That's right: one of her omen-dreams showed her a library. A cozy little house with no windows, permeated by an ineffable sense of hers-ness, and it has baths, and indoor gardens, and shelves and shelves full of books! Real books that she could hold in her hands and read! All she has to do is find the place!

She jumps to her feet, excited.

That strange sense of direction, activated now more strongly than ever, says: right here.

Acting on some dreamed-up instinct, she focuses harder, trying to access that inward portal. It's hard, much harder than she expected. Is she doing it wrong? But the thought of her very own library keeps her stubbornly focused. Surely, if she keeps trying, if she's patient... surely she can be patient...

She nearly loses her grip on the bridge, and then she nearly loses it again, but after a few minutes the forest swirls away and she's standing in a cozy foyer, stone on every side. An arch leads to the next room, and stone sconces cast a warm, steady light that feels oddly thin compared to the stars of the forest.

Well. Fidgeting with her winebark bracelet, she cautiously explores.

Just out of the foyer is a little sitting room, with an arch in every direction. On the left she sees bookcases; on the right she sees a sink and cabinets; straight ahead she sees a terraced garden, full of water features and empty of plants.

She heads for the bookcases, naturally.

The room with the bookcases turns out to be a library/study, with shelves all around the outer wall and three more rows of shelves at one end of the room and then, at the other end, an enormous desk on the left and a reading nook with a comfy armchair on the right.

She sidles past the shelves in a sort of faintly embarrassed awe, and between the desk and reading nook she finds a door, a solid wooden door which opens onto a bedroom. The bed is plain, but big. There's a wardrobe and a nightstand and a, what's it called, vanity, and the next door leads into a spacious bathroom with a spacious bathtub and separate shower stall.

Please excuse her for a moment, she must Become Clean.

Right, where was she?

Cozy cave house tour!

She checks inside her wardrobe to see if Cozy Cave House provides any underwear. Alas, it does not. Onward to the kitchen!

Coming through the door into the kitchen, the first thing that's obvious is a wall on the left. She heads past it toward the countertop on the far side of the room, makes a left turn, and discovers that it was the wall of a well-stocked pantry tucked into the space between the arch she came through and another arch leading to the garden.

She isn't hungry, but she picks up a small bread roll and nibbles it just to see what Cozy Cave Food tastes like. Pretty good, it turns out! Plain, but in a comforting way, not a dull way.

Turning around and heading away from the garden, she finds that countertop stretching for quite a ways; if she's imagining the layout in her head correctly, the kitchen runs for the whole length of what was divided on the other side into a bedroom and a study/library. (Does Cozy Cave House provide measuring tapes? She'll have to poke around a bit.) Anyway, at the far end of the room there's a little breakfast table with two chairs, and a door leading to a half-bath.

Just one place left to explore...

She stands in the archway leading from the kitchen to the garden, and surveys her domain.

It's, well...

It's pretty?

Water flows along tidy little artificial streams, fountaining from pipes in the stone walls and pouring down narrow grates. In between the streams, there are beds of dirt; some are raised, while others . Off to the left, in front of where she judges the doorway from the sitting room probably is, there's a square sand garden with sparkling off-white sand and a few nice-looking rocks. She's not a rock expert but it's all very... grey, with some pale brown, the same colour scheme from inside the house part of this cave.

"This just won't do," she says aloud. Cozy Cave House is nice and all, but her dreams of the forest have taught her how to garden, and looking at this barren expanse makes her itch to take up a trowel.

Surveying the garden, she thinks about flowers.

She's expecting her mind to fill with memories of starlit shrubbery, and it does a little, but there's another memory behind them, stuck in the back of her brain like a bit of popcorn between your teeth. She does her best to wiggle it out, and remembers...

Red sand under a brass sky. Gleaming brass bees with lacy wings. Fields of beautiful metal flowers, copper petals aflame with sunlight.

