She seems to have misplaced her previous pond.

She’s found a new one, though! She even seems to have found herself in it, which is typically more of a third date sort of thing, although this narrator isn’t about to judge. 

The veil of night is crisp, and dark, and beautiful. Every star is perfectly visible, stars being the daring creatures that they are, and most everything else in the world seems entirely too shy to reveal itself; even the moon is absent. She can see the tranquil silhouette of a tree - or two, or three, or four, or actually she’s probably in a forest nevermind - and a faint shimmer of light on the surface of the pond, and those stars aforementioned, and nothing else.

The water is warmer, though not quite warm, and the stones seem less slippery.

...what.

She takes a couple seconds to catch her breath and give the situation a chance to resolve itself into something that makes sense.  When it doesn't, she climbs out of the water - a bit gingerly; she acquired a few scrapes and bruises - shucks off her coat in a heap beside her, sits down and hugs her knees to her chest for a few minutes while she gives everything a second shot at being in any way comprehensible.

Everything doesn’t seem like it’s in an especially cooperative mood.

Rude.

Eventually, she scoops up her coat, wrings it out the best she can, and picks a direction to start walking in.  She keeps track of at least three trees that form a straight line at any given time - or, she tries to; it's really dark and her attention span is not so great even when she's not trying to figure out the question of What the Fuck.  She might lose sight of the far one a few times, but it's hopefully enough to mostly keep her from going in circles.

She doesn’t notice herself going in circles! This provides very little evidence either way on whether she is, in fact, going in circles.

She doesn’t encounter anything more interesting than an unusually large toadstool within the next few hours of walking - especially since she’s presumably moving with all the frantic haste of a paraplegic snail, in this level of darkness and in a forest containing a reasonable amount of underbrush.

This is much more nothing than she was expecting, although probably that was dumb of her.  She considers ways she could improve the situation and doesn't come up with many that aren't obviously terrible wastes of magic.  Eventually she decides to take a break; she sits against a tree to rest and try to let her socks dry out some.

The tree fails to do anything suspicious. Her socks, the same. Perhaps they know they’re being watched.

A few fireflies start flickering, singing sonnets to their beetle beloveds in obscure codes of light and bioluminescence. A few more rise up, and a few more after that, and then a rather large number of them, all together, lazily drifting through the quiet nighttime air like little paper lanterns, rising up from the grass, stretching away in every direction, beautiful pinpoints of light. The forest is brighter - still held in the grasp of the gloom of night, but less oppressively so.

She may or may not know enough about firefly behavior to know that this isn’t typical.

They're definitely not acting like any fireflies she's seen before, but she hasn't actually seen that many, so what does she know.  They're pretty, though; she'll sit and watch them for a bit.  It's not like she has a better idea.

The fireflies continue to be pretty.

There’s a faint sound, in the distance, getting closer. Someone - playing a violin?

Excellent!  She puts on her socks and shoes again and heads towards it.

It gets closer rather more quickly than it would otherwise, then.

After a bit of walking, the sound of the violin abruptly stops; every firefly she can see immediately dims, and the night is once again perfectly dark. An amused, feminine voice drips down from a nearby tree -

“A stranger! I don’t often meet strangers. I don’t often meet anyone. I rarely meet myself, in fact, and when I do I’m always quick to run away. Do you often wander deep woods in even deeper night, darling?”

Aw, the pretty's gone.  Also she can't see again.  "Uh, sometimes?  Mostly in the afternoon, which to be fair it was when I started."  She cranes her neck to look up the tree that the voice is coming from and waits for her eyes to adjust to the dark.

This doesn’t immediately reveal anything. 

“But nobody ever wanders here! That’s why I’m always so busy, I’m always meeting nobody. It’s exhausting! But nobody appreciates me. Are you very lost?”

"I think so, yeah."

There’s a kind of synesthetic pout, felt more than seen, from the general direction of the tree.

”That’s no fun! I always like the nobodies who think they know where they’re going, since they never do. Do you need directions?” 

"If you're offering!"

“Wait out the night, walk towards the sunrise, follow the spot of white, and travel down the next river you cross. And don’t take the advice of strangers. Goodbye!”

There’s a vague sound of movement, in the tree, and then yet more arboreal rustling in a tree next to it, and so on. The sound of a fiddle being fiddled with resumes, and becomes too far away to hear in short order.

She debates calling or running after her for long enough that those options disappear.  Looks like it's time for Leaning Against a Tree: Part II, this time with added intention to hang out there for quite a while.  She arranges her stuff to dry again and settles in.

Nothing particularly interesting happens for the rest of the long, dim night.

That's so boring.  Ughhhhhhhh.  She can't sleep through it - not only would that probably be dumb in unfamiliar wilderness, but also she only woke up like an hour before setting out on her initial walk and isn't remotely tired.  She didn't bring her phone, which is really the worst part; it'd be easy to kill however-many-hours with that even without any signal.  She really wishes - well, she wishes she had it in some alternate setup where having brought it with her wouldn't've left it waterlogged and useless, and if she's going for that much she might as well just wish she was back home.

She plucks lots of blades of grass and picks at a lot of moss and wrings out her stuff as thoroughly as she possibly can and takes out her shoelaces and puts them back in in a different pattern.  She attempts to weave something out of the underbrush and gives up in pretty short order.  She tries to climb the tree with bare feet and then with her shoes on.  She gives a lot of thought to trying to teleport home, and almost does, but determines that there's way too many ways that could go wrong seeing as she's never done it herself before, even over very short distances.  (Unless she somehow did it accidentally in the pond, which would actually probably be evidence against.)  She considers practicing porting a few feet away but decides that that's probably a waste of magic, then gets thirsty and hungry and determines that fixing those probably isn't, and fixes them.  She tries wrangling with the underbrush again a few times.  She scratches dried mud off her clothes with her fingernails.

And eventually...

The sun rises! In the east, one can only imagine, although she doesn’t have any external point of reference with which to check.

Birds chirp in cacophonous melodies of love and lust and danger, vividly green and terribly tall trees sway in delicate winds, flowers unfold from their nightly hiding places, spiders dangle in ornate webs framed by the light of the sunrise, gaps in the tree cover reveal merry little cumulus clouds and a cheerful orange-pink-blue sky, shrubs reveal their plump purple berries, and so on and so forth.

Fucking finally.  She sets out the instant it's bright enough to be certain what direction the sun's in.  The nature stuff is all really pretty and she probably enjoys it even more than she would otherwise because it is Not Boring.

Trees! Bees! Shiny little flowers and dainty little reeds, cluttering up ponds less water than weed!

And, eventually: a doggo.

A pure white dog, in particular, of some indeterminate breed, standing out like a pristine patch of snow on an otherwise springtime landscape, fluffy tail merrily awag.

It hasn’t yet noticed her, being utterly enthralled by a large praying mantis in the midst of viciously murdering a half decayed leaf.

Puppy.

She scuffs her foot on the ground audibly in hopes of being noticeable but not startling.

The dog - or, rather, the puppy, exclamation point exclamation point etc etc etc - looks back at her; their tail starts wagging with a vengeance.

”A person! Hot take, forests should have way more people and way fewer trees. I’d apologize to the trees for that but trees are dumb and they wouldn’t understand me and it’d be, like, super pointless? You can understand me! Who are you?”