Hineni wanders through the deep forest alone, simply unable to tell if it is night or day. The heavy, looming boughs of the trees hang heavily over his head. Their thick, old branches hold an interconnected crown aloft that is so thick and dense that to see beyond it is a simple impossibility.

He’s tried starting a fire with his ash-magic in order to burn his way through to the sky. But the leaves and the wood are so rich and moist that the hottest sparks that he can produce simply don’t ignite into flames.

“— Bunch of wobbly-woo,” mutters Hineni to himself, wandering towards where he vaguely assumes north to be.

The least the frog-god could have done would have been to bring him back, since he'd been kidnapped all the way down to the south. But no, he has to walk.

Hineni sighs, standing still.

His eyes rise up towards the canopy, and he thinks.

Why haven’t any of the others come for him? Rhine? Obscura? Sockel? They’ve always come to find him when this stuff happens.

He stands there, staring at the odd crown of leaves rustling together. Their thousands of individual silhouettes mesh together like an unentangleable bundle of matted, greasy hair.

Do they not know where he is? That’s possible, right?

Hineni keeps on walking as the forest rustles around him with the whisper of many excitedly shaking leaves.

Sure, they live on the edge of a war-zone and all. It’s possible that anyone who thinks he went missing would point fingers at the elves first. They live right next door, after all.

The south, the deep south, where he is – this is further away. The territory of the big-frog… How many days or weeks away is this by cart? How many months is it away from his people by foot?

— Sure, they’d think of the frogs eventually and think to look for him at the pond of the big-frog and, if she could, Obscura would have done so already, or?

Surely the owl-god can just… fly there, over the forest? It wouldn’t take a day, and if he’s been told the truth, he’s been gone for four now.

Or can she not do that?

Hineni rubs the back of his head.

How does Obscura’s power even stack up to the big-frog’s? It’s never been put to the test, has it?

Maybe she’s not strong enough to fly through all of this to reach him?

After all, if she was, then she wouldn’t have spent all of this time collecting power.

That means that, even if she knows that he is here, the owl-god can’t get to him while he’s in the overpowering domain of the frog-god.

Hineni sighs in relief.

That means he hasn’t been abandoned.

— He’s just somewhere unreachable this time.

The whispering voice in the back of his head dissipates as he shakes it off and keeps walking.

Would Nekyia let him walk through here by himself if it wasn’t safe?

It is later, he thinks. It’s hard to say. The forest all looks the same, and when you walk, it all kind of looks like it did a minute ago. With nobody to talk to or to focus on, time gets… weird.

But he recalls all of the horrific stories of things here and there that scour these woods, especially this deep down in the south — incomprehensible, strange, horrific things.

Hineni sees nothing of the sort.

Surely Nekyia, in her odd insistence on kidnapping instead of murdering him, wouldn’t send him out into the wilds here to get eaten on his way back?

He looks around the area and shrugs, deciding to keep walking for a while.

He could use a bite to eat. But, well, that’s life.

— The forest whispers.

This is very unusual for a forest to be doing, of course.

Hineni narrows his eyes, watching the trees that are speaking elvish as he walks, getting ready to snap his fingers at something.

He should have enough soul-points left for a few spells.

It’s definitely nighttime now.

He can tell because of how cold it's gotten.

Hineni grabs a stick, trying to set it alight, but the spell doesn’t catch. The wood here in this part of the forest is just too wet and damp to even start smoldering a little.

The man sighs, tossing it over his shoulder and into the underbrush.

Barring the odd power-nap, he hasn’t slept in days.

Sleeping in the presence of the big-frog was, of course, not really something he wanted to do. She’s creepy and weird and would probably either touch him or eat him in his sleep, likely both at the same time.

His vision wobbles.

Hineni stares off into the forest. It’s whispering to him again. He doesn’t really like what it has to say. It has a very negative disposition.

— Sleeping here doesn’t seem like a great plan either, though.

How many days has he been mostly awake for? Is it… five?

He deliriously looks down at his hand, trying to count. Yeah… five sounds about right.

For a second, he only sees two fingers on his hands, as if they were Nekyia’s. But then he blinks and wiggles his digits and finds that all of them are where they should be.

“Five, just how I like ‘em,” says Hineni, looking at his hand.

Five is a good number. First, it’s a good number of digits to have. Second, it’s a good number of days to have not slept. Third —

Hineni stands in the middle of the forest, thinking about at least three other things that are good to have in fives.

The trees continue to whisper.

By the time he counts to five, his blurred vision spinning, he looks back up at the people coming out of the forest towards him.

Elves.

“Ah, hell,” mutters Hineni as they encircle him, weapons drawn. He narrows his eyes, counting them.

Eight.

How meaningless. What kind of number is eight? Ugh…

(???) casts [Dream-Whisper] on (Hineni) Applied Status: [Sleep]

He falls to the ground, sleeping for exactly five hours, as a man in his position is want to do.

Five is an important number, after all.

Hineni groggily wakes up, shaking his head.

His hands are tied behind his back. His legs are sliding along the ground as two people hold onto some ropes and drag him backwards behind them through the forest.

