“I’m relieved you had a chance to wash that stink off you,” Lynn joked, trying to match Tomas’s adrenaline-fuelled relief to be alive.
Tomas ripped his shirt off to squeeze it out.
“Oh no, the satchel!” Lynn shouted suddenly, realising she had thrown it upon being flung from the pipe. “It’s got the tome in it!”
Tomas looked about, spotting it slowly floating away down the river. He raced after it along the muddy bank, the freezing air nipping at his bare chest.
Tomas took a long stick from the banks and was carefully able to fish it out, using the loop of the satchel as a snag.
“Got it!” he said victoriously, pulling the heavy satchel back to the shore.
Lynn appeared impressed as he went back and handed it to her. “Good catch,” she said, eyeing his shirtless body for a brief moment.
Tomas, realising he was still without a shirt, spun around the other way, embarrassed, to continue wringing his shirt out. He blushed, realising he would have to take his trousers off too to get the water out.
What’s better? Exposing myself to a strange girl, or freezing to death?
Lynn opened the waterproof bag to check that the tome had survived the water. Thankfully, it had. Barely a drop had gotten into the satchel thanks to her throwing it as far out as she could when they had been flung from the pipe. It had not been completely submerged with her when she hit the water.
“It’s safe,” she said with a sigh of relief, clutching the satchel in a sort of hug up to her chest.
“You… you should get your clothes off too,” Tomas said, shivering.
Lynn glared at him in disbelief.
“To dry them out, I mean,” he added, correcting himself with chattering teeth. “It’s not going to get any warmer out here anytime soon.”
Lynn snickered before pointing in the opposite direction down the river. “And what about that?”
Tomas followed her gaze. Through the graceful rain of falling snow, deep into the dark pinewood forest, he thought he saw a glint of a flickering yellow light. And then another, and a few more after that. They couldn’t have been more than a mile away.
“Torches?”
“There must be people out here. They can help us!” Lynn said, placing the satchel over her shoulder and racing ahead without a second thought.
Tomas caught her with an open hand to her arm before she took off. “We don’t know who or what that is. It could more of those… those things.”
“I don’t know about you, but I didn’t see any of those creatures carrying lit torches,” Lynn said sarcastically.
Tomas huffed. “They could be brigands, or bandits. Who knows?”
Lynn shrugged, pulling out the dagger that Tomas had given her back at the Repository. “I’ll take my chances over hypothermia.”
Hypo-what? He didn’t want to seem like a fool, so he kept his mouth shut.
Lynn was noticeably freezing as she stepped past Tomas in the direction of the distant flames. He saw mist exiting her lips with each exhale. The wind, while gentle, was so cold that even with his clothes wrung out, his body was shivering and aching.
Tomas decided it would be best to go with her. He finished rinsing what he could from his saturated clothes, hopping along after her as he tipped water from a boot at a time.
The mix of snow and mud made the ground cold and slushy. The pine trees enclosing around them groaned as they swayed in the wind. The fires grew brighter as they got closer, sneaking through the long shadows cast by the forest.
Tomas’s muscles cramped and his face was feeling numb. It was becoming painful to even walk as his legs stiffened.
As they snuck between boulders and around the rough pine trunks towards the flickering lights, Tomas thought he could hear voices. He could not make out any words, just distant murmurs.
It sounded like multiple people. Men… and women too. There were certainly other people around, although whether that comforted him or scared him, he could not say.
Lynn was growing pale as she rubbed her shaking hands against her forearms, trying to create any warmth for herself that she could in the blistering cold.
Despite his conflicting feelings for the woman, he did not enjoy watching her suffer. And there was no denying that the cold was quickly wearing him down as well.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some help.”
The pair shuffled through the ankle-high sludge of snow and wet soil as the trees grew sparser. Tomas could smell the thick scent of smoke from a woodfire.
He saw shapes appearing by the lit torches as they approached… walls. There were structures ahead. Houses.
But the cold was coming on faster than Tomas had expected. It stabbed at his chest, gnawed at his bones. He could feel his vision blurring and he was getting dizzy, his joints stiffening with each struggled step. His clothes felt solid, like ice against his skin. But he nonetheless pushed forward.
Out from the forest they came, white as ghosts with what water remained on them from the river having frozen into ice crystals.
The wind itself felt as frigid as the water, blowing clouds of snow through the air.
A bunch of dark figures appeared before them, but he could not focus enough to see their faces. His head grew heavy, and he fell to his knees to catch what shallow breaths of air he could.
“Please, h-h-help us,” Lynn begged, dropping the dagger from her twitching fingers, and stumbling forward towards the strangers.
Tomas knew that if these people meant them harm, there would be nothing they could do to fight back.
“What… what on Eos? Tomas? Tomas, is that you?” One of the strangers had called his name out. A man with a gruff voice.
