At least I'm pretty sure it was staring at me. Hard to tell, what with the whole 'no face' thing. Toothy flower bits were aimed in my direction, at any rate.

I left my eyes as they were. With the attention currently on me, I felt that the change would draw more, not less.

The stare-down stretched into seconds, neither side moving. Then something changed. The head started looking around, as if confused. Taking advantage of its momentary distraction, I started slowly turning down intensity of the Nebula in my eyes.

Little by little I reduced it, not even daring to breathe. Turns out I didn't need to for far longer than I would have expected, but it wasn't the kind of thing I was about to dwell on with death potentially staring me in the face.

Flowering me in the face? Something.

It kept looking around, before seemingly getting distracted and walking off, away from us. Its head was twitching a little in a cadence I recognized.

I looked older at Elder Scholar.

"You distracted it, didn't you?" I asked incredulously. He grinned and nodded at me.

"It was worth a shot." He said. "It took more effort than I had been expecting. At first, it was just ignoring me.

Feeling carefully, I could tell he was keeping it up. I'd long since faded my eyes down to ambient levels of emissions, which left me wondering if I could give them a similar circulatory method as I had used on the rest of my body, before I realized that doing so would effectively blind myself, as the incoming Nebula would be confused with that which I had recirculated.

"Either way," Celistar said, "We should get going before it returns."

"What she said," Viktor chimed in, which felt out of character to me, but I couldn't place why. Maybe it was because normally he'd be chasing that weird plant monster down to pummel it.

Maybe he was just worried about what would happen to us if he did.

It had moved off to the northwest, and we went southwest, so as to disrupt our original course of action as little as possible without potentially leading to another encounter.

The more I thought about it, the scarier it seemed. I wasn't sure why. Just the vibe it gave off and the unnaturalness of the entire scene.

We gave the circle a wide berth as we moved away, the large bloom in the center still and quiet under the moonlight.

The jungle took on an entirely distinct feeling at night, especially now that we knew something like that was out there, potentially waiting for us.

At least it did for me; I can't speak to what anyone else was feeling. But all the all the deep shadows created by the moon light filtering through the dense canopy of trees was bad enough when they were still, with no breeze, and only got worse when they came to life as we passed by, with our imperfect disguises from their senses.

It made me straight-up jumpy, and I didn't feel like I was one normally prone to such things. Sure, Liam could get a rise out of me every now and then… but generally speaking, I took some fairly spooky alleyways when going home from work, which grew even more foreboding during the shorter days at the ends of the year.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

But this was nothing like that. This was a whole spooky season.

I felt something and turned to my right only to see a fruit hanging from a tree. Which was normal enough, but it slowly rotated to face me, I realized that this one had a face, and a pair of fuzzy ears. I stopped dead in my tracks for a moment, as what I was seeing beggared belief, before I realized what had happened.

Perhaps sensing my tension, fruit-Steeves had grown from various places. It was pretty hard to take the scene as seriously with the trees adorned with various derpy fox faces.

I 'picked' one, and it kekeke'd at me before turning back into a fully fledged Steeve. The rest slowly faded away into nothing.

"Thanks, you goof." I told the fox, which prompted a bunch of chittering noises. I tickled her tummy a bit before she settled down.

It did put it in perspective: no matter how weird everything got, it couldn't possibly be as strange as the retinue I already traveled with. Myself included.

Around the time I was picking only the freshest of vulperines, the terrain took a definite turn for the annoying.

Large gulleys and other geology, carved there by unknown flows of water, started crossing our path.

We would have to painstakingly descend into each one, before clambering up the far side. Even with our fairly superhuman physical strengths, it still wound up being a lot of me just towing the other three around like a tugboat to speed things up.

It wasn't so much that we were less capable, but rather that these were very significant changes to the elevation. I wondered what exactly was making these wounds in the ground, and what they'd look like with the thick veil of leaves. The vision that came to mind was one of a sudden, catastrophic flood of water scouring the ground clean across what had become several kilometers of terrain so far.

Kind of made me wonder what would have caused such a thing.

To be clear, I wasn't worried it would happen again - I had no clue where such a source of water would come from now, as the slopes of the mountain surrounding what I'm pretty sure was some sort of weird caldera were pretty desolate.

Either way, we picked our way through them over the ensuing hours, hopefully making progress in the direction that István had desired. Although with the sun set like it was, it was quite hard to tell.

"Celistar," I said, as something suddenly occurred to me. "How long were we sleeping before you woke us up?"

She pondered for a moment. "If the position of the moon was anything to go by, which I'm fairly confident in," she said with a smirk, "then it would have been a little while after midnight..."

She trailed off as the implications of my question sank in, and started looking up at the sky.

I held a hand up, and a circle of Nebula sliced away a section of the canopy, revealing a section of sky flecked with twinkling stars. Nothing to see there, I guess. I had thought that maybe the sun was taking too long to come up, but I guess not.

"Well, so much for that idea," I said, before starting to walk again, but Celistar stayed and stared at the gap I'd created in the foliage. I returned to her side.

"What's up?" I asked. She looked quite concerned still, even if her pondering pose was adorable.

"I don't recognize any of the constellations," she said. "I know the night sky better than perhaps anyone else alive. These are foreign to me."

I looked again, even daring to turn my eyes up to eleven. We hadn't seen good ol' flower face again, so and I didn't mind doing some weed whacking because of using my Nebula. After all, I had to do a fair bit every time I played shuttle over the rough terrain.

What opened up before me was a riot of lines and spots of light. They crisscrossed the sky, making nearly no sense. The lines touched the stars here and there, but there didn't seem to be any method to the madness, just the scribbles of an angry giant, writ across the canvas of the sky.

"Is there any reason that there should be flows of Nebula in the sky?"

"What? No, not that I'm aware of." The Moon Fairy responded, taken a bit off guard.

I had a hunch, one worth a shot, or so I thought.

So, a shot I took, blasting a solid dollop of my power through the gap in the canopy, one that was slowly closing up. I swiped away the vines that attempted to entangle me with a flip of my palm as I watched the bright point of light fly up into the darkness, shrinking as it went.

Then it exploded, taking all of us by surprise. Several of the stars winked out, a splash of luminescent debris spreading from the point of impact.

A boom echoed out. And then echoed back, again and again, in a distinct manner.

One suggesting we were in a cave. An unbelievably large cave, but still a cave. We'd unintentionally found István's goal.

The stars? Stones similar to the ones that we'd seen in the Umbral Veil's hideout, or perhaps natural.

I saw a flicker of motion above us and realized I'd made a critical - and entirely unforced - error. I'd flung that chunk of Nebula up.

Straight up.

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