The Legends of old Lies

2 - Deads can't drown

A city burst into flames. Fire blazed an all consuming path. A merciless and deadly cruel precision, always cautious not to miss even one prey for their heated hunger. Maybe that was the reason, why there was water swashing all around her. The vengeance of destiny. In a survival instinct – one a person that just died normally shouldn't have – her arms started paddeling around her and pushing against the surrounding suffocating darkness.

Her vision blurred and floating in nothing, not knowing where was up and where was down. If up and down actually still existed. Some invisible force dragged her body and pulled her further. Her legs grazed something hard and sharp that cut into her skin. She opened her mouth and water slip ruthlessly through her lips and down her throat. It tasted brackig sick and forced its way into her lungs.

The dead one gargled pained, crawled with nothing to hold and stretched for everything that seemed to be around. She was whirled around. Pressed into a direction that had to be the wrong one by her soaked clothes and the metal on her. Helpless like a bug that fell into a river. Sharp stones scratched her fingers but then she managed to grab something und to pull her higher. Did she break through a surface or only imagined so? Her skull droned, her lungs burned, in front of her eyes a wet fog creeped in and in her ears was a horrible buzzing.

Her head pushed out of water. She clung to a rock next to her and coughed burning cold liquid.

It had to be a dream. Or some kind of undefinable vision in her last moments of breath. Maybe it was the Neverland which took in the should that were neither allowed to rest nor to be graced with nothing.

Blinking she looked into grey light. Above her was caves ceiling so deep, that she could have hit herself if she tried to stretch higher. Confusion paralaysed her turning mind. She wasn't able to think, to plan, to guess what in the name of all gods happened. Did she die? Or was she just thrown from one torture into another one?

Carefully fumbling she tried to go on against the pushing and pulling underground water. Her clammy fingers fiddled with the clasp of leather buckles to free her from some weight. She got rid of the coat – it slipped away into an unknown distance – but the rest still held her enveloped. Again and again she slipped back into the dark water, then came spluttering out back up a few moments later and wiped away tangled strands in front of her eyes. Until she felt something hanging down. Roots tangled in her hair, reaching down from above. She reached for the ceiling and gripped into thick leafage. Digging upwards, she shoved her hand through brushwood until suddenly more light shone on her, blinding her sore eyes. Grabbed by an energy that again did not be on pair to the nature of a dead person, she reached up.

Earth and small stones crumbled towards her. Leaves, grasses, and long fern fell past her into the darkness. She climbed, struggled, leaned herself against rough rock, and then finally pushed her way through a hole to the surface.

Groaningly, she pulled herself across the ground that had just been the cover of a wet grave. Her limbs trembled, her breath crackled, and her fingers dug through the tossed earth of a forest floor covered with rustling plants. She rolled onto her back, stared in slowly clearing gaze towards a nightly sky. Branches with softly sprouting spring leaves loomed into her field of vision like shadows that shied away from being too intrusive. The stars she saw in between looked familiar. Enough to know that she never left the world she died in.

Stories came to her mind. Tales of Revenants. Of the dead who rose from their graves and roamed the land with an unfulfilled desire for revenge, until their heads were removed and they were put back under the ground. Did that happen? But her thoughts seemed unexpectedly clear for that to be.

Her cold fingers fluttered down her side between the leather and metal panels. The wound was gone. Disappeared as if she had never been there. She could only feel them as if the healing had to be an illusion. A misleading illusion.

Crawling over the ground pecking through the fabric, she pushed herself further away from the hole she had come from. She rolled back onto her stomach, choking out water and a swallowed pieces of some plant. Then she looked up.

A pair of wide dark eyes stared at her, mouth opened in silence. She couldn't tell whether he was afraid, frightened or just surprised by the woman who crawled out of a hole in the ground at night. A child, or man, as it was not all to clear with the delicate stubble on his chin and the lanky, growing frame. A tired munching sheep peered past his legs, and behind him the rest of a small flock moved.

Another human figure seemed to move dimly somewhere in the shadows between the scattered trees. someone said something Maybe the boy while she wasn't looking at him. Perhaps the other one who was now approaching. Maybe she was the one trying to move her mouth, croaking.

She didn't know anymore, because suddenly darkness wrapped itself around her mind again.

Dead people couldn't drown, but she seemed to be an exception. Would she die next time from a fall?