He turns his head, looking at them.

Elves.

Well, shit. He supposes that this was to be expected. But also… it wasn’t. He thought Nekyia had him covered. So much for that theory.

The man blinks, his adrenaline doing a fair amount of work to cut through his delirium. The world spins, and he feels very dizzy. Five hours just wasn’t enough sleep for how long he was up.

The man fiddles with his fingers, managing to worm them free a little, enough so that he can use his magic. Hineni silently thanks Sockel for that family lecture she held on methods of escaping from being tied up.

Seeing that he’s awake, the elves talk to each other, saying something that he doesn’t understand. They don’t exactly look happy, though.

They get into an argument; one of them is pointing at him.

— The forest whispers.

The elves stop, all of them stiffening up as they look around themselves.

“What?” asks Hineni.

He gets sharply shushed by the one holding the rope to his right — A woman with long, silvery hair.

Hineni looks around them as the trees rustle and the leaves shake.

The group tightens up into a circle, looking around themselves.

There is a tenseness in the air.

Hineni can’t help but feel like they’re just small mice, standing in the den of a hungry cat.

— A horrific scream comes from the group and is immediately silenced. Hineni turns around and looks, and sees… nothing.

One of the elves from the troop is simply gone, having been snatched by…

— He looks around the area.

…By nothing.

There’s nothing he can see. One of the elves is just gone, just like that.

The others shout out loudly and then turn to run. The woman with the silver hairs yells at them to help with the ropes, and one of them comes back to help drag him along.

Hineni considers telling them to just undo his legs so he can run himself, but he feels like he doesn’t want to turn his back to the forest.

It’s better this way.

— They drag him off.

Minutes pass, or maybe hours. He really, really doesn’t know.

Time just doesn’t feel like it exists down here in the south.

The elves pant, having been running at full sprint for a good while now, having reached for the first time a small clearing of sorts that seems to bring them some relief, as odd as that sounds. But apparently, in the deep forest, the safest place to be is in the space where there are simply no trees.

— Hineni looks down to the side, seeing a perfectly circular ring of mushrooms. There are five of them.

Neat.

Hineni looks back at the group of seven…

He narrows his eyes.

— Six elves.

Weren’t there seven when they started running?

Well, there are six now.

They don’t look like they’re having a great time, which is fair. Neither is he. Although, he had thought that the elves would have an easier time surviving in their own forest. Maybe he can really understand why Sockel wanted nothing more than to do math behind a desk for the rest of her life.

He would use a spell to burn his ropes, but they’ll see the menu appear if he does.

Hineni looks up towards the sky, seeing it in all its clarity, as if for the very first time.

“Holy hell…” mutters the man.

He’s never seen it so bright and clear before. Even in the north, outside of the city, which was spectacular, it was an amazing sight. But this…

His eyes wander from star to star, often not sure where one ends and the other begins as he drowns in the sight of them. They’re so pristine, and so abundant — They’re beautiful.

Something grabs him from behind, pressing him forward. “Hey! Watch the goods,” barks Hineni over his shoulder, looking at the woman with the silver hair.

“Be quiet!” she hisses, speaking in a very pronounced accent that he’s never heard before. “Idiot. Ve are being hunted. Do not make it easier for it.”

— She cuts the ropes on his hands.

Hineni raises an eyebrow, looking at her and then at his freed hands as she goes to untie his legs.

“You will valk,” she orders.

“That’s awfully trusting of you. I’m just going to run away, you know?” asks Hineni.

“— Then you vill serve as a distraction for us to escape,” she says. “It hunts stragglers.”

“What?” asks Hineni. “What’s ‘it’?”

“Everything,” she hisses, cutting through the ropes around his legs as she looks at the forest all around them.

Hineni recalls the many tales he had read back in the library in their old house about this place.

— The night turns dark.

The man lifts his eyes and stares up towards the night sky through the clearing, towards the impossibly long, lifting shadow that rises out of the forest. The woman moves behind him, placing her hands on his shoulders and whispering in his ear. “Shh,” she orders, holding a hand over his mouth as they watch the thing, the shadow, the whisper-thin limb that is taller than any tree he has ever seen and higher than any mountain he could ever envision, rise up like an uncoiling snake.

The long arm that could belong to a monstrosity far beyond this world’s normal sort reaches up, up, up towards the sky full of so many stars with a long-witchy hand with sharp fingers, each the size of a house. Sharp fingers close themselves around a pinprick of light in the sky.

It’s a good thing that his mouth is covered, because Hineni's sure he’d be swearing up a storm right now.

What. The. Hell.

“— It is ze thing zhat collects stars,” she explains quietly into his ear.

Hineni watches in extremely confused horror as the hand, despite the impossibility of it all, simply clenches its fingers around a point of light in the sky and then… it lowers itself back down into the forest, taking a small orb of light, which never grows any larger the closer to the world it comes, down with it itself into the darkness.

And then the night returns, just like that, just a little less bright than it was before, missing a star.

The woman takes her hand off of his mouth.

Hineni looks up at her. “So uh… am I walking up front or is it you guys?”