Alice woke up frustrated and fuzzy-mouthed.

She’d slept under a tree the night before; this time she’d chanced things a little and clambered up one of the great-trees with a low-hanging limb. She set up camp right on top of it, tent and all. Driving the tent-stakes into the tree had been the hardest part. The great-trees were abnormally solid, and resisted her efforts quite admirably.

Regardless, sleeping in a tree didn’t do any favors for Alice’s back. She winced while sitting upright, muscles pulling unpleasantly and bones creaking. She briefly pulled at her roots, letting the all-encompassing ache and pain of divine blood overtake the more mundane discomfort of sleeping in a place poorly suited for resting.

She fumbled a few times while packing up her little camp, and packing away her sleeping back ended up being harder than ever. Thinking and acting through a persistent headache was difficult. Alice caught herself thinking about that innocuous little water canteen sitting in her backpack with the rest of the supplies, not really caring that the water within was glowing.

She needed to find actual water, fast, or she’d find out firsthand if the glowing water was safe to drink. It was better than slowly dying of dehydration.

Thankfully, Anchorage had to be close.

While she’d spent the previous day walking and hadn’t yet spotted any signs of civilization, Alice was confident she was close. Like she could turn a corner and spot the city through the great-trees, squatting on its peninsula. Or stumble across the highway cutting through Alaska to either end of Anchorage, north and south. If she somehow missed the city, the highway would be there to catch her.

Alice retrieved her supplies and settled in for more walking, patiently ignoring the dull pain in her body and the headache brewing behind her eyes. Zeus briefly made an appearance as she mindlessly set off in the wrong direction before adjusting to his heading. She really needed water. Soon. The hunger underlying her dehydration was a distant concern in the face of it, though finding food as well would be nice. She only had a pair of emergency hard rations left, having consumed all the soup cans already which might have been a poor idea in retrospect. They could have staved off the dehydration for another day or two.

Alice stumbled over a root. It had seemed further away than it was. Everything in the forest felt larger than it was supposed to be, like she was a child running between the legs of adults, trying to peek up onto the table and failing. It was messing with her perspective, especially with how limited her vision actually was. There were simply too many great-trees in the way. Too many legs between the table and her.

She plodded onward, keeping half an ear out for noises other than disquieting birdsong or her own increasingly clumsy passage. Alice might be unable to hear the approach of mutated wolf-packs—the ones she’d seen fighting the bear had been scarily silent—but she probably wouldn’t miss the approach of a bus-sized bear or any towering moose.

The forest’s scent had subtly changed in the last few days, with the sudden, inexplicable growth of so much plant-life. It had been like someone threw the area into fast-forward, decades and centuries of development happening seemingly overnight. There was even moss climbing up the trunks of some great-trees now, or encasing whole boulders with fecundity. When Alice had woken up, everything smelled like a freshly dug garden; loamy soil dominating that particular sense. Since then, the forest had started to smell…odd. It looked like an old forest, but old forests and copses always smelled a bit like death. There was always something decaying in a forest, whether it be the leaves, animals, or even the trees themselves.

Alice’s forest was brand new. The scent of fresh growth, flowering plants, and vitality had filled the air. No underlying decay. It didn’t smell the age it was pretending to be.

She continued walking.

“What do you think would happen?” Alice asked.

Zeus spun into being next to her, walking in step, his sandals solidly connecting him to the ground. “With what?” he asked, looking forward.

“With the glowing water. What do you think would happen if I drank it?”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know,” Zeus said, shrugging. “I can guess, but there’s no way of knowing until you do drink it. Maybe you’ll explode. Maybe nothing will happen.”

“I bet Athena would know,” Alice said, somewhat petulantly.

“Probably,” Zeus admitted. “I’ve never had a knowledge domain in the same way she does.”

“Domain?”

“Area of specialty. Sort of. It’s a divine expression of our intrinsic characters.”

“Huh?”

“Like how I’m Lord of the Skies. Or Poseidon is lord of the seas. Hades the lord of the underworld and so on. Those are a domain we created ourselves. Parts of our authority. I can call down lightning and storms because the sky is mine and I am the skies.”

“Oookay, so, what other domains do you have?”

“Fatherhood. Fairness in trade and word. Authority over the gods. Freedom. The sanctity of marriage, though that’s more Hera’s thing than mine. Purity.”

“Purity?” Alice asked, incredulously. Did he have a domain over hypocrisy as well?

“Not the purity you’re thinking of. More like the purifying power of a lightning strike. Or the purity of salted farmland.”

Oh. The purity that comes from destruction. Yeah, that made more sense.

“So, what do these domains do?” she asked after a moment, curious.

“I flex my divine will and the domain moves to follow. It really isn’t complicated stuff.”

“Does that mean you can make lightning strike wherever you want?”

“Yes. The sky is mine, as I said. Storms form from my temper, winds scour the land through my breath, rain falls at my command.”

The connection hit her, ironically, like a bolt of lightning.

