The vast majority of rifts connected to this entity are very, very bad for the person who happens to pass through them, if they can even be said to be the same person anymore.

This one is... fine? A little temporal displacement, a few tiny language related changes, absolutely no trapping Asmodia in her own personal pocket dimension or transforming her into a four-dimensional monster or flipping around her values.

And now she is somewhere else.

She comes out the other side of the wood. She... kind of thought it was bigger? It's not like she's ever been all the way to the other side, though.

What does she see?

Some sort of... castle?  Fortification?  It's shaped like a fortification, but the main part of it has too many windows to make sense as one.  It's built of red brick, two stories tall, with crenellations on top.  The windows do have iron bars in them.  Past it, clearly in the center of the area surrounded by the long curved wall-building, is a giant grassy mound, much taller than the walls, with a path going up around it and nothing but a small pole on top.

She's going to veer away from the maybe-fort, aiming for the other side of the mound in the hopes that it'll make her at least a little harder to see.

The edge of the forest is strangely close to the walls, so she should be able to stay a little hard to see as she goes around it, if she opts to do it through the trees rather than on the pretty path with flowerpots on the sides.  The maybe-fort transitions into a more normal wall; outside it there are some complicated wooden beam structures with chains attached to them in various ways.  If she goes around all that, she can see the mound is surrounded by a nearly full circle of fort and walls, with some additional brick structures attached, and there's a weirdly smooth stone road going up to it.  Down the road in the direction away from the maybe-fort there are some smaller buildings visible through the trees; nothing is particularly visible through the trees surrounding the structure in the other directions.

It's mostly pretty empty; there's a man in a black uniform walking from one entrance to another.

Does it seem like he's noticed her yet?

He could have theoretically seen her in his peripheral vision, but probably not, if she didn't go out into the open?  He's not acting like it, anyway.  He goes in the door and closes it, and now there aren't any people visible outside.

Well, if he saw her, it's too late to change that. She'll keep moving, trying to move quickly enough to make good time but not so quickly that she couldn't just be in a hurry for normal reasons. She continues to steer clear of the buildings as much as she can.

She can cross the road and go back into the trees.  If she keeps veering into the forest whenever she reaches an edge, she'll still run out of forest in about an hour.   Now there's a stretch of fields, with some crops more familiar-looking than others, and the occasional scattering of houses in the distance.

Also the sun is getting close to setting, and it's doing it more ahead of than behind her.

...She was trying to go east. She's not really sure how she managed to get turned around, she's only even been walking for a few hours. Has she somehow spent her whole life being wrong about which way east is — no, she's seen the sun set before—

Probably she should try to figure that out tomorrow. For now, is there anywhere that looks like an even slightly reasonable place to sleep, assuming she doesn't want to risk the houses?

Is a stand of trees between some fields a reasonable place to sleep?  It's cloudy and looking like it might rain, but it's not very cold, so it probably can't go too badly.  Or if she's willing to get closer to the houses, she could try sneaking into a barn and have a roof over her head.

A barn would probably be better if she can manage to get into one without being noticed, if she's just lying out in the open it'll probably be easier for anyone who's chasing her to see her. (...And she'd rather not get rained on, that too.) How close would she have to get to the houses to sneak into a barn?

If she's picky about it, she can find one that's on the far end of a big courtyard, looks pretty unused, and she can crawl in through a half-missing board in the back instead of having to go anywhere within view of the house.

It's full of... things.  Some of them make sense, shovels and buckets and so on, and some are very large complicated spiky metal shapes.

...Well, now she's kind of worried that the local priest stores his torture implements in a barn for some reason, but probably she's more likely to get caught if she finds a different barn.

She finds whichever part of the barn looks most concealed, eats some of the bread she stole from back home, and then curls up very small with her rucksack next to her and tries to sleep.

They're pretty dusty and don't smell like blood at all, so if they're torture implements they're not the ones he uses every week, at least.

She gets woken up by the rooster crowing, as they generally do on a farm.  Unless she's used to sleeping through that, in which case she gets woken up by something making a confusing and unpleasantly loud noise, out in the courtyard.

