The impact was jarring, but, Emma knew, not nearly as jarring as it could’ve been. It could have been with a rock, and that would’ve been all she wrote for Emma. Instead she landed on nice, soft water and had the privilege of feeling her shield crack open. But not completely. No, it remained just intact enough to start filling up with water and sinking.
Emma didn’t want to drown. She’d thought breaking in half on impact with a rock had been scary, but it was nothing to drowning. She panicked all over again. Limbs flailing, fists bouncing off her own shield as it got heavier and sunk farther. Emma took an embarrassing stretch to think of the obvious.
She strained her will for a moment and let the shield disintegrate, then kicked her legs and hurried up to the surface of the water. Her lungs burned, but cooled down as she drank in a mouthful of oxygen. Emma realised a few things all at once then.
The first; she was moving. Moving fast, being dragged along by currents about as quick as her own running speed. The second was that she still lived. The water was safer than she might have feared, not hypothermically deadly and not scalding like the steam-vents.
The third thing, though, was most concerning of all. Aexilica was nowhere to be seen.
Emma panicked again.
She thought about it, as fast as she could manage without scrambling her own egg, and came to the obvious conclusion fast. Aexilica had gone into the water with her. And she’d been wearing armour. Cloth armour.
Emma dove, tried to look around. Saw nothing. Her eyes were irritated by the rapid currents, vision blocked by a million frothing bubbles caused where one patch of water churned through another and drove air beneath the surface. It was all she could do to even keep track of which way was up and keep from drowning herself all over again. Before she saw anything, her burning lungs dragged her back up to breathe.
I need to find her.
That single thought was stronger than anything else in Emma’s head, a coherent focus which nothing could distract her from. But will alone was nothing. It didn’t change how powerful her eyes were, the water’s opacity. Didn’t make Aexilica’s armour less likely to have grown waterlogged and started dragging her down.
It had only been a few seconds since Emma and her landed, she would still be alive. But that didn’t mean a damned thing if Emma couldn’t—
Cognition.
Emma was the stupidest woman in the world, she’d already found her own solution for this days ago. She concentrated, tuned out the terror and the panic, and let her mind expand. It flowed outwards in a great radius of cerebral attunement until she felt…
Contact, another. Her thoughts pressed against someone else’s, then another someone. As far as Emma knew there were only two people besides her dumb enough to get themselves dunked in this river. She dove again.
For a terrible instant Emma felt certain she’d find nothing below her, that she was just chasing some phantom sensation. Then her fingers grazed something solid, her eyes widened, and she just barely made out Aexilica’s form. She started swimming upwards with both hands gripping her tight.
And promptly failed, because Aexilica was literally double her weight even without the extra snag of waterlogged armour dragging her down. No matter how Emma kicked, she couldn’t even make the woman budge. She cursed, then made herself think.
Around her, Emma conjured hardened energy. It had mass, but it didn’t have much. Even layers measuring several centimetres thick were light enough for her to move in without much difficulty, and sure enough it proved far, far less dense than the surrounding water.
Buoyancy went from Emma’s greatest enemy to her best friend, confidant and, on those cold, lonely nights, her lover. Aexilica and her shot back up to the surface, and Emma hastily conjured a platform of hardened energy to haul herself onto it.
It was not, mind you, as easy to drag Aexilica up. She was actually heavier out of the water, buoyancy not being here to help her and all. She ended up resorting to a brief Force effect lifting her upwards with about ninety percent of her own weight. That, finally, let Emma drag the woman on-board. From there she just kept them from sinking for all of the remaining thirty seconds they needed to hit the riverbanks and plop out into the gravelly ground.
Emma wanted to just lay there for a moment, let her exhausted body rest. But she couldn’t. She scrambled up to her knees, hurried over to Aexilica and turned the woman onto her back. She felt for her chest. A heartbeat, good. Felt at her mouth, no breathing. Bad.
What did you do when someone had water in their lungs?
Get it out, genius.If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
With a great deal more effort than most women and almost any man would have needed, Emma managed to force Aexilica supine with her hips and shoulder meeting the ground. Then she snaked an arm under her waist, propped her chest up against Aexilica’s back, and hauled inwards as her hands tightened around the abdomen.
The heimlich maneuver, or as close as Emma could get to it from memory and pop-culture alone. She must’ve either done something right or gotten very lucky, because in a few squeezes Aexilica was regurgitating water and coughing. Then she inhaled.
Emma fell back, gasping. Drained. After taking a few more moments to make sure Aexilica really was breathing again, she finally let herself relax against the gravel and just…Listened to her heart beat.
She was fairly sure it had never drummed so loud in all her life.
When Emma finally came to—or rather, when she finally had the calm and presence of mind to let herself move and respond to the world— she rolled over and looked at Aexilica.
The woman was up now, gasping. It was only then that Emma realised Larry was still at her belt. He was coughing too, though Emma had no idea why. It wasn’t like he had any lungs connected to him.
