Zoe stared down at the group from far above the trees, like tiny ants panicking on the floor at the scene that just occurred. She liked them, for the most part. They didn’t trust her, but she couldn’t blame them for that. A random young woman walking up to them in the middle of some dangerous woods? Who would trust her?

But it still hurt, when everything began to fall apart and James rushed to sacrifice her so quickly. The emotions that surged within him were awful, even to Zoe having to experience them second hand through her Vampyric Empathy. He was terrified, guilty. Ashamed of what he felt he needed to do.

If the tables were turned, and Zoe had to sacrifice him to save Emma and Joe, or Peter and Lauren? Sally? Would she do the same? Just throw a stranger to the wind to keep them safe?

Maybe. But that was a situation she didn’t want to imagine, the pain of living with that knowledge would haunt her for her very long life.

It would have been nice if James trusted her more, if he didn’t jump to the first conclusion he thought would work and wrack her brain with images of death and pain. They could have had a nice hunt, slain the hydra together and made their way to town. Triumphant and full of excitement.

Instead, Zoe was left alone again and the group would likely be terrified of her retaliating for the rest of their time in the woods. But such was life, she supposed.

She looked off to the north, at the menacing wall that stood over the valley she’d fallen down into. The peak was dozens of kilometers above her, and Foizo even further inland. Things were different down in the valleys, Zoe had discovered.

The biggest difference was the sky. The further down she went, the brighter the sky seemed during the day. And the shorter the days got, as the sun was blotted out by the towering walls that surrounded everything. If she had grown up down here, what would life have been like? Like a frog at the bottom of a well, unable to see the world for what it was.

Though, that applied to the people who lived up on the peaks too, never seeing what lurked just below their comfortable homes. Valleys that cut through their planet like scars lost to time.

Down here, in the Frambling Woods as James called them, the sky seemed like a bright white light at noon, and dimmed as the night fell. And when it did, the night took over in a way Zoe had never experienced before. Even with her enhanced eyes, nights down this deep were almost impossible to see in. For anything beyond her sphere of perception, she scraped by with the faintest hint of light of the stars and for about an hour every night, the dim light cast by the moon.

And lighting up the night? A mistake she wouldn’t make again. The shadows that bounced along the forest among the flickering fire she created came to life. Horned demons and imps that screeched and flooded out of the darkness in swarms that threatened even Zoe’s patience.

No, down in the valleys, the nights were to be respected and feared. When darkness came, it ruled with an absolute authority.

The other difference Zoe noted was the people — or the lack thereof. Months of travelling through the valleys during the short hours she had, wandering through the forests and deserts. Drifting across the vast oceans and delving into the caves that poked out of the walls that surrounded them. And even after all that, she’d only just had her first encounter with people down in the valleys.

Zoe chuckled, thinking of how horrible the experience had been. They were fearful of her until the very end. James began to have the slightest inkling of trust towards her right before the hydra interrupted their discussion, and then even that crumbled away when he noticed Zoe’s excitement about the creature.

But that was okay. If nothing else, it meant her enchantment worked to hide her level. And they did give directions to a town, though Zoe had no idea if they were telling the truth. James was an interesting fellow, and Zoe would have loved to spent more time with him. Learn how he communicated with his team, how his class worked and what he could do with that power.

She shook her head. It didn’t matter now. A four days journey to the east, at what speed, though? How far could they travel in the few hours of light they had every day? Maybe she should have just left them earlier and headed to the town.

For a minute, she was going to. But then James pulled her back in, and for what? Was she supposed to be bait all along? Sacrificed for their hunt? The first people she found down in these valleys after months of searching, and they decide to toss her aside like a used rag.

Zoe sighed and teleported a few kilometers to the east where she built up a stone hut with walls over a foot thick and summoned a bed inside it. On most days, she chose to fly up to the peaks and roam around in the light. But if she left now, she’d never find her way back to this spot in the forest and with the little directions she had to work off, that wasn’t a risk she was willing to take.

Civilization was just out of reach, if she could just spend a day or two stuck in the pitch black night. A few minutes of tossing and turning in her bed later, and she drifted off to sleep. Her dreams were filled with darkness, shadows that crept in at the corners of her vision wherever she looked. Sitting in Joe’s inn chatting with her friends while the shadows beneath the tables chewed away at her sanity.

She woke a few hours later, darkness still on its throne. The faintest hint of light letting her see distant shadows reach across the forest floor and climb up the trees. A terrible place to be, in Zoe’s mind.

As long as she kept all of her lights off, they never seemed to bother her. And even if she did, escaping them was as simple as teleporting into the night sky beyond their reach. But it never failed to disturb her, watching them wriggle around in the dead of night. Infecting her dreams and wearing away at her mind.

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Zoe summoned a workbench and started working on enchanting some balls of frost. She didn’t get much time to work on it anymore, though that was by choice. The incessant need to create a beacon calling her back to Abyllan was unhealthy, and unproductive. But enchanting was still her greatest passion in this world. Bending and twisting mana to her will, forming it into structures that acted on the world in just the way she wanted.

The night passed as Zoe enchanted ball of frost after ball of frost. Happy balls, sad balls. Her favourite was a puck of frost that floated just above the ground and slid along when she pushed it like an air hockey table. Maybe she’d try making one, someday.

The dim gray light of morning poked through the pinhole she’d left in her ceiling, and Zoe’s building crumbled around her. Clattering to the ground as the stone cracked and broke from Zoe’s Earth skill.