She's sleeping pretty lightly, under the circumstances, and wakes up when the rooster starts crowing. If she peers out through the missing board does it seem like she can get back out again without being noticed?

Yes - nobody seems to be up with the sun, or at least not out in the fields yet. 

Alright, in that case she's going to get out of here. Can she tell for sure which direction the sun is rising from?

The clouds have half cleared up, and the sun is its usual amount of obvious!

Does it look like she's going to be backtracking straight through the woods, or something more complicated than that? She's really not sure how she managed to get turned around, but maybe if she's got the sun right here it'll be easier to figure out where to go. If Andoran province is even to the east, which maybe it isn't, it's not like she has any way of knowing besides what the Asmodeans said.

Approximately backtracking, yes.  Woods to the east, fields interspersed with some trees in all the other directions, not that she can see very far.

Now that she thinks about it, she's not actually sure backtracking is a good idea. It'll get her closer to Andoran, probably, but depending on how exactly she got lost she might just end up walking back home, which would be a lot worse than just not being to Andoran yet. What if she heads... north, north should be safe for now unless she somehow ended up exactly south of home, and it won't get her closer to Andoran but it won't get her further from it either.

North it is!  Fields, with the occasional person in them but rare enough to be easily avoided - it's neither sowing season nor harvest.

There's a... ??dragon?? in the sky??  It's really loud!

Why is there a dragon????

Is there anywhere she can hide from the dragon? She doesn't think it's looking for her, she's not important enough to be worth sending a dragon after, but she'd still rather it not notice her.

She can flatten herself in this wheat and hope it'll cover her (it won't do a great job of it), or dive a few steps into the bushes.

Whichever she picks, the dragon goes on its very loud way quickly enough.

Oh good. In that case she's going to head off again.

She has to cross one of those weirdly smooth stone roads (there's a wire strung along it on poles, but it's much too high to work as a fence).  In less than an hour she ends up on a slight grassy hill where she can see more of the surrounding terrain:  a cluster of villages ahead, a small lake and some bushes to the east, a very flat field with a tower next to it to the west.

Also the ??dragon?? is flying over again, closer than last time.

She can't hide from a dragon up here, so she'll have to just hope it doesn't notice her.

Her waterskin is getting pretty low by this point, so she veers towards the lake. (She's heard that pure water can make you sick if it doesn't come from a priest, but it's not like she can just ask a priest for water, so... hopefully that was just something the Asmodeans made up so that everyone would think they needed the priests around?)

The dragon once again flies away without appearing to take any notice of her.

She has to route around some houses, and part of the lake is fenced off for some reason, but if she doesn't want to jump a fence she can find a part that isn't.  It's all surrounded by reeds and hard to get to any clear-looking water though.  There are a few small wooden piers that would make that easier, but there's a man fishing off one of them and within clear view of the other two.

Well, that's not great. Can she tell anything about the man from where she's standing? A regular farmer might not turn her in, especially if he assumes she's got a legitimate reason to be traveling. 

He's wearing weird clothes - they're just cut completely differently from what she's used to, and there's something odd about the fabric too, and his shirt and hat are brightly colored in a way you wouldn't expect a regular farmer to be able to afford.  But then again, most of the people she's seen here were wearing weirdly bright things.  Except the black-uniformed man near the castle.  This guy here is clearly not wearing a uniform, at least.

He's old, his hair mostly grey, and acting pretty much like a normal farmer?  He looks kind of bored, isn't particularly alert.  He has some bags and baskets arranged like he's been here for a while.  Occasionally he takes a drink from a glass bottle.

Old is good, if he decides to make an issue out of her being here she might be able to leave faster than he manages to tell anyone. She'll head over to whichever dock is farthest from the one he's on and fill up her waterskin.

He watches her for a moment, frowning vaguely. 

"Good morning!  What're you doing with that water?"  He has to shout a bit because of the distance, but he doesn't sound annoyed or look like he's about to move from where he's sitting.

That's a really weird question, it's not like there are lots of different reasons for people to dip their waterskin in a lake. It's going to really suck if it turns out that the local lord has forbidden people from drinking from the lake on pain of death or something.

"Filling up my waterskin!" she shouts back.

(He will hear her speaking Polish.)

