They have been walking for at least an hour. There's an occasional trap tripped, but otherwise the forest is silent, and it is a silence that doesn't sit well in Allayria's bones. It's like a poor echo of another forest, lush and dense, but that one made the silence, and the slow vines that slithered there were more than just plants grasping for sunlight.

This is the most perturbed she's seen Finn; there's a frown that plays at the edges of his mouth, shimmering in and twisting around as his wide eyes flit to vacant ground and empty branch. The farther south they travel, into the heart of the eastern section of the arena, the quieter becomes.

It gets to the point where even Lei seems to notice it, and he holds a jut of rock in hand, rolling it slowly between his fingers as he glances around.

"Do you think this is part of the game?" Allayria asks and he looks back at her.

"No."

The first scream is like a smoldering knife through water, scraping in a sizzling hiss against the silence, and their heads turn in unison, knees bending, backs hunching down. It isn't far off, by Allayria's judgement, and there's a crack of breaking wood that follows it.

The initial thought is that it's a mistake: someone who took the wrong step on a tree branch, someone who triggered a hidden trap, but then another voice rings out, their words buffeting against the drifting leaves and whispering grass:

"Get off her!"

Allayria catches the name "Simon" murmured under Lei's breath before he rushes off into the underbrush, leaving them to sprint behind. He's moving toward the voices, and she slides out a coil of vine, sliding it between her hands.

When they break into the clearing Allayria registers a tangle of people, struggling in the center of it. Toward the ground, with a huge, muscled arm pressing her neck into the grass, is Fae Urilong and her face seems to be bright red in equal parts from asphyxiation and potent rage. Two similarly attired men grapple with the hulking one holding her down—Durai, with long rivers of red flowing down from his shattered nose—as well as a short, dark-haired woman Allayria thinks might be the non-Kali Solveig woman.

The three dash forward into the fray and suddenly a glint of silver flickers up from the grass as one of Fae's shaking, slender hands buries a knife deep into the front of Durai's foot.

The howl of pain breaks everyone apart as he wheels back, clutching at the speared foot, and in that time Fae Urilong scrambles to her feet, dodging the punt of ice sent at her head by the woman and tossing another knife in the Nature-caller's direction. The movements break the strange freeze and the rest of them rush forward.

Allayria crashes into the Solveig woman and they grapple, hard hands and clumsy feet, too close in proximity to do any effective Skilling. It's a matter of who loses balance first and, by suddenly dropping sideways, twisting on one heel, Allayria loses grip of her rope but manages to catapult the woman forward. Her fingers grip into the grit, the tips of her boots digging in as she tries to haul herself up, but then she feels the tug. It's clammy earth that encloses around her ankles but it feels like hands, and there's salt in her mouth for a moment, salt and water, and the hands are cold and hard, digging in and dragging down, down deep into the dark water...

Her lungs seize, rasping for air and she twists, acting on instinct, thought little more than a white panic as her hand lashes out blindly, grasping, and her foot lurches down, kicking out as her knee cracks and throbs in pain.

She hears an 'oof,' somewhere below as the vine suddenly slams into her hands and the clay crumbles around her legs. In the pulsing pound of adrenaline and fear she has accomplished what she could not on horseback in the bright sunlight: she called an element without sight or touch.

But there's no time to revel in it; she rolls forward and back up to her knees as the Nature-caller moves too. But Lei suddenly shoves Allayria aside and one of Beinsho's men, whose name must be Simon, jumps forward too, and the Solveig woman is clever enough to know the game is up—she grabs Durai and they run off.

"Are you alright?" Lei asks, glancing at Urilong and the other two, including Felix, the Roftenian with the cat.

"They just attacked us," the Halften man says, looking flabbergasted as Fae runs a hand along her throat, the other braced against her knee. Finn darts forward and begins talking to her in a low voice.

"Same thing happened to us," Allayria interjects, glancing over at the direction that the two members of the green team ran. "Their teammate Rahul ambushed us and Hiran said Durai attacked them too."

"They attacked Hiran?" Fae rasps, sounding so much like Lei did a couple of hours ago that he holds out his canteen to her automatically.

"Is Tara alright?" Felix asks and his cat stares up at Allayria with yellow eyes.

"They're both fine," Lei assures them. "We saw them at the cliffs."

"We were just headed that way," Simon answers, gesturing in the direction Allayria and the others had come. "We just finished at the lake."

"Any tips?" Allayria jests but Fae actually answers, her words muffled as the back of her hand wipes away the water around her mouth.

"Look to the mirror."

The Keesark woman straightens up, handing the canteen back to Lei.

"Any advice for us?"

Allayria snorts.

"Start climbing."

They part ways after this, Lei glancing back as the three move north, in the direction he had pointed. They in turn had told Allayria and Lei the lake was near, to just continue southward for another quarter of an hour and then they would be there.

