Get out.

Cerina dropped the stone on the bed, and spun away. “Later,” she muttered, trying to convince herself. “I’ll deal with you later.”

With that, she turned to her bag and pulled out the book. Its leather cover was worn and cracked, and the edges of the pages were frayed. She opened it and stared at the markings inside. They were as incomprehensible as they’d been the first time she’d seen them—alien and chaotic, yet somehow deliberate.

Cerina flipped through the pages, searching for anything that might give her a sense of direction. But they were all the same: line after line of impossible symbols. They looked like they could slice the paper beneath them.

She snapped the book shut and stuffed it into the crook of her arm. The lower maze of halls. That was where she was meant to go. To find the matching symbols. To what end, she didn’t know. But the weight of the task pressed on her shoulders like the Monastery’s heavy silence.

Cerina spent what felt like hours wandering, examining, and comparing. The symbols meant nothing. She discovered that one particular marking, short and slashed horizontally twice, seemed to frequently start or end sequences of symbols.

But the book had hundreds of pages. The damp, stone corridors had carving after carving after carving. Amidst all that, how was she supposed to find a match?

_The woods, _came the whisper of her mind.