"Your what?"  Confused squinting.  "You know you shouldn't drink that, right?"

"This is my first time passing through this village, where do people around here get water to drink?"

Probably the answer is 'from the priest' but if he tells her to talk to the priest she can just pretend she's going to and not actually do it.

"From... the tap?  Or the well, I guess, if they haven't got a tap.  But if you want water to drink right away you gotta buy mineral at the store.  Your parents not teach you that?"

What's a tap? ...The priest here makes people pay for water?

Probably that's less important than figuring out how to answer his actual question without sounding incredibly suspicious.

"I'm not from around here, we didn't have a lake back home." She's pretty sure there aren't that many lakes in the area, so it shouldn't contradict anything else about her story, and she already admitted she wasn't local.

"It's not about--" he makes a frustrated noise and gives up on explaining the multiple levels on which one should know not to drink unboiled lake water.  "Where are your parents, anyway?  Or your teachers or whoever you're here with?"

"I'm sixteen," she lies.

"Sure, fine, and you're doing what exactly?"

"I've got business at the markets in Dekarium." That one she did have planned in advance.

... He doesn't know where that is, but he's not going to admit that to the weird stranger girl.  Sounds far away, though.  Maybe she's foreign?  She doesn't sound foreign, but what does he know.  And the airport is right there.

"Well, go get your train or whatever, and don't drink fucking lakewater!"

He turns back to his fishing, but looks over at her again a moment later.

Well, in that case she's going to leave, and hope he doesn't decide to tell the priest on her.

He doesn't look to be about to do anything any time soon. 

Where does she go next?

She's heading north-ish again, heading a little bit east to avoid the village if necessary.

...If she just eats the food she brought with her she's going to run out pretty quickly. Is there anything growing around here that looks like she could just eat it, without needing to do a bunch of extra work to it that'll slow her down? Like, apples or something, she's not going to start eating random plants she doesn't recognize.

Avoiding villages is getting increasingly hard, but the first problem with going north is that there is a large road with... fast noisy incomprehensible things... going along it, not constantly, but frequently enough to be kind of frightening.  There's a stream that the road goes over - she could go in it and under the bridge, if she doesn't want to get too close to the things?

Before that area there are some fields with young corn at the stage where it's pretty edible raw.  (You can kind of eat young wheat too, and there's more of that, but it's really a lot of work.)  No apple trees or anything of that sort around here.

Alright, in that case she'll take some young corn when no one's looking and head on her— what the Abyss are those??? She didn't know ??constructs?? like that even existed.

Well, she's definitely not going anywhere near the weird constructs. Going in the stream also seems like a bad idea, though, she doesn't have another set of clothes if these ones get wet. Is there room under the bridge to squeeze past the stream without actually getting wet?

It'll be a tight fit, but she can squeeze through the bushes on the bank where they go under the bridge.  (It won't be great for her clothes, but at least they'll be dry.)  The stream is also very small, she could take her shoes off hike and her clothes up to her knees and just get her feet muddy.

Either way, the ??constructs?? zoom past noisily and leave her alone. 

The little stream keeps going north, and following it makes her life easier - there's really rather a lot of villages here, one on the right before the big road and another one after, and a large one on the left, but they leave the stream with enough empty grassy space that she can walk along it and not have to get too close to any houses.  (Maybe it floods sometimes?)

It gets worse after about an hour's walk - a road along the west side of the stream, then another on the east side, and then a place with two big road-bridges going over it and some large buildings next to them.  Does she want to risk getting through there, or backtrack a while to the stripe of forest that went from the east to the west?

... One of the bridges has an even worse ??construct?? curving over it, like some kind of giant and disturbingly fast metal millipede, making a truly incredible racket!

Oh, if it's shallow enough that she isn't going to get her clothes wet, walking in the stream is probably a good idea — it'll be harder for anyone to follow her if she's not leaving a trail. ...She thinks. 

How late is it when she gets to the big buildings? Would she even have time to make it back to the forest without it getting dark?

It's maybe a little after noon, or maybe not even that, and it'll be maybe half an hour to backtrack.  She hasn't gone very far, really, it's just that weird stuff keeps coming up and interrupting her travel.  This whole area is really surprisingly dense in weird stuff!

