>"Right."
>Make with the following.
>You follow Kagerou as she leads further into the woods, past the boulder and along a small depression that skirts the thickest of the trees. Mostly she follows the curve of the terrain, moving wherever the ground itself suggests is easiest to move while still heading westward, though a few times she points out some small landmark she's using to orient herself ? a tall hill crowned with a gnarled pair of dead oaks, a small fen dotted with tiny red wildflowers. Her knowledge of the terrain in this area seems less intimate than it was earlier, though you're still making good time. Once, you are forced to backtrack several minutes when you emerge from a tangled stand of trees onto the wrong side of a shear ridge ? Kagerou's apologies are profuse ? but largely your progress is without incident.
>Far more bothersome is how little time has passed before you find your steps feeling leaden, your body weary. It's just as well Kagerou's not being very talkative, since you don't think you could hold much of a conversation right now. It's been a long day, you've spent quite a few hours of it hiking, and you're... not well. But you soldier on, putting one foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. You're thankful you have someone else to lead you, so all you have to do is plod along behind them ? less thinking that way. Thinking takes too much effort.
>It's damnably frustrating to, in the same moment, want to forge onward until dawn and collapse right where you stand. Instead you do neither. One foot in front of the other, Nazrin. You can keep going as long as she can. Are you
ever going to reach that glen?
>The last leg of the journey passes in a dull haze, the steady voyage of the moon above your only anchor to the passage of time. She slowed the pace for you. You told her not to and she did it anyway and then you pretended not to notice. You didn't want to need it. It feels like reality hasn't cared much about what you've wanted for a while now. Perhaps you ought to thank her for that when you're more lucid. When you're somewhere that isn't all trees and hills and rocks and trees.
>As you trudge up yet another ridge lined with patches of thick scrub and stocky beech, Kagerou pauses. She takes a good look at something to her left and then with two words relieves your weary spirit.
>?We're here.?
