Arc 2: Chapter 2: The Drowning Dead
I burst through the castle window, dead hands clinging to me.
That moment then might have lasted forever, and it did last in my memory, stark and crisp as a waking dream even now. I remember the two moons, emerald and cerulean in the sky, dominating that great cathedral of stars. I remember the woods and fields and hills of Strekke spread out beneath the silver odlight shining from the sunless heavens, an oddly beautiful scene, startling next to the macabre darkness I’d just escaped.
Then, with a startling sense of deja vu, I beheld the river below. Its dark waters expanded in my vision as I fell. When I struck the river’s surface I hit hard and felt all the breath go out of me, knew my body would be badly bruised later. I had more to worry about than bruises then.
The wights wouldn’t let go, even when one of the skeletal creatures broke near in half from the impact of striking water at speed. There were three of them — no, four of them, as one still animate hand gripped tightly to my elbow — and they doggedly kept trying to subdue me even as we hit the mud of the riverbed.
I was blind. I’d managed to get a breath in me before going under, but it had been lost in that first moment of striking the water, driven out as surely as if an ogre’s fist had slammed into my chest. I struggled not to breath, struggled against the dead hands trying to keep me from moving. They pressed me into the mud, brown water turning the world black. I thrashed. One of those skeletal hands found the edge of my neck, scraping at skin with broken fingernails. It shifted again, managed to wrap around my throat.
I panicked. Couldn’t use my aura, couldn’t focus — I could burn it, but I had so little left after days of fighting. It could kill me.
The hand around my neck squeezed harder. In a flash of terror and rage I let my essence flare, filling the muddy water with golden-red light. The hands around me loosened, and I kicked at one armored carcass so it went tumbling along the river bed, carried off by the current. I turned, lost my sense of up and down, managed to get my fingers around the hand at my neck and tear it away. Skin came away with it, the pain like bad sunburn along my throat.
My armor — elf made — didn’t weigh me down in the water, but my natural weight did. There are times being a big man has its advantages, and times it did not.
But I was free. The dead — anything powered purely by od — don’t like the touch of pure aura, and mine is more potent than most.