Alright, in that case she's going back to the wooded area. 

Sure!  And east or west from there?

East, but if she starts to recognize anything that looks like the area near her home she'll reconsider.

No, it's all pretty unrecognizable!  But it's not long before she comes out of the forest onto a grassy area that's pretty much surrounded by a village, with no way to get further east (or north or south, without backtracking west first) without either walking the village road where anyone can see her, or attempting to sneak between the houses.

How are the houses spaced? Does it seem like sneaking between them might actually work, or only if she gets really lucky?

Most of them are close-ish or have fences around the yards; she can find some reasonably sneakable-between pairs, 20-50 yards apart with unfenced bushes or trees between them.  But even if it's pretty likely to work for these individual houses, how likely is it that she can through the whole village like that?  Probably not very.

(Looking around does also find her some apples, although they're green and probably won't taste great.)

That's really annoying. If she backtracks far enough, can she just go around the whole village?

A couple hours' backtracking around the area shows that the forest+field area about a mile across is very solidly surrounded by the village-blob, with the only ways out being back south along the creek toward the farm she spent the night at, back the other way to the spot with the multiple big roads and bridges and buildings, or the band of forest going west where she hasn't been yet.

(Is that going to lead her to somewhere less weird and hard to get to?  Recent experiences point to no, but maybe it's just the right around here that's so annoying and if she picks the right heading she can get back to a more passable area.)

While she's coming to this conclusion just inside the edge of the forest, she gets hit by a pinecone from above.  (Unless she's pretty good at looking up into the trees, in which case she notices there's a boy sitting pretty high in one of them with a book, and can avoid the surprise if not necessarily the pinecone.)

Her heart starts racing as she realizes she's been spotted. Awfully nice of him to warn her he's spotted her, really, but she should get out of here quickly.

There's got to stop being weird big villages somewhere. She'll try heading west.

The boy cackles victoriously at her running away.

That turns out to be a better direction!  She can head more or less west, veering away from villages a few times, and not run out of forest until the sun starts to set.  (Of course she's not making as good time through the woods as she would walking along the road, but they're not too bramble-y or monster-infested or anything.)

Oh, that makes more sense, he wasn't warning her, he was being smug about how he's going to turn her in and get her killed. She picks up the pace, as much as she can in the woods, until he's well out of sight.

(she can't die here she can't die she can't)

Can she find a barn to sleep in overnight while the sun is setting?

It doesn't take her long to find the edge of another village, and there are plenty of barns, although none quite as convenient as last night's.  Rather a lot of these places have dogs which object to her sneaking around - in one of the houses someone comes out the door to see what the racket is about, but if she has any sense she's out of sight by then. 

Also-- are all these people lighting their houses with magic??  All the windows are so bright.

She can eventually find an abandoned-looking shed that's not very near anything, and doesn't even have creepy metal spikes in it.

A shed is fine. Maybe someone'll have their dogs track her down, but she's not going to get very far in the dark, so — she has to just hope that they won't, she guesses, and plan to do her best to fight back if they try.

She curls up with her rucksack and tries to sleep. It's longer before she manages it than it was last night.

It starts raining sometime in the middle of the night, pretty heavily.  The shed roof does not stand up to this very well.

She misses the torture barn, which is probably kind of pathetic. ...Also if her clothing soaks through she might catch a chill, which is an actual problem that isn't pathetic to care about. Is there anything in the shed that she can use to get more cover from the rain?

It's pretty empty - mostly there's some wooden planks and a couple of large rusty cans.  She can kind of prop up some planks against the wall at an angle to keep the worst of the leaks off her, but it's not going to keep her actually dry, just kind of soggy rather than soaking wet. 

If she catches a chill and dies it's not actually worse than getting tortured to death for the glory of Asmodeus. She curls up under the planks and tries to sleep. (It doesn't really work.)

The downpour gets less bad in an hour or two, but the morning is still grey and rainy.  It's not terribly cold, at least, but still a very unpleasant night.

Ugh.

If she tries to walk through the mud she's probably going to leave tracks, can she find any of the weirdly smooth roads?