Alice kind of wanted to hit herself for being so stupid. She blamed the dehydration.

“Can you make it rain here, right now?” she asked, any desperation carefully pruned from her voice. Telling a merchant that he had something you needed only made the cost higher. She knew he could—he’d been responsible for the rain drenching her immediately after she’d become his vessel.

“Nope,” replied Zeus with absolutely no hesitation. “Well, I could, but there wouldn’t be a point.”

Fuck, thought Alice, already gearing up for negotiations with the douchiest god. Her headache had gone from a dull, constant throb to a stabbing pain and she was fully willing to vent her frustrations on the asshole standing next to her.

“Why not?” she gritted out.

“It would be a waste of effort,” Zeus said, amused. “You wish for rain in order to fill your waterskin, yes?”

“...Yes,” Alice admitted, glaring at the god. Did he really just think she wasn’t worth it?

Zeus rolled his eyes and sighed very dramatically. “It isn’t that I think you should die of thirst, but rather that the expenditure of willpower on my end doesn’t match up to the availability of nearby water sources. Which is, to say, that there simply isn’t a need to call down the rains. There’s already water nearby.”

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“Lead with that next time, asshole,” Alice said, perking up significantly. “Where’s the water?”

“Just keep going straight. You can’t miss it,” he said, vanishing with finality.

Huffing, Alice stepped over a particularly large root, keeping eyes and ears open for the water she’d been promised.

Nothing. The trees were blocking sight beyond two dozen or so meters, and the sounds of the forest itself had increased in the past few days, bird calls joined by leaves loudly rustling in the wind. Maybe Alice heard something else, something deeper, but maybe she didn’t. It was hard to tell. Hard to focus.

She knew it was the dehydration. It really, really sucked.

Stumbling onward, Alice tried to not hope too hard. There would be water or there wouldn’t. Yes or no. She’d been in situations like that before. Where reality intervened in her dreams just to ensure that she gained some miserable experiences. The worst had been in high school, of course. People really couldn’t have designed a better hell if they tried.

If there was water, great. She wasn’t going to die of dehydration anytime soon.

If there wasn’t…well, she already had very little hope in Zeus’s general helpfulness. She trusted him to work whatever angle he was fishing for, nothing more or less. There wasn’t any other trust to lose.

She would, however, immediately drink the glowing water if it turned out that he’d lied. It just seemed like the thing to do in that sort of situation. That, and it would prevent her from dying of thirst, one way or another.

As she trudged onward, Alice nearly tripped over a bit of stone peeking out of the mossy ground. It was a small stone, but sharply edged and easily missed. Righting herself with a grumbled curse, Alice absently noted that the stone was unusually shaped. The edges were too perfect to be natural. She must be approaching another ruin.

What if the water Zeus mentioned was more of the glowing stuff? She’d found a lake of the stuff next to ruins, after all. Somehow, that would feel like the worst outcome. It’d mean that Zeus hadn’t lied and she was going to have to drink possibly radioactive water regardless. It’d rankle.

More stones started cropping up as Alice walked forward. Little ones at first, just barely visible through the greenery. She only noticed them because of the tripping hazard they posed. Watching the ground carefully for roots and other potential pit-falls made them easier to spot. The corner of a stone poking out of the grass and moss, an edge with roots partially grown over it, a complete stone block resting atop a larger foundation…

The ruins started getting larger. It might be another town, or something bigger. Something about the entire situation made Alice uneasy, like she was forgetting a fundamental issue.

More foundations started showing up as Alice walked, like memorials to a people no longer present, a civilization she’d never known. Standing walls started appearing, looming from between the great-trees which had grown in and around them. The corners of buildings tapered upward a story or two, stone bricks mostly intact but for the fresh moss trying to cling to every indented surface.

A path appeared and Alice walked on it instead of the treacherous ground. The cobblestones might be uneven and craggily, but they made for better walking than the soft soil and gripping plants.

The first mostly-complete building appeared as she stepped past another great-tree. It was just a small building. Like the structures from that first town she’d found, anything not made from stone had long since started rotting away. Furniture, doors, framing…all of it slowly turning to mulch and dust. Not for the first time, Alice wondered what had happened to all the people who’d once lived in the crumbling buildings. Then again, the building’s had all just shown up in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. Maybe there’d never been any people involved at all. Just whatever force had caused them to appear in the first place.

Gradually, something else started tickling Alice’s ears. A new sound, something she’d grown up with. A constant, rhythmic crashing carried through the forest, low and powerful but still distant. Waves against a shore.

Alice picked up the pace, nearly tripping over a raised cobblestone once or twice. She paid little attention to the more and more complete buildings sprouting from the forest soil around her, focused on that sound of liquidy salvation.

The ever-present great-trees thinned out unexpectedly, and visibility opened up. Alice stumbled to a stop, eyes wide. A city lay before her, solemn and silent in death. More ruins like those she’d passed. Except…past the ruins, water framed a bay hemmed in by mountainous terrain steeply rising from spits of land. And she smelled brine, but that couldn’t be, shouldn’t be possible.

