor rough in demeanor. Our quest, though we were still not entirely sure where it was we were going, seemed to be coming more and more to fruition. I could only muse that this water must be connected, somehow, to the ancient river, the one that might send us home. That was what I told myself, and as the four of us sat around a meek fire (for it was quite warm), we muttered a few scattered comments about home; we had a new appreciation for it, truly, the land from which we had come, but I had my doubts. My face, and the edges of my consciousness assured me that I did want to go home. My subconscious, however, and the confines of my thoughts doubted this proposition. They doubted, also, that I was even to survive here. There was a deep-seated cynicism there, but there was also something much darker. A secret, I feared with each moment, might bring itself into being. Then no longer would I be just a deceiver to them, just a reserved but still kind man, but rather... It was not a sound idea to dwell on it, I finally decided.

Lily was more reclusive than she had been after our initial talk, and she seemed to like her time out of the limelight (more than surprisingly). We were not at all abashed, however, to allow her to revel in a little shyness. We had no doubt that she would be back again in full swing. It was only a matter of time.

Time was wearing away this day, too. Night had come again, and we were all less than restless; we hadn't the sense to immediately think to assign watches, but Lily merrily volunteered. I told her to wake me when she finished. We all rested, ungracefully, in a pile of clothes and lichen. Lily sat quietly on a rock, pretending not to be uncomfortable, and this sight was enough to allow me to float lazily into the dream world.

=

It dripped keenly down my hands, and pattered quietly onto the dirt. I stared aghast at it, and quailed in fear. "Keep calm, cool..." I muttered in my head. It was far from the time, and the insides of my head could only scream in utter terror. What had I done!? My freedom was surely gone now. What had I done!? What had I done!?

=

Cold sweat, tingling across my back and chest. Musk flitted to my nostrils and I cringed in the heat of my dreams; it was only a dream... or was it a memory? I had suppressed my inner emotions with such purpose that I scarcely knew. I could only sit, and shake, and watch the crackling fire. Lily saw none of my pain, and I was glad that I had not feigned hellish surprise in my sleep. Dreams... they let us escape to a world all our own- the world inside my mind was not one I cherished. They only served to expose us, and I would have none of it. It was not with immodesty or without true passion that I told myself that I would never allow myself to see into that world again. Never. For if I looked too far, I would tumble into the pit, and as the echo of my scream rang out in the gloom- I looked at my companions- they would know.

Lily rose from her seat, and I distracted my disheartened mind with her movements. She walked carefully and deliberately towards the pool, and there should stood and gazed into the pool. For a moment, I swore that from my position at the side of her I could see the reflection of a woman with gray skin and mudded white locks. Then it disappeared, and Lily frowned with impunity. I discarded the image immediately. It was only a hallucination from beyond, likely, some ruse made by angles and light.

I waited for some time longer, not falling asleep until Lily gently tapped my shoulder, seeing I was awake with surprise. "Well, hello silly," she muttered. She leaned against one of the cavern walls, with her eyes trained towards Tryfan's sleeping form, and closed her lids gently.

=

Drip… drip… my countenance was eerily panicked as my eyelids fluttered open again. I realized that I had fallen asleep, tragically, during my assigned watch. I cursed myself gently, and suddenly realized that I had little to fear. What was it about this night, suddenly that had me so jilted? And then I looked at the pool, and the insides of my stomach did a somersault. I watched a single drop coalesce upon its side, and furthermore, go tumbling an incomprehensible distance downward and strike what sounded like rock with a gentle drip. I marveled, and I drew back, before bolting to standing position. Then I saw it for its true form.

It was a set of aquan stairs, so elegant and so well formed that my eyes glazed over with sadness towards their watery beauty; I was almost sickened by the solid surface, which was not ice, but rather water in such a magical form that it held itself up without the aid of any science. I eyed it with no suspicion, for it had me utterly dumbstruck. The staircase led a steep path downward into where the pool had been, into a pit, and suddenly the rushing of an underground stream came to my ears. It was a gentle flow, archaic in rhythm, but I was ensorcelled. Each beat of its current I felt, and each beat of my heart was felt by it. It was wondrous, and my heart was a flutter with the surreal quality of it all. And then I saw it, and I quivered with fright.

A shadowed form moved up the steps in the slowest motion, fluid like the water it traversed, and shadowed. The cave was dark, and a single ray was all that fell on the pool. This moonlight illuminated it in gorgeous details, but the steps below were all but uncharacteristic in the light. The movements of the figure were lithe and seductive, almost, even of this night crawling beast. It was humanoid in shape, but that was all that there was to say of it. There was a quality of its step, that light and happy smashing motion that pressed my mind into cogs which crushed it with alacrity; it was utterly wrong and I felt nauseated by the power in those limbs.