Not that she can see from here - she's still pretty near the edge of the forest, and the couple of roads she saw were normal dirt.  Is she going to walk through the village looking for the weird stone ones?

No, that's probably even riskier. Hopefully anyone chasing her already lost her trail, she doesn't think people are just randomly going to start following her tracks if they aren't looking for her.

Back into the forest and west, then, or is she planning something else today?

(Also she's definitely hungry. And thirsty. And cold, but maybe walking will help with that.)

Ideally she'd find a well, but it sounds hard to do that without getting spotted.

...It's still raining a bit, can she fill up her waterskin that way?

Probably she could've done that by leaving it right under one of the big leaks overnight, but now it's not raining hard enough to fill anything up without finding something wide to collect the water and then waiting a long while.

... Some of the houses have metal gutter pipes that collect water from the roof - she could get a decent trickle from one of those if she wanted to risk getting that close to a house.

...She does not really want to risk that. She'll head back forest-wards, keeping an eye out for any water sources or edible crops that she passes along the way. Drinking lake water might be a bad idea, but it's probably not worse than not drinking any water.

Probably not!

She finds some old fruit trees near the forest edge.  About half an hour into the forest she finds a rock formation that has a small hollow filled with rainwater, and if she goes over to examine any other large rocks visible from her route she can find more.

Oh good. She fills up her waterskin and keeps moving. Heading... west, she guesses, and she'll just have to hope she was wrong about which way Andoran province is, or about which way west is.

She has to go around another village, then the forest runs out and she needs wait for a horrifying noisy construct to leave before she can cross some fields, but then there's more forest and she can have an uninterrupted, if still wet and unpleasant, several hours' walk through it.  Sometimes there are even trails going in the right direction, if she's willing to take those.  (Nobody else is out there hiking in the rain.)

She'll take them if they're the weirdly smooth kind but not otherwise, there's no reason to make things easier for whoever's chasing her.

They're pretty normal forest trails and not weirdly smooth at all!  Going through the forest with no path is slower, but not by that much, if she's used to it.

In the afternoon, when she comes to a clearing and happens to look up, there turns out to be a castle on a rocky hill looming really rather close by.

She's guessing that's the baron's. She'll backtrack a little bit so she can give it a very wide berth.

She can do that.  She needs to veer away from a village a couple of times, but doesn't run out of forest at any point, and soon ends up in what feels like a larger chunk of forest again, judging by how she's no longer running into villages.  Is she going to actively look for some when it's getting close to sunset?  How long in advance? 

It's gradually stopped raining, but it's still cloudy, and everything is still pretty wet.

She'll start looking for somewhere to sleep when it gets close to sunset, but it's a little hard to tell how close it is to sunset from under the trees, so she's getting kind of a late start. It doesn't have to be a village, a cave or something is also fine, as long as it has something resembling a roof. ...Ideally a roof that doesn't leak.

And it's too cloudy for it to be much of a sunset as opposed to a gradually-getting-darker, anyway, which doesn't help.

She's not going to have much luck with caves - she left the rocky part of the forest behind a while back, and is now in a very flat area.  She hasn't run into any villages yet either, and it's definitely getting dark now, but she can hear dogs barking from one direction?  That's probably going to be a village, right?

Well, it could be a village, or it could be hunting dogs for hunting down runaways, it's hard to know without getting closer. If she really can't find anywhere else to sleep, she'll head towards the barking with her knife out, prepared to run if she gets any indication whatsoever that it's a hunting party.

She can't find anywhere else to sleep unless she's interested in piles of leaves under fallen trees, which don't seem like much of a roof. 

... Yes, it's a village with some dogs getting annoyed at each other.  A kind of weird village though - no fields, and all the houses look pretty new, each one on a little plot of land with a fence around it, and really not much in the way of old barns.  This is going to make it hard to find a place to sleep here...

There's someone walking along a road with two leashed dogs - does that qualify as a hunting party?

Does it seem like they're looking for anyone, or following a trail, or anything, or literally just walking?

Well the dog seems to be following a trail?  But the man isn't paying much attention to it and tugs it away when he wants to follow the road and the dog doesn't.

That's... probably fine. She hopes. Or at least, more fine than hanging out in a forest would be. ...She's still going to steer clear of that road, though, if there's any other way to find somewhere to sleep.