"I wonder who else that team has attacked," Lei says and the rock knife twists in his hand once more.

Allayria glances back at Finn, judging by his unfocused, wandering gaze that he's not paying them even a bit of attention, and turns to Lei, asking in a low murmur: "Do you think we should go after them once we get the next item?"

He glances at her too, brow furrowing.

"We'll dump the items back at the courtyard; if Ruben is there, we'll tell him what's going on. If not, we'll go back in and get them ourselves."

And then he suddenly reaches out, gripping her arm.

It because, she realizes, her knee is starting to give out. In all the rush of adrenaline and panic to break the grip on her legs she had forgotten about the bone-cracking kick at the Solveig woman but now the pulsing throb comes back in full force. Under the weight of this and the bruises trawling up her side, she partially collapses onto the ground.

"We should stop, and let your knee rest," Lei says immediately. "You're barely walking upright as is."

"I'm fine," she insists, straightening up and hiding her shaking fist behind her. "I'll just lean on a stick for a while and let the swelling go down."

"We have the entire second task to get through after this," he insists. "We can't risk it any further—"

"I'm fine. We just need to keep moving—"

"You need to stop—"

"I can handle it," Allayria snaps, pain running up her leg. "We've got to do this plus hunt down the other team so there's no point in moaning about it—"

And then he loses it, jabbing a finger in her face, a flush of red rising to his cheeks.

"No. First you go flying into the forest without any plan, then you catapult yourself off a cliff, then you run into hand-to-hand combat without any warning. You nearly lost your head, you almost plummeted to your death, you bruised up the entire side of your body, and you smashed your knee in—"

He rages on, enough so that Finn stops walking entirely, standing there in mild interest as the Nature-caller paces back and forth. Allayria is a little relieved: the lack of motion is making her knee feel a lot better.

"—you are the most reckless, irresponsible—"

"Reckless?" she shoots back. "I'm not the one sprinting toward screaming people without any plan—"

"—the entire day you have been running around like a lunatic, ignoring everything I say, taking all the risks without any kind of input—"

"I took those risks because I was the least risky option!" she shouts back. "You were holding up a wall the first task and I was better suited for the jump. I would happily let you risk your skin if you were the better choice—"

A hand smacks against her forehead, pushing her back and she balks, but the hand is too small to be Lei's and when she peers around it she sees Finn, his other hand slapped against the face of an equally irate Lei.

He looks at both of them, face serious.

"The squawk of the chicken only tells the fox where it hides."

They stare.

An annoyed little crease shows up between his eyes.

"You're yelling so much the whole forest can hear you: shut up."

He lets go and they both step back, ruffling clothes and shooting dark looks around.

"Fine," Allayria snaps, flinging an angry flick of her hand in Lei's direction. "Five minutes. Now can someone help me find a damned tree branch I can use as a crutch?"

The lake is vast and dark, smooth like the edge of a blade and still, unmoving. The murky, blackened depths make Allayria's palms sweat and her neck seems to be made out of gooseflesh.

Something like memory crinkles on the corners of Allayria's mind—yes, the cold and the dark is too much like the icy blast of sea water that dragged her down once before, but there's something else underneath that memory. It's not a recollection of images or sight, but of taste and smell. There's bile and the faint, tangy taste of blood, the smell of mildew and, yes, something else, something like the cold touch of pruning hands—

"Something's wrong with it," Finn suddenly announces, and Allayria jumps, rattling against her makeshift crutch as her jangling nerves manifest in a full-body shiver. "I feel like I'm walking without sea legs."

Lei wears a frown on his face as he moves forward, closer to the unnatural thing, and he even crouches down.

"She said to 'Look into the mirror,' " he murmurs, a fist of fingers pressed to his pursed mouth as he crouches near the surface. "Where's the mirror...?"

"Is there one somewhere underneath the water?" Allayria suggests and a cold spike of fear runs through her. Perhaps they will have to go in it. Perhaps they will have to dive down into the deep depths of the water and look for something...

But suddenly Lei stands up, and his hand falls away.

"It's at an angle,"he says, and there's awe in his voice. "The water—it's tilted at an angle."

A/N: A full view of the (unrelated) artwork,"Death by Plants," can be found on my deviantart account here: https://asimsluvr.deviantart.com/art/Death-By-Plants-180303439. Face reference: DinoCruton-Stock.

In unrelated news, Partisan and Paragon were both trending in Fantasy this week! Huge shout out to all my new readers and cheers to my old friends. You guys are the best ❤️

P.S. keep your eyes on Wattpad for the next couple of weeks. I have something short and non-Paragon/Partisan-related that I'm hoping to post soon at the request of EssayOfThoughts. Assuming, of course, that the site does not collapse in a smoldering pile of code and tears around us. (In all seriousness though these last two days have been wild!)