It was a long staircase, and though little time had passed, it felt like a singular century by the time I could bring my trembling, chapped lips to make out several syllables. “Who comes?”

There was no answer, but I could have sworn the shadow creature’s “face” curled into what looked like a wicked smirk. All the color was torn out of my face in that moment, like it had been ripped from it by a savage animal, steel incisors clamping down upon my skull and crushing it. I could have warned the others, but I knew doing so would only anger it. I could have tried to do so without speaking, but I knew this humanoid, she, as it became suddenly apparent to me, would not have it and would notice this movement immediately. I felt like her mind contained my mind, and I had not even heard her speak. It felt as if for every action I had considered, every strategy I could think of… she had thought of it, and tossed it away with the finesse of an acrobat, and only the slightest of wrist movements. She exuded such glorious sadism that my deeds, as hideous as they were in civilized society, seemed like nothing this black lady could have done.

Each second passed with suspense, and I both rejoiced and was disgusted in the time that it took for her to mount the stairs and reach the position where she was clearly visible. I longed for it, to see her, but I also knew that in that walk was death.

And then it happened, and my body was seized and clamped, and torn into by a steel vice grip of metal vivacity. My expression was utterly vapid, and the fan I had readied subconsciously fell from my hand and clattered loudly on the floor of the cavern. I regained myself, but the effect was done, and though I would hardly bow to it, this was the true iron maiden.

All the parts of her being were layered with the subtlety of an icy lance plunged into the stomach of some unlucky soldier. Her obsidian, slate, hair flowed like icicles from the crown of her head, for she was royalty. Her eyes were dark blue, that furled and unfurled like a sea, relentless, and a river of pain drilled into my consciousness. Looking at her was an effort, and I felt the need to turn away for reasons I could not rightly fathom. She dwarfed me, even, and was no less than six feet in height, with all the towering magnitude of a giantess. She was lithe and so fair it burned my pale skin, white as the maggots that crawled about carrion, and just as maddening. She was the utter impression of a lady, and was beyond it, a queen of such fine nature that the room itself seemed to fall away to make space for her. Her wrists looked like the flick of them could kill a man, but she past this telltale sign she seemed almost frail; it was duly hidden just how easily she could wring your neck. She was bold, as her face was, with ears that accentuated the mark of an elf of some sort; they were not dramatically pointed, but it was there, and it only further increased the mythical aura about her person. She smiled with all the draw of a shark, biting into your skin with those incisors, slightly pointed, so keenly white that the embroidery of the same color about her robes looked yellow. It was a face, so flawless and unmarred that it seemed she was perpetually impossible to injure in some normal way. The black robes that covered her left quite little to the imagination as they were so form-fitting, a form with voluptuous curves and her feet were shod in the oddest white leather sandals. There was a lustrous pearl embedded in her forehead, I noticed as her hair was swept away, and then the true meaning of her countenance hit me. The expression was so effortlessly grim, and the very malice of a thunderhead covered the whole of her person. She bore into me with those fiendish blue eyes, my own stare locked and I felt my resistance shatter, and her hand began to raise skyward, and then fall. She then threw her arms to the heavens, and yelled with glee, shouting there and to the ground in a voice amplified and mechanical at the same time. The power of what seemed Satan breathed behind each syllable, as she screamed in the beautiful pitch of a water nymph. And then I realized that it was not words, but a glorious cackle, and then her features fell and settled on the awakening group. She manipulated the waters of the stairs, and they disappeared, and then danced about her in concentric circles. She threw her hands out, and the very force of a wall of water bound all of us to the cave wall.

She did not pause to speak, but merely began to choke us with each of the movements of her wrist. I began to drown as water poured into my lungs, and I saw the others in a similar situation. Though we managed to fall somewhat down the wall, and wriggle to a point where an actual battle was likely, she did not maintain her concentration long enough for us to get into a battle stance. She merely wheezed suddenly, choked, and I could not help but revel in it, to see her harmed; she pointed a single finger at Lily, and I knew not of her reasons, and uttered contemptibly with a cough, “The marshes will boil! The waters will churn!” Then, speaking to all of us at once, she articulated in a soft tone. “Death will come swiftly to all of you, for you may never escape when I am near; I am the universal conduit. Heed my warning, for it was never meant to be given.” She spluttered, and the pool gathered again as the power of her waters dropped. She gave one last leer, so wicked that I cringed in it, and then dissolved into the water with a splash.

The only thought that could run through my mind was thus: it was she. They had told me, the Fae. I now knew.

Zhila. She… is.

And then I realized... if she was the river, could we still go home? My last hope died.

=====