“Nice—hrngh—nice thinking with the…The raft.” Aexilica gasped, her voice sounding ragged and worn. Probably, she’d coughed away hard enough to simulate a cheesegrater against her voicebox. But she was fucking alive.
“Thanks.” Emma wheezed. Wasn’t sure why, for a moment, then remembered she’d just spent the last minute or so desperately hauling twice her own body weight across the place. For a while she and Aexilica sat together in silence, punctuated by the occasional snark from Larry. Even he seemed put-out somehow. Typical of him to somehow get whiney over drowning when he didn’t need air in the first place.
But the silence couldn’t last. Day was ending, night crawling over, and the air was cooling already. They were wet, battered, exhausted and scraped in so many places by god-knew-what that Emma couldn’t even feel all the minor sores littering her body.
And they had bigger concerns than moping around and nursing their own discomfort.
“We need supplies.” Aexilica wheezed at last, her voice still fragile and wispy from one or more of several recent traumas. “We can’t get those by staying in the wilderness.”
“What are you suggesting?” Emma frowned.
Aexilica looked up at her, resigned.
“There’s a city near here, you saw it yourself. The one you were almost sacrificed in front of. Vichin. We can pick up the things we need to travel back to Aethiq there.”
“No.” Emma snapped. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s a dumbass idea.” Larry added, helpfully. “If you get yourself killed it’ll take who-knows how long for me to get back home.”
Emma’s first instinct was to agree that sprinting into the middle of a heavily populated enemy settlement hours after killing a bunch of people within sight of it was a bad idea. She didn’t respond based on her first instinct, though. And actually thought about it.
“We do need food.” Emma shrugged. “And it wouldn’t hurt to be in somewhere actually warm and semi-habitable when the night comes, right?”
Larry looked like she’d just spat on him, while Aexilica looked as if she were trying to find the best argument she could against agreeing even as she nodded.
“Then it’s settled.” Emma chirped, feeling some semblance of calm return to her. She was making decisions again, picking where they’d go. Okay, sure, it was mostly out of her hands given that the only alternative here was dying of exposure, but at the very least that was still an option. She wasn’t just being carted around.
And if she died, she got to choose when.
They took off without further ado. Or, rather, with a lot of further ado exclusively from the person with no arms and legs, whose further ado did not actually delay anything else they opted to undertake. The walk was…Unpleasant. And, worst of all, a walk.
Where Emma was now, beside the winding river in some shitty valley, there just wasn’t chance to use her new sledge, improvements or no. The room wasn’t there, and they were still walking beside the water. Water that was, now, flowing in the opposite direction to where they wanted to go, making another raft not even feasible either.
She tried, of course. And almost drowned.
Accelerating along a river was one thing, Force was fine for that and applying touches of Energy at corners let Emma do something close to steering. The problem wasn’t even overpowering the currents, which were trifling things compared to her magical acceleration.
The real bottleneck in that approach was that the raft kept overturning. Emma wasn’t ready for what such conflicting forces did to her vessel’s balance, and in mere moments it tipped her over into the water.
It was Aexilica’s opinion that Emma’s efforts were pointless, and best saved up for something less “stupid” and “dangerous”, however Aexilica was not an all-powerful wizard and so she had no intention of listening to her. Trying another raft, Emma made one with a greater elevation and a larger, now sealed, cavity for air to gather within its structure. The added buoyancy made it a great deal less prone to suddenly flipping over, which was good.
The seizure-inducing experience of actually riding it was less so.
Still, after a brief half-hour of proving her concept, despite infuriatingly strong scrutiny from the apparently hydrophobic Aexilica, Emma was eventually able to convince her companion to join her on an enlarged model, and they started making a good deal more progress.
Casual progress, too. Enough for her to take some time to check her stats.
Fundaments:
Energy 2, Matter 1, Force 2, Entropy 1, Cognition 1, Space 1, Time 1
Crafts:
Alchemy 1, Talismans 1, Enchanting 1, Animacy 1,
Cores:
Attunement 12, Mastery 6
It was, once again, a lot of numbers paired with words Emma didn’t quite know the meanings of. Fortunately, god had created Larry for that very purpose.
“You’ve expanded your knowledge of Forces.” Larry actually sounded surprised as he said that. Emma didn’t want surprised, she wanted smug and knowing. Free info.
“Well yeah, I’ve used it a ton.” Emma snapped. “What else?”
“There should be some new, significant change to it.” He continued, irritably. “And you should have more raw power…I think.”
“You think?” Emma scoffed.
“As I said, I do not know as much about fucking Untethered.” He growled. “Just experiment, see what you can do. Attunement means how out-of-synch with the world your mind is growing, how much it’s expanded. My guess is you have more raw power from that and a new trick you can do with Force. Play around and find out for yourself if you have all the fucking answers.”
He fell silent at that, and, with nothing more to do, Emma gave his suggestion a try.