I'll be here forever

chapter 56

I hoped Daisy was doing okay.

I swam slowly along the bottom of that river for quite a while, gathering my strength. There weren't any fish near, and the river nymph had left. The water was slowly but surely healing the burns on my hands, which I appreciated. I would've come up and started walking again, but I didn't want to accidentally come up too early and end up fighting against the two people that were chasing me.

I wanted to be done fighting. I was tired. Gods, I was so tired of fighting.

So, bronze scale tucked under my arm, I kept swimming in the direction that I somehow knew would bring me closer to the bank of the river. How did I know this? Absolutely no fucking clue.

I felt the loneliness a lot more acutely than I had before. Being alone was hard, much harder than I thought it would be. I'd always had Daisy, she'd always had me, and we'd always been together. Just thinking about her, what I'd done, it left a stabbing pain in my chest. I'd left her.

I know that there wasn't any other way. I wish there would've been. But I would do it all again, over and over, just to spare her from the pain I'd endured after falling.

I just wished there was some way I could let her know that I was okay, that I'd made it. Just like I'd said. I wished she didn't have to suffer through that. But there wasn't, not one that I knew of, at least. All I could do was press on, and hope I could find her before something else killed me.

I swore that I'd do everything I could to get back to her.

So I kept swimming, and sensed the bank coming up ahead of me. It was weird how that happened. I just knew, even though I could barely see a couple feet in front of me in the murky water.

And then I stepped out of the river, the water rolling off of me. I wasn't wet at all. It was kind of a strange concept; when you go into water, you expect to get wet. But I wasn't.

As soon as no more water was touching me, and I'd made it a couple steps a way from the riverbank, everything came crashing down again.

Being in the water, even for a short period of time, it'd given me a good amount of energy. I'd actually felt okay for a moment or two. I felt... normal. But as soon as I was out, though, everything went back to how it was before.

Both of my legs, but specifically the one that had been broken before, pulsed with pain. I don't think the ambrosia had fully healed it yet. And no shit. I'd barely given it any time at all.

My shoulder felt like it was going to fall off. I wheezed with every breath, my lungs subjected to a dull, throbbing pain. Every single fucking step was agony. And still I kept walking, kept going. I couldn't just sit and let either the people who'd been upset about the dragon find me, or any other stupid monsters that might be hiding nearby.

I just wanted to be done. I didn't want this. I was so tired, so tired of fighting. Tired of fighting monsters, tired of fighting altogether. Tired of it all.

For the thousandth time, I wished I could be just some stupid, oblivious mortal.

But I wasn't, so I pressed on.

I limped through that forest, pain burning through me with every step, debating on whether or not to take another one of the ambrosia. Because what if I ran into another situation like I had on the riverbank? And I had already eaten the only ambrosia I had?

No. It would be better to suffer for a while and be sure than let it go to waste, just to relieve a bit of the pain.

That was when I heard a stick crack, a little to my left, in the bushes. I froze.

If I had to get into a fight right now, I was so fucked.