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"Half! Half, what are you --" The voice drifted between the trees, ghostlike. A crescent moon lit what things it fell upon, outlined them starkly, imparted them with a strange significance despite their randomness, like objects arranged in a shadowy curio with pools of lamplight focused on them for display. Here a wedge of rough bark, there a spray of silver leaves, and finally a red, succulent mushroom, redness diluted and gills startlingly pale in the dark. Everything else was enveloped by the night. Except every once in a while a pair of matching blue lights bobbed past, vanished as they went behind a tree, and winked back into existence again.

The voice became louder and rather less ghostly, accompanied by the sound of someone crashing around in the forest. "Half, you know what, ******** you, I'm just going to leave you here to get eaten by -- I don't know, foxes, badgers, whatever, and then maybe you'll think, oh, hey, maybe I shouldn't have just gone wandering into the woods in the dark like a ******** maniac, except you won't, because apparently you don't think about anything, goddamn it. Food, maybe. Possibly. Tormenting me. Subcategory: leading me to my death in a magical forest. Seriously, how are you not making any noise? You can't even see."

Abruptly, Elias stumbled out into a yellow-lit clearing. Halflight stood ahead of him, motionless, head lifted, a dark silhouette against the golden glow. He was standing in front of a Wolf-stone. Moss covered most of it; pale moths fluttered in front of its eyes and vanished when they exited the pools of illumination, like silt floating in sunlit water. Beautiful and, frankly, terrifying.

"Nope," Elias said. "We're leaving now, thanks." Halflight did not acknowledge him. He went over and touched the guardian's shoulder; the piebald skin spasmed, as if trying to dislodge a fly. Elias felt the growing pressure in the back of his mind that meant Halflight was in his head, looking through his eyes, and suddenly the guardian threw his head back and snorted. Elias made a grab for one of his antlers, but he was off again, crashing through the forest as a quickly retreating patch of white preceded by two little blue lights.

Elias aggressively sat down on a patch of moss. Then he looked up at the Wolf-stone with suspicion, retreated several steps, and sat down again. He couldn't tell whether the panic clawing down his gut was his own, Halflight's, or a mixture of both. The search would inevitably begin again in a moment, but for now he allowed himself a moment of leisure to press the heels of his hands against his eyelids until he saw stars and try not to scream.

At approximately the same moment the woman drops to her knees, Elias scrambles to his feet, as if shared contact with the ground might harm him. "No," he says. "What?" For perhaps the first time in months, he has been struck dumb.

He recovers quickly.

"What if I am a sailor? Calling me an a*****e, that's pretty mean, though, you have to admit. You don't even know me. What are you, a harpy? A valkyrie? A really dirty one. Why were you laughing?"

He's eyeing her with visible mistrust, his body turned defensively sideways, as if she might suddenly take him up on his accusation by sprouting a pair of wings and talons and launching herself at him in a shrieking rage. It is quite obvious to him that she is completely insane.

Elias stares at her for a moment with the perfectly neutral expression of someone who is trying to figure out whether he is going to laugh (hysterically), flee, or, very possibly, vomit. Finally he says, "Who says I'm scared? All these baseless accusations. First I'm an a*****e, now I'm scared, you really know how to win a guy over. That comment about my height, too, that was way out of line. What deer thing? Also, prove you're a ghost. I don't believe you."

"See, what you're doing right there, that's deflecting. It's fine if you aren't really a ghost, I don't mind. You still look like one, that's all that counts, right? Creepy as ******** dress, craz--, uh, artfully tangled hair, you have something going for you. Sorry, I didn't mean to call you creepy." He did. "Are you talking about the deer with the blue eyes? I mean, there are a hell of a lot of deer and deer-related phenomena out here, so."

"That's a comparison I've made myself from time to time, admittedly," he says, without looking at the Wolf-stone either. He prefers not to, if possible. "The first thing? The very first thing? Well, uh, that would have to be screaming-slash-laughing, it carries. Do you mean visually?"

He watches her empty her bag and scrounge around in the contents with an air of faint curiosity overcoming wariness. "His name's Halflight and he's a massive d**k. Er, figuratively speaking."

"Wait a second, ********, what are you doing? Are you just gonna -- seriously?" He winces when the hair starts falling, ineffectually raises one hand, lets it drop, and then glances over his shoulder into the darkness. A reflex, as if to tell himself: this is disturbing, but there are worse things out there.

Almost on cue, he feels a foreign stirring in the back of his mind.

"Why are you doing that?" He keeps a careful eye on the knife.

"I don't know, I regularly receive compliments on my flowing locks," Elias replies, clearly still unsettled. "Trees. Dirt. Harmless woodland fauna. Why, did you see something else? Other than Half, I mean." He shifts, cracks his knuckles restlessly in what would be an aggressive gesture were it aimed at anything tangible. It occurs to him for the first time that she might not just be some governess who's read too many brooding romance novels, suddenly snapped, and wandered off into the forest to enjoy a psychological breakdown in a fanciful setting -- it occurs to him that she might be running from something. He laughs, brief and desperate. This is something he'd prefer not to think about. "What's in your hand, anyway?"

"Oh, well, thanks. The feeling's mutual. Looks like you're going to have a creepy deer of your own in a few weeks, congratulations."

He sinks back down onto the moss, relieved -- that explains a lot of it. Not all of it, not the laughing-and-screaming, the speech patterns, the generally terrifying appearance (at least, he didn't get that bad after his first stint in the Wardwood), and the spontaneous hair-cutting, but, well, a lot of it. Okay, some of it. A little.

Sort of.

"I'm not hiding, I'm looking for Halflight." He pauses, thinks those last two questions over, and stares at her, a sick suspicion dawning. "Why, wait, you aren't going to, uh. No. I don't, no, I don't think either of those things are particularly distinctive. At all."