The Girl in the Water

Chapter 14

We listened as the groaning of our sandy ceiling collapsing turned into hissing as sand rained down around our icy cocoon, the fiery light flickering through the white - blue barrier on our pale faces. After several moments, the hissing slowly stopped. Eisla looked up and around cautiously, but the ice was too warped to see through well.

"Is it safe - ?" She started to ask.

Suddenly, a roar blasted through the muffled silence, and a hole was blown into the ice right beside her face. Before anyone could do a thing, Roan's face appeared in the hole.

"Roan!" I breathed out, instantly relaxing. As soon as I saw his face, the energy that had been rippling through me evaporated, and the ice instantly began to melt without me keeping it up.

Roan helped it along; fire roared out from his hands, making a bigger hole for us to climb out of. After a second, I realized that his face was tense.

"We need to go." He said tersely.

Seamus' face appeared next to his. "Di?"

"I'm here."

"Thank the gods." Seamus smiled in absolute relief, and he looked gorgeous in that moment.

"Eisla, we need to go!" Roan snapped, looking around wearily.

I looked past him anxiously. The quicksand ceiling was gone, and sunlight poured into the fiery cavern uninterrupted. The rock formations were still floating, great dunes of sand tottering on them as they floated around haphazardly. As I looked at them, a wall of sound I hadn't noticed before hit me - there was a cacophony as hundreds of prisoners yelled and screamed. Their voices were a jumble of anxious, scared voices, and I couldn't understand what they were saying.

Before I could focus on their distress, I saw that flashes of silver were moving from formation to formation, getting closer to us by the second. I realized with horror that they were the guards I had been looking for before; they were making up for their absence before by coming now by force.

Eisla cursed under her breath when she saw them. She clambered off the still unconscious Riedrus before pulling out her Vita water and crystal rod. "Where do you want to go?" She looked at Roan when she asked.

"Far away." He said firmly.

Eisla rolled her eyes, but began to chant. Roan shepherded Dionysus and I closer to the elf as the wind began to whip around us, tossing sand up into the air and tearing at our clothes and hair. As the wind spun faster and faster around us, the first of the guards began to close in. I saw that she was a faerie, her light coloured wings just a blur as she surged towards us. She held out a hand, her mouth open to shout something angrily, but before the words could reach me, we were gone.

My breath whooshed out of my chest with a gasp as we hit the ground with a harsh thud. I looked around wildly, half expecting the guard to grab me with her outstretched hand, but she wasn't there. I looked around to see that the horizon was green and stretched for miles uninterrupted. We were in the middle of a field of crop that I couldn't identify - everything was still green, too early to yield produce. Somehow, we'd managed to land in the space between the rows. The stalks grew til they were just over my head, and when I stood to my feet, I could just barely see a white house and a red barn far in the distance. The sun was high above us again.

"Everyone okay?" Roan asked behind me.

"I accidentally brought back a stray." Eisla said glumly.

I looked back. She was standing with her arms crossed, her face subdued as she looked down at Riedrus. He was still out cold, crumpled on his side with his eyes closed. He must have been pulled in by the force of Eisla's vortex. She looked up and met Roan's gaze, and sighed.