Something sniffed and nibbled on my fingers. I swatted it away and immediately regretted the action as the movement pulled on my injuries. I groaned and heard several other creatures—probably a nest of mice—skitter away. Everything hurt. Ached, even where I didn’t have wounds from the bane pack. The fall down the waterfall and sleeping on cold, hard rock hadn’t been kind. A dull, throbbing headache pulsed from the back of my head and when I used my good arm to reach back and pressed on it, the skin felt tender. I didn’t feel any fresh blood seeping from my wounds, but I didn’t attribute the fact that I hadn’t bled out in my sleep to good luck.

My mark burned, much as it had when my foot got infected. The goddess’s gaze was like the brush of pine needles against my skin, but She didn’t turn Her head and let Her gaze fully consume me. This time, though, I couldn’t simply lie down and waste away until I was given the correct treatment. Fellen and I needed to reach the Statue Garden, so we could get our supplies back and reach Grislander’s Maw before the cold season came. There wasn’t time to heal. I would simply have to press on until there was.

Fellen stirred as I rolled onto my stomach and pushed myself up into a sitting position. It was slow going. My whole body felt weak and wobbly, and protested the movement. Fellen groaned as she sat up, no doubt she felt nearly as sore as I did, but it took her half the time it took me. Thankfully, it seemed she wasn’t on the verge of stepping into the Silver Forest like me. Once she sat up, she snapped her fingers to create a flicker of light and saw me struggling. Fellen yelped before recovering herself and creating another brief flash of light.

She let out a breath and reached over to help me finish sitting up. “You looked like a shamble man.”

I tried to protest her help, but she ignored me. Once I was sitting upright, I asked, “How are you doing?”

“Everything hurts or feels stiff, but I can manage. You?”

It hurt to think and I didn’t have the energy to sweeten my words. “I should be dead. If you can walk, we should keep going.”

Several seconds crept by before Fellen spluttered, “W-what?”

“My mark.”

I worked to get myself standing as she processed what I was saying. Even though all I could see was pitch blackness, it felt like the room spun, and I collapsed back to my knees a couple times before Fellen gathered herself enough to make another flame and help me up. She grunted with the effort, but she was more stable than me. I could also tell she wanted to ask questions.

“Just walk.”

“But—”

The headache flared. “Fellen. Walk while I still can.”

We followed the river as it flowed from the waterfall’s pool and deeper into the caverns. Occasionally, Fellen would light up the area around us, but between holding me up and trying to keep pressure on her hip, she didn’t have enough hands to do it constantly. We mainly went by edging slowly forward and listening to the river. Some of our wounds opened up a little from the movement, like the claw marks on Fellen’s hip. Hers bled, mine didn’t.

Fellen noticed the difference during our first break. She pointed to the claw marks on my back, the bit of smoldering moss we found providing a dim glow of light. “You’re not bleeding even though your scabs tore.”

I kept drinking from the river without saying anything.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

Unable to drink anymore without feeling like I might throw up, I carefully turned and answered her. “If I bled anymore, I’d die. So I don’t.”

Her eyes widened. “So its true then? Your mark really doesn’t let you die?”

“If it didn’t, you would have woken up next to a corpse.”

She swallowed hard. “I’m glad that didn’t happen.”

I gave her a small, tight smile. “Me too.”

Blessed silence, only broken by the sound of the river, took over then as we rested. It was odd not knowing whether it was night or day outside, and I didn’t like that we could no longer tell how long we’d been in Flickermark. But the silence of the caves was preferable to getting chased down by a bane pack. We only rested for a short while before we decided it was time to keep going.

The more we walked the more the time blurred together to me. My focus narrowed from trying to pay attention to what was around us to making sure I wasn’t leaning all of weight onto Fellen to feeling so lightheaded and weak that it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other. I might not die, but that didn’t mean the state my body was in was much better.

I didn’t understand when Fellen stopped walking. I didn’t think it was time for a break and, even if it was, I doubted I could make my body take another step if we stopped. But Fellen didn’t move when I tried to keep walking, and without the forward momentum to keep me going, my legs gave out. That broke Fellen out of her trance long enough for her to scramble to catch me, so I got slightly bruised knees to add to my collection of injuries, rather than extremely bruised.

“Why did you stop?” I had to pitch my voice louder to be heard over how loud the river had gotten. It made my head pound.

Fellen gestured in front of us, awe filling her voice. “Look.”

It was only then that I realized that the cave was no longer pitch black and the light was the wrong color and too sustained to be Fellen’s flickers of flame. A soft, blue-white glow filtered down from the ceiling to light up the area around us. I lifted my head slowly and looked up.

The night sky stretched out above us, but much too close and not quite right. The stars seemed shifted in their positions to how I was used to seeing them, but I was too out of it and not strong enough with the constellations to know for certain. We were in a large cavern. The stars shone down on—not just our river, like I expected, but five others. The spray and thundering noise filling the air suddenly made sense. Each river had a simple arch of stone arching over it like a bridge, and they all poured into a hole in the middle of the floor, creating a large waterfall. Possibly the one Fellen had heard through the rock before we were set upon by the bane pack. A breeze drifted by. The whole cavern was simple and beautiful, and wholly unexpected.

