It's best not to go anywhere alone these days. Wilhelm is grateful, then, to have found a consistent riding partner in Alicent, or else he'd be tempted into the reckless decision to hit the trails on his own. He can't stay cooped up in the castle indefinitely.

Sure, disappearances aren't all that rare — Summoned come, and Summoned go. But the going isn't usually all at once, or maybe he's only noticing it now because it's people he knows that are vanishing from the castle. People who have become fixtures of his life here. The other night, Elrond never came back to the room, and Wilhelm's barrage of messages went unanswered. In the dining hall, he finds fewer familiar faces, and those that remain are grimmer than usual.

Lucifer's concern sharpened to enough of a point that he decided to arm Wilhelm with a knife. The weight of it in his pocket, rather than reassure him, whets his own paranoia. This is why, as the trail curves into a dense copse of trees, he's watching the shadows. For what, he doesn't know.

Until he catches a glimpse of a pale face amid the trunks, and his heart jumps in his chest. He urges his horse into a faster pace.

"Hey, try to keep up!" he challenges Alicent over his shoulder. He doesn't want to freak her out. Though, his attempted grin is tight, and his eyes dart back to the trees.

When he wakes up, Wilhelm is so disoriented that he thinks he's still asleep, caught halfway between dreams and reality. It's so dark he might as well be looking at the inside of his eyelids. Slowly, he becomes aware of a putrid smell and a burning sensation in his skin, which sharpens as he sloughs off sleep. His arms spasm into action, trying to slap it away, but whatever is causing it is all over him. Groping around him, he discovers that's he's lying in a pool of something viscous and stinking. Further flailing reveals the curve of a slimy, dank wall, and—

He's not alone. There's hair, the bump of someone's chin. Wilhelm grabs at where he thinks their shoulder should be and gives a shake.

"Hey, you okay?" Urgency presses at his voice. And his fingers sink into the person's flesh.

No, they're definitely not okay. Screaming, Wilhelm scrambles away from the body as much as he can. He pounds his fists on the wall of whatever is ensconcing him.

"Let me out! Is anyone out there?"

Nothing in Wilhelm's life has prepared him for the challenge of surviving in such a hostile environment. By the end of the first day, he's already questioning the logic of every piece of media set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. What the hell drove all those people to try so fucking hard? Life is hard enough to get through when you don't have to fight tooth and nail just to stay alive. Half of him is throttled by the urge to simply lie down and wait for whatever will happen, but it turns out the other half of him is just as crazy as all those post-apocalyptic weirdos.

a. He tears open ear after ear of corn, desperate for one that isn't rotted through, until his fingernails are black with all the decaying matter stuck under them, and his sleeves are covered in dried up corn silk. Frustrated, he kicks the stalk, as if that might force its hand.

"Fuck, I'm so hungry. This fucking sucks," he complains to nobody in particular. "There has to be something else to eat around here."

b. At night, Wilhelm lies on the hard ground and waits for sleep to take him. It's the only real reprieve from his hunger and thirst, and the pounding in his head as the result of both. All he's got to be grateful for is the small patch of moss he's positioned underneath his head and shoulders, and all he's got to keep him warm is his cloak, which still reeks of fungal juice and never quite dried. His exhaustion is so heavy, dragging on his mind and body — but every little sound shoots him wide awake.

"What the fuck was that?" he whispers sharply, propped up on an elbow. Maybe it was nothing: someone's sleeping body shifting, a rat scurrying over the rocks. Or maybe they should be very, very worried.