Arrow Lake Wednesday has been cancelled due to a scheduling error

Aurëwen didn't answer his half-question, but that was all right. It drifted away with the ripples fanning outward from his trembling legs. Dragomir looked down at them and wondered to himself why they were shaking. His nerves were bubbling up like acid in his stomach, it was true, but he didn't feel particularly scared of the water. He felt something a little more like foreboding, like something bad would happen to him if he ventured further, but that was what his mother was for. Aurë's tail was a flagging beacon over the lake's shattering surface, begging for him to advance.

He took one slow sloshing step, then another, but didn't make it quite to his elbows as she hoped. He stopped when the water licked at his forearms, a quarter of an inch above his ankles, with a chattering of his teeth. Even with the warm sun of June, the mountain water was frigid. He didn't want to go further lest it grow colder, and there was still that swooping sensation in his stomach tethering him to the shore. I can't, complained Dragomir, but it was in the reedy and halfhearted way that a particularly fussy child might insist that they can't eat broccoli or they can't do their homework. He certainly could do it, but to him it felt like the hurdle was much higher than it was.