If she investigates the edges of the weird village for a bit, she can find a house still under construction (made of weird large square grey kind-of-bricks-maybe) - an empty shell with walls and a roof, and just holes where the doors and windows will be.  Might make a decent place to sleep?

The lack of doors and windows isn't great, but at least it has a roof. It'll do, she hopes. She misses the torture barn.

It has walls dividing it into several rooms, so even without doors she can find a spot that's not visible from the outside, and out of the wind.

The floor is hard - the same weirdly smooth stone as the roads, maybe? - but it's dry.

Wow, this house is so big for a normal-person house. ...Probably because it isn't, that would explain why it's built out of the whatever-this-is. She'll see about arranging the edge of her rucksack to be a bit of padding between her and the floor. 

It's still really uncomfortable but it's kind of pathetic to care. At least she's not being rained on.

It's not comfortable, but it's dry, and after the previous awful night she's tired enough to eventually manage to fall asleep properly.

She's woken up by two male voices echoing inside the building, talking about incomprehensible construction details.

Can she tell where in the building they are? From what she remembers of the layout, is there a way out of the building without going past them?

It sounds like they're probably in the central hallway somewhere, but it's hard to tell where exactly, with the big place echoing like a particularly complicated cave.  If she comes closer to check - maybe they'll turn out to be past the room she's in and she'll be able to get out behind their backs, or maybe they're standing where they'll see her before she can be sure.

Does this room have anywhere to hide, or any way to leave without going in the central hallway?

Nowhere to hide at all.  There's a window hole in this room - it's near the hallway door rather than in the back where she is, so still a bit of a risk, but might be the best option she has.

In that case, she'll try climbing out through the window.

It's one of the windows that face the road rather than the forest.  A third man is walking up to the house, carrying some long wooden planks.

"Hey, what're you doing there??"

Rather than answering she's going to try to run away!

He drops his planks and goes after her, but she's clearly much more invested in this chase than he is, and by the time he reaches the house he gives up on running after her and looks in through the window she came out of to check the state of the room.

The other two show up at the noise, and the three of them end up having a loud and rather baffled-sounding conversation, but she probably doesn't stick around to try to listen to it from the forest edge?

She is absolutely not going to stick around! She is running the Hell away from here as fast as she can!

She doesn't hear any sounds of pursuit. 

After ten minutes or so of running she hits one of the big weird-stone roads with some constructs moving along it.

She really needs to hide her trail. Is there enough space on the weird stone road for her to run alongside the constructs?

In theory yes!  Depends on how she feels about getting really pretty close to the constructs.  They're all going straight and following the same path, so they don't look likely to run into her even if she does, they're just large and scarily fast.

She doesn't want to get close enough that they'll touch her, obviously, but last time they didn't try to chase her down and follow her, it doesn't seem like they've got minds of their own or anything. Still, she probably wants to head in the opposite direction from the one they're going in.

They're going in both directions, but all the ones close to her side of the road are going one way, if she wants to stay on this side and run in the opposite direction? 

Sure, she'll do that. If it seems like they're getting close to a fortress or a wizard tower or something she'll stop and cross the weird smooth road, her tracks should hopefully gone by then. Or as gone as she can get them, at any rate.

One of the constructs makes a sudden and really loud noise!

Change of plans, she's getting out of here before whatever reinforcements it just tried to call for show up! Can she cross the weird road without touching the constructs if she tries to run behind this one and then across? 

She can, they're not coming that densely. 

Alright, she'll do that, and then she'll sprint away from the road as fast as she can go.

There's a bit of trees, and another village right behind them.  Is she going to run through that, or go along the road in one direction or the other to avoid it?

Both options seem pretty bad, but unless it looks like anyone in the village is running out to the road to attack her she'll run through the village. Farmers are probably safer than whatever that construct was summoning.

The villagers look surprised, some frowning, but nobody threatens her.  And old woman shouts "The <something> left already!" at her as she runs past.

She's not really listening to them, she's trying to run as fast as she can.

She can only sprint for so long, though, depending on how big the village is her legs might start to give out before she can actually make it through.

