She follows the stream in its hollow, walking ground that could cave beneath her, and looks for mushrooms for the Argonauts, to make them see. She will change shape and grow by the fire, become impossible to locate, a leering image of fear. She plucks bits of fern and moss, finds droppings she can’t identify, spoor of something larger, gathers a few pellets. A sense of being watched, and her breath shallow. Listening, but all is covered by the water beside her. All that would encase coming closer still.

Leaves and needles and old branches rotting. Mushrooms in clusters near the bases of trees and on banks that have fallen away but not the right mushrooms, and she doesn’t know whether she’ll recognize what grows here.

She moves deadfall, an old branch, and a salamander kinks and runs toward the water but she’s faster, grabs him and holds him close to peer at that sealed mouth, overwide, and slack throat. Eyes without any depth that can be known, bottomless and vacant, numb even at extinction. Belly and squat legs edged in red, otherwise black, as if all creatures must be this, all burrowing upward from some underworld to wait on the surface or just under. Skin moist and not meant for air, for sun. Half-born.

She presses her thumb at his throat until he yanks and dies, sets him carefully in the goatskin and continues on. It could be that no human has ever walked here before. No path, no sign, no trees cut. Wanderers, and so perhaps no forest is untouched, but this air feels unbreathed.

The stream rises in small falls and pools and the banks no longer overhang, no longer so deeply etched. Rotted wood and rock and moss and coming closer to the familiar. Medea finds a colony of mushrooms on a decayed black branch at the stream’s edge. Perfect round caps on short stalks. Domed, bulbous, and so plain looking, a smooth light brown, but these are the right ones. Gatekeepers to the other world.

The Argonauts will begin a new voyage, she says.

The sound of her voice too loud and exposed. She looks around, waits and listens, but there is only the water, made of a hundred sounds and enough to erase all else.

She takes every mushroom, every stalk and bulb until only white circles remain among the bright green moss, a sign unreadable and seen by no one.

She is running out of time. Far away from the shore, and the sun past its peak. She won’t lose her way in light, but she could easily lose her way in darkness.

The goatskin filling. She needs root still, and berries, but there will be no berries here.

She can’t take the same path back. All her life she’s avoided that, always making a circle, afraid to return for what she might find waiting along the way. The sense always of being followed.