For what felt like hours, they walked along in darkness.  Neither of them spoke.  Captain Park was always three or four steps ahead, and while Seoyeon had questions, the pace he insisted on walking at was so exhausting she didn’t have the breath to get them out.  Saliva built unpleasantly fast in and she was constantly having to spit it away.  He had no such problems — as a soldier, he was in much better shape than she was and, she suspected, used walking long distances in the wild.  Possibly in the Neuma, too, she realised tiredly.  He’d said he didn’t recognise this plane of it, after all.

She stumbled so often on the uneven ground in the dark that she was even beginning to get used to the pain in her ankles.  Seoyeon thought she might possibly have twisted one, because it was a nuisance and felt slightly weak, but since she hadn’t actually fallen, she reckoned it couldn’t be worse than that.  Her stomach was beginning to growl too, reminding her that she was supposed to be eating her birthday dinner — supposed to have eaten it already.  It somehow felt very distant now that she was practically in a different world.  Did the Neuma classify as a different world?  She didn’t know.

After what felt like forever, Seoyeon’s nose suddenly stung with fresh, pure air as she breathed, and she realised that they were probably away from the swamp — and the swamp had smelt bad.  Since they’d been walking in it for some time, she hadn’t even noticed it.  The ground felt firmer under her feet — though Captain Park had managed largely to keep them on tussocks and small pathways above the swampy water and the mud (how he could tell where the good pathways was in the dark was utterly beyond her) — and they began to climb.  On and on they went, Seoyeon’s muddy feet squelching in her shoes, trudging upwards ever more steeply until Seoyeon was so tired that she was half crawling, using her hands as much as her feet to haul herself along.

At long last, Captain Park came to a halt at what appeared to be the top and glanced back.  With a groan of relief, Seoyeon collapsed on the ground beside him and rolled onto her back.

“Get up,” he murmured.

“I’m tired.”

He just sighed.  Seoyeon flopped back and half closed her eyes.  Captain Park stood there silently, and after a few minutes, Seoyeon began to wonder if he was waiting for her to get up so they could start walking again.  But, he was the one who had stopped, and he also hadn’t told her to get back on her feet a second time, and nor had he just walked off again like he’d done at the swamp.  Instead, Seoyeon concluded after a moment or two, he appeared to be watching something back the way they’d come.

After a few more minutes, Seoyeon’s curiosity got the better of her and she sat up with another groan.  Her left ankle was throbbing and it seemed like every muscle in her body had been overstretched and then gone horribly stiff.  Her right hand was actively painful from the smoke monster, and she wanted light so that she could have a proper look at it and attempt to clean it up.  A sudden wave of gratitude for Jongdae swept over her at both the unorthodox opinion he’d insisted upon, and the birthday present of the satchel and its contents that she still had with her.  Hopefully they wouldn’t be in the Neuma for very long, but at least she did know more or less how to treat her hand.

Shivering a little, she started rummaging in the satchel, wondering if she’d be able to identify the herbs she needed by touch, or smell if the worst came to the worst, and whether she could use saliva instead of water to make the relevant paste.  She was pretty sure Jongdae had said at one point that saliva helped to close freshly open wounds more quickly because of something to do with the way that it interacted with blood.  Had there also been a roll of bandage among the medical things he’d put in the satchel?  Seoyeon was pretty sure he had.

She forgot all about that when she absently looked out in the same direction as Captain Park and saw bright flashes against the sky some distance away.  At first, she wondered if it was lightning, but it wasn’t bright enough and it also didn’t seem to be zigzagging between the sky and the ground, and it wasn’t illuminating the entire area, which she was sure it should have done if it was lightning.

“What’s that?” she asked, hand stilling in the satchel as she looked up at Captain Park.  He didn’t take his eyes off the flashing.

“Dragons,” he grunted.

Everything suddenly felt a good few degrees colder.

“Dragons?” Seoyeon repeated.  She was about to tell him that dragons didn’t exist, but then she remembered that they were in the Neuma, and anything and everything probably existed.  If she recalled correctly, she’d seen dragons in the book she’d read in the library.  She was about to ask if the flashing lights they could see were the dragons breathing fire when Captain Park glanced down at her, folding his arms.

“You done?” he asked her tersely.  “Rested?”

Seoyeon’s heart sank.  She’d hoped that he’d changed his mind and they weren’t going to go any further.

“No,” she said.

Even though she could barely make out his face, it was pretty clear that he was not impressed.

“If it makes you feel more rested,” he said, “those dragons are where we entered the Neuma.  There are at least five of them, and the one