It is night. A round silver moon hangs low in the cloudless sky. The surrounding landscape is very flat, very dry, and very lifeless. Nothing reacts noticeably to their arrival or Dakker's death.

"Where the hell are we?" Luvei asks, after the final tones have died down and everyone's recovered.

"Not in Arshalei," Kaleith points out. "At least so it would appear. Which is good enough for me, really."

"Well, it's not good enough for me," Mirrin interjects. "If we're stranded somewhere with no civilization with no living Strider, how are we going to survive?"

"We're not going to die, we have an orc," Amalta says reasonably. "And if we can't stand it here--well. We have three elves, and plenty of fresh Strider DNA."

"Two elves total," Mirrin grumbles. "If you go by fractions."

"Why the hell would you do that," Kaleith asks.

The wasteland has no commentary on their reproductive habits.

On the subject of survival, the faint breath of a breeze carries the smell of water from over thataway.

"I smell water," says Yttren, the orc. "I'm going to check it out."

"Great. Everyone else look away, if we want to use his DNA ever we have to collect it now, so we should whether we're going to use it or not." Her right hand goes to the glove covering her left, but doesn't remove it while anyone other than her fiancee is looking.

Her sister sighs and turns away, in a direction so that no one can see her front and she can't see her sister, peels off her own blood-soaked glove, extends her collector-tendrils and starts probing at the blood on her hands.

As Yttren progresses toward the smell of water, a dip in the ground becomes visible in the distance. It will take him a while to reach the point where the elevation begins to change, but when he does, he'll see the dry cracked earth sloping down slow and steady toward a very large, very still freshwater lake completely devoid of discernible life. There are four trees dotting the shoreline. They are all dead.

...Huh.

Yttren touches one of the dead trees to see if he can tell what it died from.

Thirst and starvation, a very long time ago.

...Huh.

He scoops up a pinch of soil and rolls it between his fingers. How good is it for growing things?

Totally void of usable nutrients, that's how!

What the fuck.

The smear of parched earth between his fingers holds no answers.

Well. The group's not gonna like what they're gonna have to do to survive, probably, but they'll dislike it less than dying. Before he goes back to share the bad news, he pokes the water to see if it contains anything inimical to life.

Nope. Some minerals, but nothing toxic or toxically concentrated.

What the fuck, none of this makes sense.

He starts trudging back to the group.

The landscape remains super dead. No birds, no insects. Occasional broken and dessicated tree stumps, some so caked with dirt that they could pass for rocks at a glance.

He will check every fucking tree stump he sees in case one of them has anything else useful to tell him.

They all died of the same ultimate causes, in varying proportions: lack of water and barrenness of soil. The soil is indeed both dry and barren.

But there is a lake right there this makes no sense.