It's not very big.  Five minutes of sprinting, and then she might want to veer off the (smaller but still weirdly smooth) road into the fields on one side or the other before she hits the next village.

Yeah, she'll head into the fields, veering in whichever direction looks easier for her to stay hidden 

Neither looks great, but east there's a band of some sort of bushes, only half her height but thick enough that she can at least hide in them if she stops and gets down.

Doesn't take long for the fields and bushes to change to forest, but if she keeps going east she'll just backtrack compared to yesterday.  Does she have a plan for the day besides staying hidden?

...Not really. She'll stop going east once she gets to the forest, though, and she'll try to keep an eye out for places she could sleep in the forest, rather than needing to risk a village again.

Some investigation of this particular patch of forest finds a forested route west again, if she wants to keep going that way.  (She could also go north and cross the big road back into the other forest, but she presumably doesn't want to do that, since she was seen there.)  It also finds a clearing with a large cross and a metal figure of a man hanging from it.

No places to sleep around here - it's still pretty wet and devoid of caves - but she has most of the day ahead of her if she wants to keep looking further out.

... She's done a lot of running after a sudden wakeup, hasn't been eating much, and is running out of water again.  She kind of wants to sit down on a fallen log and rest, even if it's wet and not at all a useful sleeping spot.

She forces herself to keep running until the — incredibly weird way of threatening people off breaking the law? Demon cult meeting place? Inexplicably metallic unquiet spirit? Whatever it is, it really doesn't seem safe — is out of sight. And she really should keep running, she can't afford to stop in the middle of the day for stupid pathetic reasons like the way her legs feel, but — maybe just for a couple minutes, and she can eat the last of her food, and then she'll get up and keep going. If they were going to catch her in the next few minutes she was probably doomed either way.

They do not catch her in the next few minutes. 

She runs through the forest for another hour, stumbling on the uneven ground and veering away whenever she sees fields or houses through the trees.  Sometimes there are trails, but they inevitably lead toward the edge, which is not what she wants at all, so even if she was willing to risk them they wouldn't do her much good. 

She nearly runs into another castle, because for some reason they let the forest grow almost up to the walls.  (Maybe it's abandoned?  It doesn't look in good repair, if she stops to look, but she probably doesn't.)

She is absolutely not stopping to look. She is getting away from this castle as fast as she can.

...It might not be very fast. She knows her legs can move faster than this but for some reason they aren't.

She trips on a root hidden in the undergrowth and falls, scraping her hand bloody against the sharp bit of a fallen branch. 

Ow!!!

She should... probably do something about that... but she doesn't really have anything to do it with. In school they wash off injuries with salt water, but she doesn't have very much water, or any salt. Can she find... a leaf or something... to at least wipe off some of the blood, so she won't be bleeding everywhere?

Plenty of leaves, yes, but new blood keeps welling up as she wipes it.  It's slow bleeding, not enough to be dangerous, but enough to mark her trail if she doesn't wrap it up in something absorbent.

She has her clothing and her rucksack and nothing else that would remotely qualify. She doesn't really like the idea of cutting up either of those, but it's better than leaving a trail of blood. She takes out her knife and cuts a strip of fabric from the top edge of her rucksack.

That works.  And then?

She wraps up her hand and attempts to keep going in the same direction she was going before.

She can do that.  She has to cross another road, but a smaller and currently empty one.  There's another big cross next to it, this one without anyone on it, with some containers of flowers underneath.

She's still pretty confused about the crosses but she's not inclined to stick around and try to figure them out. (Maybe they aren't even related? ...Maybe this cross is for actually executing people, and the other one was a threat?)

It does seem weirdly... nice?... with all the flowers, but yes, probably not the place to spend much time in. 

She crosses the small road and keeps going through the forest, although it's a pretty small bit of forest, given how often she has to bounce off villages on one side or the other. 

After a couple of hours there's a another small road and then a large stretch of sand covered with tracks that... were probably left by wheels even if they look uncannily like it may have been giant worms.  It stretches for a long while along the road, so she can't see from here how long it might take to go around.  There are trees on the other side, and a big sandy hill.

Well, that's really not great, but if there's no one else in sight she'll try to cross the sand area to the trees on the other side.

