Tenaro's eyes went wide. He kicked frantically, panicked, trying to swim away, but the tree was too close and his swords tied him down like anchors.

  “SPLAAAAASH!!!”

  The trunk slammed into the water. He twisted his body just enough, pain shot up his right arm as the falling wood clipped him.

  Air tore from his lungs in a bubbling, muffled scream. He forced himself to hold his breath, chest burning.

  *Damn it!*

  The tree rolled and sank, dragging silt and branches into a churning cloud. Tenaro stared at the arm that throbbed with white-hot pain, brows furrowing. The tree shouldn't have fallen at all, he recalled the roots were loose, but were still strong enough to stay in the ground. He frowned, confused.

  He pushed toward the far wall and began to swim upward, his chest burning. The swords in his hands made every stroke a challenge; their weight tugged at his wrists, at his lungs.

  *Why are these things so heavy?*

  The surface didn't come, it receded.

  Water slid away as if being poured down a drain. Tenaro's legs churned, panic rising with every failed kick.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  *What now!?*

  He snapped his head down, his lungs screaming for air.

  A dark maw gaped below him, a hole in the stone, wide enough for two people side by side. Water rushed toward it, a fierce, ducking current. The nearer he got, the faster he got pulled in.

  He clawed at the wall, fingers scrambled for purchase without losing grip of the sword, while his lungs burned like coals. He tried to summon one last desperate kick…

  …But the current took him.

  He closed his eyes and gripped his swords and let the dark swallow him.

  *Is this how it ends?* His thoughts thinned as the hole swallowed him hungrily, consciousness fading.

  ***

  Water spat him out over a lip, and he fell, his unconscious body cartwheeling through an ice cold spray. He slammed through a low waterfall into a cavern that yawned below.

  Ice-bright stalactites stabbed downwards from the ceiling as he plunged past them, his swords still in his hands.

  “Splash!”

  The pool surrounded with snow swallowed him, cold hitting bone-deep.

  His body convulsed with the shock, but the fingers never loosened; the hilts cut into his palms like anchors. The current caught him again and shoved him into a narrow, rocky creek. He tumbled over stones, water hammering his ribs, cliffs flashing past in a battered blur.

  He knocked against jagged rock until the creek opened into a wider pool surrounded by heaps of snow, piled as if it had been snowing, the crystal-clear surface almost glassy. Tenaro's limp body rolled and thudded against the lip of the pool with a wet, echoing “thud.”

  Somewhere in the gloom, a figure stirred.

  It was half-buried in the snow, shivering. Head low at first, mouth cracked from sleep, or injury.

  The sound of the impact reached it.

  The head lifted slowly; eyes blinked into life and found Tenaro floating in the water.

  The figure pushed up with a single arm, struggling, snow falling from its hair. It cocked its head and, in a small, puzzled voice that cut the cavern silence,

  “Huh?”