The city itself was largely intact. Buildings grew taller towards the center of it, and Alice could almost see the citizens of a dead civilization walking the streets, living out life in the shadows of a sprawling complex of communities. Something towered over the rest of the city. A spire that, even from her distance, looked half-melted.

Alice looked upon a dead city nestled within a saltwater bay and felt something in her, a little ember of hope, or excitement, or certainty…she felt it crack and die.

It wasn’t Anchorage, she told herself. Not Anchorage. The mountains were wrong, and the city was smaller. The bay wasn’t shaped the same. But she’s seen it on the way over, hadn’t she? The way Alaska had been reshaped. Mountains missing or appearing in unexpected places, lakes where none had stood before. Impossibly large sinkholes opening up in days. She couldn’t trust the landscape she’d known. Couldn’t trust that everything would have remained the same.

And now there was a city of ruins standing where she’d been expecting to find Anchorage. She thought she’d been prepared for disappointment.

She stood for a long moment, staring upon the shattered remains of her hope. The desire to shout, to scream and blame the heavens rose. The roots burned inside her body, divine blood circulating pain and focus.

Survival at all costs, Alice reminded herself. Water first, crisis later.

Alice started walking again, descending into the city itself.

It was surprisingly intact. Like people had been living in it just months before and suddenly left for some reason. Most of the wood was sound, sturdy still. Like the decay from other ruins hadn’t even touched this particular city. It made the whole place spookier than the other ruins she’d passed. Something had happened, something bad. And now Alice was walking through the remains of a vanished people. The whole situation was awfully disconcerting.

On the plus side, a city of this size had to have access to freshwater. Wandering the streets allowed her the opportunity to keep an eye out for any wells while observing the buildings around her.

Peculiarly, it felt somewhat like she was walking through a medieval or renaissance city. There were differences, sure; the architecture around her favoring steeply gabled roofs and stone constructions. But the way the buildings were packed together, with a good number of them having a larger second or third floors and looming out over the streets—well, it really reminded Alice of some of the pictures she’d seen of fantasy or historical cities. There were little individualistic examples of culture scattered all over the place, too. Statues of animals, big and small, featured heavily. One building’s doorway was bracketed by an upright bear on one side and a bird of some sort on the other. Maybe some sort of crane. Both had been delicately wrought from a white stone, obvious care taken to present them a certain way. Most of the statues had that same sort of feeling. Of an almost casual reverence.

There were also reliefs carved into the stone bricks of buildings at times. Some were obviously words of some sort; in a language Alice couldn’t read. Others were depictions of scenes. Battles, ceremonies, animals fighting, people who were also bears.

A niggling feeling was starting to grow in Alice, a familiarity towards the city.

She found a well before much longer. The promise of clean water washed away her other thoughts for the moment, though she knew they’d come back around.

There was a rope tied up outside the well, a functional looking bucket sitting next to it. Looking down into the well itself revealed something reflecting shimmering daylight back at her. Water. Of the hopefully fresh, non-glowing variety. Alice cast the bucket down and listened as it clattered against the stones lining the well. It hit the water with a splash, and a few seconds passed before she started pulling it back up by the rope.

The bucket crested the sides of the well and Alice eagerly gulped down the water it had contained. It hit her throat like the sweetest nectar; she couldn’t help but try to swallow the entire bucket’s worth of water.

It sat poorly in her stomach and she immediately retched, coughing wetly.

Alice lay down with a groan, staring up at the sky and trying not to puke up all the water she’d just drunk. Her eyes prickled as the sun hung to one side of the sky. The south, probably, given it was just about noon. There weren’t any clouds in the sky. No rain, either, but she felt wetness at the corner of her eyes.

She’d expected to find Anchorage.

Whatever else it was, the ruined city she’s found instead certainly wasn’t Anchorage. It was strange, and empty. Foreign, nothing like the home she’d expected to find.

It left her feeling further adrift than ever. More lost than she’d ever thought she could feel. What had happened to the Anchorage she knew? The people who’d lived in it? Had it all been scattered to the winds, displaced by the ruined monoliths of a dead culture and overtaken by a new, deadlier Alaskan wilderness? The not knowing might drive her crazy faster than the ruined promise of hope she’d felt.

All her current plans had hinged on getting back to her city.

Get back to Anchorage, and she could start getting rid of Zeus.

Get back to Anchorage, and she could better prepare for the new Alaskan wilderness, satiate her curiosity with further trips. Bring a bigger gun along with her, next time.

She was supposed to be out for a weekend trip. Not whatever shit-show she’d stumbled into.

And now she lacked a city to go back to.

What next?

What move was she supposed to make in this situation?

Sighing, Alice raised a hand upward, to the heavens. Stared at the back of it. Curled her hand into a fist. The nausea from drinking so much water had faded somewhat, and she could already feel her headache easing.

She was going to have to continue, wasn’t she?

Her hand fell again, and she lay, splayed out under the sun.

Survival. At all costs.