She leaves clear tracks in the sand, unsurprisingly. 

Past the trees there's a cliff looking down over a rather lovely view of a blue-green lake and more forest on the other side.  It would be pretty hard to climb down, but it looks like if she goes left there's a slope down to a rocky beach by the shallow side of the water - further that way there's another lake surrounded by trees.  To the right there are some constructs and people far off in the distance, on another large sandy stretch on that side of the lake - she can hear some muted noises, but they're busy doing their own incomprehensible things, and too far to be able to see her against the forest backdrop.

She'll go left down the slope and around the lake, then. She's mostly staying within the wooded area, but she'll duck out for a minute to refill her waterskin in the lake. (It'd be better if she could find a well or something, like the man at the other lake suggested, but it's hard to do worse than dying of thirst, and the water looks clean.)

It does look very clean, although it tastes off in a hard-to-define way.  But yes, it's better than dying of thirst.

Once she's filled up her waterskin she'll duck back into the treeline and keep moving past the lake.

There's another road soon after, and she has to search a little to find a place to cross it where it's not surrounded by houses, but after that there's more forest and she goes for a good couple of hours without running into any more villages, although it's still not a very deep forest and she crosses the occasional dirt path.  That brings her to midafternoon of this rather exhausting day.  She's not thirsty any more, but she's definitely hungry and tired, and generally not feeling very well.

She keeps an eye out for more apples, or anything else she can eat. Apart from that she can't really think of very much else to do. Offer extra prayers to Desna, maybe, she's not sure if Desna does 'helping travelers not starve' in addition to 'helping travelers not get attacked by monsters' but it can't hurt.

No apples or anything similarly straightforward in the forest.  She finds variously suspicious berries sometimes, but she probably knows eating those is a bad idea.  There's also plenty of acorns!  (She's probably heard that acorns can be edible, but she may have also heard that it's not entirely straightforward.)

She briefly considers taking some of the more familiar-looking berries in case someone catches her and she can't get away but decides against it. She doesn't really have a good way to keep them separate from everything else in her rucksack, and if she gets captured alive they'd almost certainly be able to stop her from eating them anyway.

If she goes long enough without passing any farms she might have to start looking for them instead of actively avoiding anywhere vaguely close to other people but her best guess is that that won't be a problem, she keeps running into them even when she's trying not to.

She does run out of forest before sunset, but the thing she runs into is another lake rather than a farm.  A huge one - she can see the other side but without any detail, and from where she's standing on the bank she can't tell how far it stretches in either direction, but it looks to be miles.  At least there's a road running along the shore, roughly north-south, and hopefully it leads somewhere.

She'd rather not backtrack if she can avoid it. She heads down the road, keeping a look out for anything she can eat and anywhere she can reasonably sleep.

Half an hour down the road the lake ends, and so does the forest, giving way to fields.  Most of them not immediately edible, but some searching does yield a stretch of corn just about when it's getting dark.

She'll take some corn, then, and plan to come back for more in the morning when she's eaten what she has. Is there any sign of shelter, ideally without any people? She's willing to take some extra risk of getting eaten by forest-beasts if it means that she definitely won't run into any humans. She hasn't even seen any forest-beasts.

This is another more newly-built area, with nearly all houses having fenced yards, and nothing in the way of abandoned sheds.  If she's willing to hop a fence she could sneak into a barn, or if she spends some more time looking she might be able to find another unfinished building?  These people do light their houses and even their streets bizarrely brightly, so looking around after dark is not as bad an idea as one would usually think.  But it's also been long enough since the rain that she can find a dry and decently comfortable patch of grass nearby.  (She's cold, but she'll be cold no matter where she ends up.)

She's definitely not going to risk an unfinished building after what happened this morning. If she can find a patch of grass with trees or corn or something around it to keep her out of view she'll go with that, otherwise she'll try to jump a fence and sneak into whichever barn is the farthest from any of the houses.

None of the barns are particularly far from the houses, is the problem.  But she can find a screened off patch of grass just fine, on the edge between a corn field and a patch of trees and bushes, a decent distance from the houses and roads.

It's not great, but she doesn't really expect to find anything better. She curls up in the little grass patch and tries to fall asleep.