Stills.
Listens.
Sees, never witnessed but always known, intimate and deep: how hair floats, carried in the drift; how bodies float, loose-limbed and passive, submitting to the caress of current as if in slumber.
He panics.
In a furious blur of copper froth and weighted, too-slow limbs, Tokela descends upon the weir where it has tangled in bottom sludge and roots. With a heavy-thick slash of knife against entangling rope he frees the unconscious oških and, severed ropes still splaying, bursts upwards to light and life and Sky. Staggers from River’s clutch with dead weight in his arms, stumbles as gravel and stones sink him, trip him, fell him to his knees. Falls forwards, his burden flinging out limp and empty beneath him.
Breast heaving in tight-clenched, truncated sobs, eyes dark with a skim of blood and black, he splays trembling fingers over the slack, pale face and down, to query ribs that do not answer to draw breath, that do not quiver, even slight, with the heart’s drumtalk.
So cold. So still. So… fragile.
Tokela shakes her. Says her name, first a whisper then a sharp reprimand.
Yet Anahli’s head lolls, braids like sodden snakes, joining the matted River-wrack clinging to indigo Marked cheeks and wilted neck.
Don’t take her… please, please don’t… You can’t do this, don’t make me live through this again!
In death, lips are the hue of his own gaze, indigo-and-ebon. Tokela knows, because he saw it—saw his parents dead upon Her—and memory seeks him but he cannot bear it, cannot let it ever take him, ducks and dives beneath.
River holds him, curling at his feet, foaming up the shore to his thighs. She murmurs his name. Whispers Anahli’s.
“N’da!” It is a hoarse shriek. “You will not have her, you cannot have her! She isn’t yours—I am! Take me instead… me… me…” It wavers into a moan, a frenzied growl/whisper/keen against Anahli’s soft, immobile breast as he lies there in the foam and gravel, drenched to skin and steaming, a hum of ebony and indigo filling his burning eyes. Hands splay, plead, clutch…
Take me!
And She does.
A twist within: an answer, a surge to take him under. Curling. Expanding. The water in Anahli’s lungs—in his own lungs—sloshes heavy and stifling, and he writhes, whimpers beneath the sodden weight. Retches against it, somehow begins to heave up everything in him, in Anahli, in them. The blood-black skim behind his eyes swells into a crash of copper tide—rushing, pulling back to course through him again, and again, as sobs of denial become a rush of mutters not his own.
Language not his own. Other, filling up every space within, twisting and shrieking through his Spirit, changing, Shaping.
Because everything changes. An entire existence can change in the span of a heart’s beating.
Sudden droplets patter against the still and sunken chest: like Rain, like the last seep of life from game hung to bleed out. Each one has a sound as it impacts. Each one leaves a tiny smear of impossible hue—not crystalline tears, not carmine blood, but thin indigo, as if Tokela’s oških Marks are leeching beneath the scorch of his tears. Each one pools then runs over and down Anahli’s throat, indigo runnelling across sienna. Each one reverberates through Tokela: spilling from his nose and eyes; hitting acrid-thick against the back of his throat; filling his ears and heart to finally burst, the heat/relief/agony of a septic wound being lanced.
No longer himself but more in himself than he has ever been, bound to everything and nothing, drowning and tangled and sinking even faster, and he will not let this happen, will not bend to death just as he has become alive.
Alive.
The chill leather beneath his fingers gives a quiver. Surges, a wave against a shoreline. Chokes, then retches, as if echoing Tokela’s force. Convulses, curls, pukes water and bile and more water. Falls back, gasping in huge gouts.
Breathing…
“Otter?” A breath, choked into stillness, faint and nearly lost beneath River’s rush within Tokela’s ears and heart. “Squander and sc… Tokela?”
For a heartbeat Tokela didn’t see—couldn’t see—what was standing, shadowed, above him. Slowly his pupils narrowed from black skim to Sun’s light-Shapings. They limned a tall, sturdy oških, his half-shaven head with black twistlocks plastered sodden to one pectoral, catching in a knife harness. One arm extended, the fingers splayed as if in warding; legs spread as if he’d sprinted so far then halted half-stride.
Fear, raw, in his face.
Tokela blinked, then blinked again. Recognition set in.
Akumeh. And, behind him…
Madoc.
Sopping wet, sprawled half in the water’s roil and half onto the bank, braced on his arms. His tangled, sodden forelock could not curtain the alarm, wide-white, about his Earth-copper eyes.
He was staring at Tokela. At Anahli, lying still and pale and streaked with indigo. Then back again.
Kuli stumbled up, then, and said, “Anahli? Tokela?”
Tokela?
It echoes into the neverending, thrums with the drum of his heart, echoes in his skull but not upon his ears. No talk, only hoarse, waterlogged pants in the stillness, but nevertheless Anahli speaks:
Tohwakelifitčiluka. My heart Sees you, oathbrother.
And her eyes open, dark as drowning kelp, and River is there, reflecting a copper haze that gives way, curls back, parts before thick grey mists blown before Wind.
Eyes meet eyes to waken Spirit…
Yet none of that matters. What matters is the horror of what still stains her throat; what slides down her now-heaving ribcage, warm and thick; what drips from Tokela’s face even as he watches, to fall upon Anahli’s cheek like a tear. It smears upon the fingers Tokela puts to his face then extends before him with sick, detached curiosity. It smells like blood, somewhat; he can taste the hot melt upon his tongue. But it doesn’t look like blood.
It looks like indigo.
The keen spills from his throat. Voices have become a voice: his own, a strangled scream ripping into Forest’s sudden-odd silence.
It takes him, then, tumbles him into River and spins him into Her depths.
Tokela knelt… n’da, he