Her arboreal instincts aren't too sure about gardening with metal, but she has other instincts, brass ones to go with that gleaming brass dome.

The expected alignment of her inner compass doesn't come, though. Maybe she can't get to the brass place from here?

Can she get to the white marble place from here? No. The college? No.

The forest? Yes.

So... only the forest is reachable from the Cozy Cave. Or only the last place she was before entering the Cozy Cave is reachable from the Cozy Cave. It feels more like the second thing; it feels like the door she carries in her heart leaves a waypoint behind when she enters it, and she can exit again the same way.

This bears some testing.

She goes back to the little foyer, out of a vague sense that it's best to enter and leave your house by its door, and sits on the floor and reaches across the gap between worlds. It's a little easier this time. Maybe it will get better with practice? Or maybe it just gets better if you're not flailing at it in desperate confusion. Hard to say.

The starlit forest is just as she left it.

If you'd asked her last week she would have said that a Cozy Cave House with no windows and many bookshelves and a pantry full of plain yet pleasant bread would be the most comfortable imaginable place, absolutely bar none. But she finds herself breathing easier in the forest's warm air, feeling better under its many-coloured starlight.

She will just have to make the Cozy Cave House even cozier. Step one: flowers.

Inner compass, which way to the brass place?

She turns in the indicated direction, and starts walking.

There's a spring in her step, and it feels out of place there. What business does she have being happy? Just because the forest is nice and it feels nice to be here? Just because she has a Cozy Cave House with a huge bathtub and a library? Just because she decided not to lie in the dirt and rot? She should've stayed down there. It would've been better for everyone.

...she shakes her head. No, that's not right. She's not harming anyone. She did admittedly make herself a dress out of someone's skin, but the tree seemed happy to help, and its bark has already regrown. She can just... exist, by herself, in this welcoming forest and her private cave house, and no one can possibly be any worse off than they would be if she turned into a tree.

With renewed purpose, she keeps walking.

...this dress is nice. It doesn't quite swish, but it has a pleasant weight to it. It is just about the worst dress she can imagine herself making with the tools and materials available, and as she walks she begins to tentatively imagine making better ones, and she finds she quite likes the idea.

(It also occurs to her that perhaps part of the reason she feels drawn to the Planet of College Girls is that she might be able to find underpants there. Well - the need for underpants is not all that urgent at the present time. She thinks she'd rather focus on flowers for now.)

The forest is beautiful.

Every tree is a unique character, some familiar, some strange. She wishes she knew more about trees. It would be nice to be able to look at something and say 'that's an oak' instead of 'well, it has leaves, and I think I saw one in a park once'. On the other hand, no amount of knowing things about trees is going to explain that one over there with the blue bark that looks almost iridescent. Or at least she's pretty sure it won't? Did Earth have trees like that?

—thinking of Earth brings up her internal compass, and she stumbles to a halt, staring blankly into the distance.

Earth is still there???

Well—of course it's still there, she's the one who died, but—she can just go to it?

She can just go... home?

...what if she doesn't want to?

What if she does want to?? What if—

No.

Stop.

Deep breath.

She does not have to do anything about Earth.

Even though it's there, even though she can go to it.

The continued existence of Earth represents, among other things, a possible alternate source of underpants, but if she'd rather take her chances on the Planet of College Girls she can just do that.

She isn't sure how long she spent being slowly assembled underneath the forest, but it was a good long while. It's reasonably likely that back at home she is at best a missing person, at worst a waterlogged body already retrieved from the lake and wept over by Aunt Gail.

(Wept over by Luke, too? She can't imagine him crying. She can't imagine him regretting what he said to her. It feels like a wrong she's doing him, to be this bad at imagining it.)

...regardless, Earth can just keep on keeping on without her. It doesn't change anything, that she has the option to go back. An option is not a constraint.

She steadies herself, breathing deeply of the humid air, and sets her internal compass to brass bees and copper flowers, and starts walking again.