She stretched, and teleported to the sky. For a moment she thought about checking on James and the rest, but pushed the thought aside. She’d done more for them than they deserved already. The hydra was dead, and they were left with more healing capability than they could possibly dream of. If they still died, then they’d overestimated themselves when they chose to explore the Frambling Woods.

What did ‘frambling’ mean anyway, Zoe wondered. Some kind of local dialect? Or just gibberish that’s pleasant to say? Wouldn’t be the first time something was just made up. Kliggig dungeon made just as much sense.

But somehow, ‘frambling’ just felt so much more normal. Like it should mean something, but Zoe just wasn’t sure what. Or maybe she was just obsessing over something stupid.

Zoe looked to the east and teleported another kilometer. Four day’s travel, for the group Zoe was just with. If they travelled for five hours a day then they’d cover maybe forty or fifty kilometers? So the town would be about two hundred kilometers away, give or take.

And all she had to go by was a vague direction that somebody pointed their dagger in. Zoe sighed and pushed mana into her Earth skill. A towering pillar erected from the ground, several dozen feet above the tallest trees, and then Zoe vanished.

In seconds, she was about two hundred kilometers from her pillar which had been lost under the distant horizon. She drifted to the ground and looked around for tracks. Most, she couldn’t recognize. Her skills gave her a distinct feeling of what they belonged to, but Zoe just didn’t know what those things were. What they looked like, or what names could be attributed to them.

But there were many wolf and imp tracks, and plenty of droppings left behind by some giant bird Zoe had run into a few times while she flew through the air.

Zoe spent the rest of her day drifting through the forest, looking for tracks that would help her. Human tracks. Footprints left behind by heavy boots or perhaps ashes leftover from a firepit. But there was nothing even after hours of searching, so she teleported back to her pillar and set up for the night.

The next day, Zoe repeated the process over again but angling herself a little more to the north. Though, she was no luckier on her second try.

On the third day, she decided to do something different. James’ party would likely be heading home, wherever home was. And there was a good chance they’d leave tracks that Zoe could find, even if they tried not to. They had one member who might be able to elude her, a man who seemed to travel through the trees. Winding through the branches and roots. Even to Zoe’s senses, he was hard to notice at times.

But the rest of them? Zoe grinned. There weren’t many vampyres as high level as she was. Or were there? Was there some secret society of vampyres that she could go join? She shook her head, that wasn’t important. If she wanted to find somebody, and she knew where they started, then there were few things she was more confident in.

Zoe teleported back to the west and looked for where she left the group, which wasn’t hard thanks to the hydra plowing through the forest as it chased the two women. Most of its corpse was still left behind where Zoe killed it, too and Zoe stored away some of its flesh and hide before she started looking for tracks left behind by the group.

It seemed they put in a bit of an effort to hiding their tracks, but it made little difference to Zoe. The disturbed dirt they left behind instead of footprints was just as bright a beacon as anything else. She covered herself in a suit of earth and floated along the trail they left behind until night fell and she set up another shack to wait out the darkness.

When the dim gray light shone through, she drifted along the path. At the end of the second day, she managed to catch up to the group. Their quiet footsteps and ruffling dirt audible to Zoe’s vampyric senses a few hundred meters ahead. Zoe teleported up into the sky and watched them walk through the forest in the same formation they used when Zoe was with them.

She followed them, several kilometers above them for the remaining hour before they set up camp. James and the wooden fellow set up a fire while Lilith and Patty left to find food. Did they not have storage items, Zoe wondered? Or just not very large ones?

No more hydras bothered them though, and the two women bagged a wolf that they lugged back to camp for dinner. Darkness fell, and they huddled together beneath some large tree roots that they covered in a dark blanket. Shadows crept along the forest floor, crawling along the tree roots and over their blanket, barely lit by the distant stars.

She watched the shadows through the night and then watched the group wake, pack up their camp and then continue to the east. The next two days passed much the same, the group below Zoe doing their best to avoid any major conflict and cover their tracks. To keep Zoe from following them? They didn’t do that when Zoe was with them.

How would they feel if they knew she was with them the past few days? Maybe she should have just gone down and said hello when she found them, if only to stop them from wasting so much time trying to stop her from finding them.

Near the end of the fifth day, they arrived at a ravine that cut through the forest floor, almost a hundred feet deep.. Inside was a maze of wooden bridges crossing back and forth between buildings set in the walls of the ravine. Zoe smiled and teleported down to the other side of the ravine from where James’ party was. A creaky wooden ladder hung from some metal posts and Zoe climbed down it to a wooden platform that stretched into the ravine wall.

Dozens of rooms were set into the side of the tunnel Zoe found herself on, and even more across the bridge on the other side of the ravine. Another ladder hung from the side of the bridge down to the level below, and Zoe smiled.

She walked up to the first person she saw — a younger man walking out from one of the rooms in the tunnel she was juts outside of. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello?” The man questioned.

“Is there an inn around here?” Zoe asked.

He shook his head and gestured at the rooms around them. “No inn. Take your pick.”

“Oh, that sounds great. Thanks!” Zoe said.

The man nodded and hopped down to the bridge below to run across to a wooden building that hung from the other side of the ravine.

Zoe walked into the nearest empty room she found. A plain stone room with a wool blanket on the floor. It wasn’t much, but excitement bubbled away within her as she sat down on the cold rocky floor to wait out the night.