She's still in the cave. The faint glow of luminous fungus paints the stone walls in gentle blues and greens, like starlight spilled across the floor. It isn’t much but it’s enough to see. Enough to feel less swallowed by the dark.
Somewhere deeper in the cave, water flows in a steady trickle. It's clean and drinkable. She's sure of it.
But it isn’t the water she keeps staring at.
It’s the fungus. The one that clings to the far corner, near a raised curve of stone where dampness gathers. It's white, with faint shimmers even in the dark. She hadn’t noticed it at first. Not truly.
But when the panic subsided—just a little—when her stomach twisted in hollow pain and her mind quieted enough to feel again, the urge had come.
Not hunger. Not thirst. Something deeper. That fungus. Her gut whispered it, nearly screamed it. It’s important.
She thought she was losing it. Maybe she is. She’s sleep-deprived, hunted, half-starved, living in shadows and hiding from something that could unmake her in a single moment.
And yet... She knows how to handle it. How to cultivate it and use it to heal.
“Penicillin fungus,” she mutters under her breath, her voice cracked and brittle. The words feel strange in her mouth. Familiar, but too clean. Too clinical. Like they were placed in her head by someone—or something—else.
She hugs her knees tighter.
Penicillin? When did I learn that?
She scours her memories, flipping through them like brittle pages in an old book. She remembers poultices. Bruised herbs. Rural medicine taught by an aging apothecary. But this... This is different.
“I never learned this,” she whispers, eyes fixed on the fungus as if it might answer. “So… why do I remember it?”
The glowing spores shimmer faintly under her gaze. There is no answer. Just silence. And the slow realization that something... Or someone had spoken to her, hadn’t they?
Not yesterday. Before. But the thought slips away like water through her fingers. She exhales and closes her eyes, curling around the weight of her own uncertainty.
---
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Thalia is still in the cavern. Days may have passed, she isn't sure anymore. Time bends strangely here, without sunlight or stars. But at least she’s still breathing.
Her makeshift camp rests near the glowing fungus and the flowing stream. It’s not much, but it’s something. It's a shelter. A pause from that chase.
She found a torn satchel tucked behind a rockfall, half-rotted but still holding useable scraps. An old flint striker. A cracked waterskin she doesn't need but keeps anyway. A small, rusted knife—more like a letter opener. There were also bones, human bones.
Maybe they were cave delvers, she thinks. Or people like her, running from something that doesn’t care what they are.
She cleaned what she could. Salvaged cloth for bandages. Wrapped the knife hilt in leather scraps to keep it from slicing her own fingers. Everything has weight now. Even the useless things.
The fungus still glows beside her, undisturbed.
She’s started to tend to it, gently moving damp stones, clearing space. She’s learning to cultivate it. Not from trial and error, but from knowledge that simply is in her head. As if someone handed it to her in a dream.
She no longer questions it out loud.
Sometimes the knowledge she remember frightens her more than the silence of the cave.
The beast—that thing of shadow and teeth—hasn’t come. Yet. But she doesn’t trust its absence.
She stays near the back of the cavern, where a narrow tunnel snakes deeper. It's definitely not for an escape. Definitely. She just want to feel like there's more than one direction she can run.
For now, she rests. Tending to her fungus, nursing what calm she can gather, and watching the shadows. Waiting for its movement.
---
Thalia started walking again.
She can’t stay here forever. Not in a hole of stone, no matter how safe it feels. The cavern might feed her, might shelter her, but it presses down on her thoughts like heavy cloth. She needs sky. Or light. Or the simple comfort of knowing the shadow won’t close in.
So she begins her search. She marks the stone with bits of penicillin fungus and scraped lines from her knife. Crude, but clear. With the glow from the penicillin fungus. Her trail, her way back, is just there.
But the deeper she goes, the less sure she becomes.
The walls are darker here. Not in color but in weight. The shadows lean in more than they should. They stretch farther than her flickering flame from the salvaged striker should allow.
She begins checking behind her every few minutes. Then every few seconds. Then she stops turning around entirely because she’s certain if she does look, something will be there. Waiting.
She laughs once. A short, broken sound. The sound echoes too long and doesn’t sound like her voice.
The fungus helps. She scraped a patch into a tiny pouch and pressed it flat against her chest, hoping its glow might keep her composed.
But even it flickers sometimes. It dims. She’s not sure if that’s the fungus or her own sight.
Every small noise sharpens her nerves. Drips of water sound like footsteps. Shifting dust becomes breath.
She passes a natural stone arch. The space beyond it hums. Not with sound, but with pressure.
She didn't enter. Instead, she turns back. Not in defeat but in caution. Just to check that her trail is still there.
And when she turns back, the trail is still there. But she counts the lines. One, two, three… five? But she only marked four.
She doesn’t sleep that night. Or what feels like night. She presses her back into the stone wall and keeps the glowing pouch in hand. Her other hand grips the little knife.
She tells herself that she’ll try again tomorrow. A different path. A safer one. Maybe.
Info Dump #8:
- Divine blessings are powerful yet can sometimes be dangerous toward mortals who have never been or have only been recently exposed to magical energy or divine energy.