There was no gradual rise of wind, no warning sprinkle of rain. One moment, the lake was a black mirror. The next, the world dissolved into howling chaos. The wind screamed, tearing the breath from Alex’s lungs. A tall wave lifted the bow of the boat toward the sickly violet sky before slamming it back down.
The crack of the second oar snapping was lost in the roar. The boat became a leaf in the chaos.
“Alex!” Iris’s voice was thin. She had propped herself against the stern, her face etched with pain and fierce focus, her good hand gripping the side of the boat.
“Hold on!” he roared back, the words ripped away. He had no oars, no control. He could only brace, one arm hooked around a bench, the other reaching for Iris as the boat was tossed sideways.
The sky shattered. A bolt of violet lightning didn’t fork, it lanced down, striking the water a few meters away with a deafening crack that was more felt than heard. The concussion punched the air from Alex’s chest. The water where it struck didn’t just steam, it boiled, glowing for an instant with an ethereal, purple light.
In that impossible, frozen flash of illumination, Alex saw everything.
He saw the lake churned into a seething, mountainous madness. He saw Iris, hair plastered to her skull, eyes wide not with fear, but with a warrior’s calculation of a battle she couldn’t fight.
And he saw beneath.
The light penetrated the furious, foaming surface. And deep in the black depths, a shadow moved.
It was not a shape of the storm. It was massive. A sinuous, serpentine outline, thicker than ancient oaks, an unconcerned power that made the storm above feel like a tantrum. It had no discernible head, no fins… just an endless, scaled darkness, moving in a slow circle far below, a patient dweller in a drowned realm.
Alex froze, he swallowed hard.
The light vanished. Darkness and deafening noise rushed back in, even more absolute.
“Did you see…” His shout was cut off as the next wave hit. This one didn’t lift them. It broke over them.
Icy black water filled the world. The boat vanished from under Alex. The cold was a shock that locked his joints. He was tumbling, weightless, disoriented. Which way was up? Panic, pure and mindless, exploded in his skull. He thrashed, his lungs already burning.
He never learned how to swim.
The thought was absurd, terrifying. He’d survived monsters and mist, only to be undone by water.
His flailing hand struck something solid. Wood. The hull. He clawed at it, trying to pull himself toward air he couldn’t find. A darker shape loomed in the churning water beside him. Iris. She was moving not with panic, but with purpose, kicking toward the surface, her one arm pulling against the current. She saw him, his wild, desperate eyes. She reached for him.
Alex stretched, fingers straining.
However,
A submerged piece of wreckage, the broken bench spun in the current and struck the back of his head.
His vision went blank. The world went silent. The roar of the storm, the thrash of water, the screaming of his own mind, it all vanished into a deep, muffled hum. He saw a final, blurry image of Iris’s outstretched hand, receding into the deep.
Then there was only the weight, pulling him down into the deep where the shadow waited.
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*****
In the endless darkness of unconsciousness, a faint familiar voice echoed:
“Dream Nexus Receded"
Consciousness returned as a violent convulsion. He was on his side, vomiting lake water that burned his throat and nose. Each cough was agony, a tearing in his chest. He sucked in a ragged, screaming breath, and the air itself felt like glass.
Alex lay there, shuddering and spent. The roar was gone. In its place was a gentle, rhythmic hush.
He forced an eye open.
Sunlight. Blinding, golden, punishingly bright. It warmed his soaked back. He took moment to look around, Alex found himself on a shore, not of black rock, but of coarse, pale sand. The air smelled of salt and seaweed, not stagnant rot.
He rolled onto his back, the movement sending fresh jolts of pain through his ribs and his ruined leg. The sky above was a clear, impossible blue. Birds circled in the distance.
He was alive.
Alex scoffed bitterly, the thought had no triumph. It was a simple, brutal fact.
He pushed himself up on trembling arms, scanning the shoreline. Driftwood. Tangled nets of strange, rubbery kelp. No boat. No…
“Iris,” he choked, head snapping left and right.
The beach was a narrow crescent, bounded by towering, water-smoothed cliffs of dark grey stone. To his left, the shore vanished around a headland. To his right, it ended in a jumble of massive, house-sized boulders.
No sign of her.
He tried to stand. His legs buckled. He crawled. The sand was hot under his palms.
“Iris!” The shout was raw, torn from his abused throat.
Only the waves answered.
He reached the boulders, using them to haul himself upright. His vision swam. Every part of him was broken, bruised, waterlogged. He peered into the shadowed gaps between the great stones. Nothing.
A cold dread, colder than the lake water, began to seep into his core. He had failed. Again. He had been pulled from the water by the current, and she…
He rounded the largest boulder, and his heart stopped.
…She was there.
Half-propped against the stone, lying in a shallow tide pool, her face was turned away, hair fanned out like dark seaweed. She wasn’t moving.
“No. No, no, no…”
He stumbled toward her, falling to his knees at her side. “Iris…,” He pressed his fingers to her throat. For a terrifying second, he felt nothing but cold, wet skin.
Then, a flutter. A weak pulse.
He didn’t think. He dragged her fully out of the pool, tilted her head back, and began the desperate rhythm. Breathe. Compress. Breathe.
“Come on,” he pleaded, water dripping from his chin onto her face. “Not like this. You don’t get to leave like this.”
He breathed into her mouth again, a shared, desperate gasp. Still nothing.
Once again. Breath. Compress. Breathe, for a long, terrifying moment he repeated and repeated and repeated.
“Come on Iris” Alex’s hands began shaking violently, as a dreadful thought creeped in. He did not allow it to stop him.
He breathed into her mouth once again, a deep, long, desperate gasp.
Her body jerked. A flood of seawater spilled from her lips. She gasped, a wet, sucking sound, and then she was coughing, her body convulsing as she fought to expel the lake from her lungs.
Alex held her shoulders, supporting her as she choked and gasped, life forcing its way back in. When the coughing subsided into ragged breaths, she slumped against him, her eyes slitting open. They were clouded with pain and exhaustion, but they saw him.
“Told… you…” she managed, each word a struggle, “…we… alive.” A faint smile tugged at the corner of her lips.
A sound escaped Alex, not a laugh, not a sob, but something raw and in between. He rested his forehead against her wet hair for a second, the weight of the drowning world still on them, but no longer pulling them under.
They were alive. Both of them.
But as he looked up at the sheer, unforgiving cliffs, at the vast, uncaring sea, and felt the deep, aching void where his friends had been, he knew one thing with absolute certainty.
The drowning wasn’t over. It had just changed its shape.
Fragments of a Dreamer
by Glassriver
Read up to Chapter 43
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