We sat there for long minutes, taking it all in, before Fellen pointed again. She brought her lips close to my ear to be heard. “There’s a pathway under the twin stars!”

I looked at where she pointed and saw that she was right. Across two rivers to our left, under where the fake twin stars shone, was the entrance to a pathway. Given how it was marked, chances were that it would at least lead us back above ground, which would be a start to finding our way again if Fellen recognized any of the constellations we could see at where we ended up. The twin stars were one of the main tools we used to mark our way. But I wasn’t certain I could walk over two of the slippery looking bridges without falling in.

Nor did a part of me trust the marked pathway. It…wasn’t like the goddess to be so helpful. The trouble was, I also didn’t see any other way to go unless we followed one of the other rivers upstream, and there was no guarantee that they didn’t have at least one more waterfall like ours did. Given the lack of good options, I gave into Fellen’s insistence that we at least try the marked pathway. I was still struggling to stand back up, so we could make our way over to it, when I saw the shamble man. Fellen felt me freeze, but before she could grumble at me to keeping trying, it was my turn to point. Her gaze followed the line of my finger before she froze as well.

The shamble man had lurched into the cavern on the other side of the river to our left. All that lay between us was forty or fifty feet and the river itself—and if it wanted to cross that the stone bridge was only another thirty or so feet down the river. We watched in silence as the creature shambled forward. It was impossible to tell if it was the same one we encountered before, or a new one, but I didn’t care for it either way. We didn’t have the stamina to flee from it this time.

Or at least I didn’t. Fellen might be able to get away if she left me behind.

The shamble man shuffled forward so that it was parallel with us and Fellen and I held our breath—terrified that it would notice us, but it kept going without even a pause. The breeze blew by again, blowing my hair in the direction of the waterfall. The shamble man reached the bridge it could cross to reach us, but again it ignored it, and kept going straight. We watched as the shamble man kept heading for the waterfall. The shamble man didn’t pause when it reached the lip of the circle before it stepped off the ledge. We choked back screams as the shamble man didn’t simply plummet from view, but instead appeared to float in the air, before making a lurching turn and slowly disappeared below the circle’s edge. Fellen and I shared a look before we both scrambled to our feet—adrenaline giving me the push I needed. We walked toward the waterfall as fast we could before we slowed the closer we got the edge. An image of the shamble man popping its head over the edge right when we went to look over it played through my head.

Fellen held onto me as I gingerly leaned over to look. She refused to be the one do it even though she was faring somewhat better than me. The shamble man didn’t pop out and attack me. Instead I saw a pathway with a waist high lip spiraling around the edge of the circle. It started just below where the shamble man had stepped off the edge of the circle and continued underneath the waterfall arcs from the rivers. By the time we got to the circle, the shamble man was about to disappear behind the last waterfall on the right side of the circle.

I turned back to Fellen and had to shout at her to tell her what I saw. It made my headache pound more, but I pushed through to add, “We should follow it!”

Fellen gave me an incredulous look.

I gave her an exasperated one back. “The Statue Garden is the Grove! It knows where to go!”

I saw her put the pieces together. The Statue Garden was full of shamble men and they had to get there somehow. Now that we were trying to get there instead of just trying to leave Flickermark, it stood to reason that we could follow the shamble man to the Statue Garden. Fellen swallowed hard before nodding.

She looked longing at the twin star pathway after she helped me across the river bridge before resolutely turning toward the circle of waterfalls. When we reached the hidden pathway, we had to sit on the ledge and lower ourselves down the three foot drop. We didn’t have the shamble man’s height or disregard for accidentally pitching ourselves over the edge.

After the third time I slipped on the wet path and nearly took Fellen down with me, I opted for the indignity of crawling and sliding down the path on my butt. My legs were ready to collapse on me again at that point too. Fellen joined me in my method when we went under the waterfalls, and kept as close to the wall as possible, but otherwise walked—so she could keep an eye out for the shamble man. It wasn’t difficult for us to keep a good distance behind it, and it never once paused or turned around. I hoped our luck held.

The path didn’t go all way down to where the waterfalls fell below. The rock the circle was carved into was about twice as tall as the bluffs back at Gabbler Shore before it stopped and the rivers free fell into a dark, wide open space. Fellen and I eyed the drop, somewhat worried that we had assumed wrong and the shamble man had pitched himself off the path into the dark space below in the end, but when we reached the bottom the path led through an archway and into the rock.

The archway was of a woman, tall and elegant, leaning against the wall in a simple dress and staring with an amused smile into the abyss below. On the other side was the same woman, kneeling and blinded by a cloth, reaching with outstretched hands toward the stars above and tears streaming down her cheeks. On the top of the archway were two simple, carved eyes.

“The goddess always watches.” It was eerie to see the scene even as I felt the goddess’s averted gaze brushing over me and the burn of my mark. Fellen didn’t hear me, but I saw her murmur the same before she helped me stand and walk through the archway.