The first thing any Soraame Clan shadow hunter learnt, long before they ever even started their apprenticeship, was how to swim.
Like many youths of the clan, Hamonike had learnt to swim and float before she had learnt how to make the transition from crawling to walking. And more importantly, she had learnt what to do when you fall into fast moving water. How to twist to get your feet below you, because breaking a leg was survivable. Breaking your neck wasn’t. Protect your head, just go limp, don’t panic and let the current take you, and eventually it will wash you up somewhere down river.
Unlike the other youths in her clan, she really did not like to swim, not anymore. Maybe she had liked to, as a young child. Maybe at one point she had liked to float around in the shallow waters using her third eyelids shadow hunters had to look at and see clearly all the colourful glowing little fish that would dart and flicker between the roots like underwater stars. Maybe she had liked to dive under the water because she was great at finding the little kani that would live at the bottom, scuttling between the silt and rocks. Maybe, just maybe she liked how when she was under the water nobody could shout at her, and she could scream if she wanted to as loudly as she wanted and all there was to show for it was a flurry of bubbles and muffled noise. But that was calm water. Back when she had two arms and everything was still okay.
When she wasn’t being tossed around like a stuffed toy by a flashflood.
Knowing what to do when that something happened, and actually doing it when it finally did, might as well be the two moons. Two completely separate things. One is standing on dry land and thinking confidently from solid ground and safety ‘okay! If you fall in the water here is how to try to not die or drown!’ and the other is actively dying and drowning and pain in your back, your legs and your shoulder (why is it always her shoulder?) as it all gets whacked by branch, branch, rock, another branch. It’s all muddy all very horribly cold and trying to remember that right, she wasn’t supposed to be panicki-
She hits a cluster of roots, bubbles laced with little bits of foam and wisps of red fluttering from her mouth.
Perhaps what made it worst of all was that it didn’t get any easier the second time. Only this time nobody is going to save her, she’s going to drown down here, she’s going to die and her clan probably won’t even miss her and-
She pops free, a tangle of roots like grasping claws grasp at where her arm should’ve been, with nothing to grab onto. Hamonike almost has time to gloat and call the roots stupid when she collides back first into a thick trunk of the tree washed down the river with her, leaving her barely the time to think as the air leaves her lungs and the world washes away to nothing.
Hamonike returned to consciousness because she was too angry to let the stupid river kill her. She came too, pulled herself out of shallow, muddy hot water onto the sand and rocks with a loud, ugly gagging noise and several mouthfuls of regurgitated water and slime, because she was beaming the mental image of Kitoge mocking her for being so bad at everything the Soraame Clan was supposed to be good at directly into her own brain and she REFUSED to die with that as her last thoughts.
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She collapsed onto her back after she was sure that was all the water, heaving in greedy gulps of air as she stared at the sky.
It took her a minute to realize that was weird. Seeing the sky. Normally the jungle’s thick canopy was all anyone in the rainforest could see, and even if one was to climb to the tips of the tallest trees, you’d simply see nothing but mist, fog, and the storm clouds ready to dump another rain storm on the land. A cloud dots the sky. A single cloud. The most pathetic looking flimsy cloud she’s ever seen in her entire life. A cloud that frankly ought to be embarrassed to call itself a cloud, and she could only imagine it got laughed at by all the other clouds.
Beyond it, a twilight purple pink sky speckled with stars, so dazzling she forgot her mockery of the one lone cloud.
Where was she? Hamonike groggily wondered, and slowly, with a grunt she peeled her soaked body off the sand and forced herself into a shaky sit to observe the strange, instantly unfamiliar land around her. She was somewhere wide open, which she quickly decided she didn’t like. Ahead of her –across the water littered with branches, trees and debris that had been swept along with her– rising up from its banks to a height that dwarfed the trees and the cliff she had struggled with was a cliff taller than any other she had seen in her entire life. Cliffs that weren’t moss claimed, or a slate, greenly blue. The stone here was purple, with hints of red and a deep, burnt colour. She followed the towering expanse to her right, watching it sprawl down until the rocky walls would bend and twist and stop her from seeing any further, and then left, to be met with the same daunting view.
She was in The Great Valley, she knew that much…but where?
She jolted sharply when a low, long howling noise echoed, reverberating out through the valley and her chest. Predators, predators she had never heard before, or seen before as she spots it up on the cliffs, a long, low slung body and the claws and limbs to scurry, skitter even, up and down the cliff. Its fur is dappled and splashed like the rocks, had she not heard it, she never would’ve seen it.
And it’s- it’s looking at her she realizes with a second start, likely has been for a few moments before she caught on, judging if she was worth scrambling down the cliff and crossing the water to chase down and eat. The shadow hunter forces herself up.
“I absolutely did not survive almost drowning again to get eaten by a furry noodly beast,” no if it did try, she would bite and hiss and spit and make it absolutely regret it, she thought not at all frantically as her eyes darted around to find shelter more reliable than the crunched, washed up trees, though they at very least give her something to duck under as she searches for something a little more sturdy and harder to claw though. In this state, she’s definitely not running very far or fighting, and grimly she already knows with her arm she’s not getting up that cliff, certainly not faster than this animal could. Hamonike’s gaze catches a gap in between the rocks, small, even for her to fit, but if that's the case this animal (and any other animal its size) definitely will not fit in after her.
Hamonike stumbles into the shelter, wiggling until she’s more certain of her safety. It opens up a little further in, enough space to lie down and rest. With exhaustion she flops down, curling up to get as warm and comfortable as she can get. If she can rest, she can deal with this later, when she has more energy and wits about her.
