Hallen follows their tracks for some distance, tying her skirt in the middle without a second thought.  She follows Remec's lead, walking logs and skirting the pools as deftly as the ranger and the forest-trained soldier, but the sight of flesh-eating fish shocks her.  "I don't understand..." she muses aloud, reaching with her thin hands into the dark, lichenous water to snatch up a surface-growing water plant, its disk-like leaves each the size of saucers.  "It was<i>not</i>like this afore.  There was a path."  She shakes her head, seeming to resign herself to the supernatural forces at work.  "She must have made it to bring him.  She hid it to keep us away.  But I know the way.  I can feel it."<br/><br/>They walk for half an hour more, until suddenly Hallen gestures to Alphonse, marking a shape a hundred meters off-- a rise in the earth, like a hill, ahead.  "It's there," she says.  The hillside is thick with mangrove and black oak, their dangling roots dipping into the water like thousands of bone straws.  The fetid, sulfur smell is even stronger here.<br/><br/>The earthen hill is perhaps twenty feet tall, and as wide around as a gladiatorial colliseum.