Wheeling Gull Isle treibloka

His momentum carried him under too. The chill seeped into his bones. For a moment he was deaf and blind, the world nothing more than flurries of bubbles (from his laughter, he realized) and the slimy feel of river rocks beneath his feet. He arose, water streaming down his forehead, beading on the ends of his whiskers, his nose. She had looked beatified.

But now she was nowhere.

Хэда! Heda, the aitch hissing past a palate constricted with sudden fear. His eyes were impossibly opaque and dark. They looked like hagioscopes pointing to blackness.

Despair had been a living thing inside of him, then. He remembered the moans of pain in his ears, and not knowing if they were his own or from the man in his arms. He dragged them through the ocean. His arms and legs ached, burned beyond his comprehension. He felt one long inflamed nerve that coursed through him like a poisoned taproot, a filament charged with cruel light. The memory tired him as if it were an embedded bullet leeching lead into his body.

When she resurfaced she would see a smile on his face, somehow existing in a vacuum and not touching the rest of his features.

Ha. I thought I pushed you too deep. You are good swimmer. Woodenly, he waded back to the riverbank.