Soulwoven

Chapter Forty

His legs and feet pressed tightly against one another. His arms pinned themselves to his sides. His eyes fixed themselves wide open. His body stiffened.

He couldn’t breathe.

He panicked and tried to wriggle from side to side, but something had a strong hold on his midsection. He needed water. Needed to be wet, and to be cold, and to breathe. A hand put pressure on his shoulders and forced him downward until his head hit liquid.

His lungs filled with water, and then he could breathe again.

The hand let him go. He flicked his legs and dove for the bottom of the pool, and then he let himself drift. His heart thundered small and fast and fearful against his ribs.

A human-sized, long-haired, familiar shape floated toward him from the surface. Some part of its midsection gripped a larger, heavier shape and dragged it along. The first shape belonged in his world. The second didn’t. It was too big and too blocky, and it looked out of place in the water.

But the first shape he knew. It swam past him, towing its burden.

He followed.

He trailed it down and down, deeper and deeper. Thick mud lay under his belly. Bubbles and tiny bits of edible somethings floated in the water around him. Black, broken rock loomed before him. The pressure squeezed his head, but he didn’t mind it.

A passageway opened in the rock. The shape-he-knew entered it, and he followed it past jagged ledges into a little tunnel. The shaft angled sharply upward. Bits of algae hung from its roof. He soon reached the mirrored, rippling plane of the water’s surface.

His friend-shape swam to the edge of the water and changed. Its tail-like back end split into two flailing halves. Its middle divided into a thick, central trunk with two thinner stalks attached to it. The lower bits settled on the rock and propelled the rest of it up through the surface. The middle bits dragged along the blocky burden they’d been carrying. Only his friend-shape’s feet were left to him, and those feet jerked desperately, as if something violent was happening in the breathless world above.

Cole panicked again. He cared for this thing—this shape, whatever it was. He wanted to help it, and he didn’t want it to leave him alone, not there, not then, not ever. He swam up against its splintered tail bits and rubbed his face on them. He nibbled at them desperately. It was all he could think to do.

And then he couldn’t breathe again.

There was water in his nose, his mouth, his chest.

His feet felt like feet. He stood up, and his torso broke through the water. Muscles he didn’t even know he had in his abdomen went rock solid, then pulsed again and again, and he spewed water out of his mouth at the same time he was trying to gasp in air through his nose. His arms and legs buzzed and shook. His fingers scrabbled on wet, black rock, searching for something, anything, to help him.

A hand grabbed them. Its digits wrapped tightly around his own and pulled him out of the water. An arm circled around his chest and hugged him against a body that was warm and soft, until the coughing stopped and the water was gone and he could breathe again.

Mucus streamed from his nose. His lungs took in air in quick, desperate gasps.

“Shh,” said a voice. A hand stroked his hair. He laid his head against a shoulder and let himself relax. For a moment, he just breathed.

And then he opened his eyes.

He was on his knees, leaning against Dil at one end of a round, dirt-floored cave. Thousands of blue, iridescent dots clung to the walls around him. Strings of pale green moss dangled from the ceiling and trailed across the top of his head.