Black Sea [English Edition]

CHAPTER 5

I opened my eyelids little by little, and my right eyelashes rubbed against something. My cheek was resting on a hard, uneven, and slippery surface. Slowly my gaze focused on an endless expanse of calm water, blue as my eyes.

The Thalion Sea.

I was sitting with legs astride on the tree, my arms dangling to each side, my fingers occasionally splashed by the small waves crashing against the trunk. I pressed my hands on wet bark and pushed myself up.

I immediately realized two things.

The first one was the incessant and painful throbbing on my forehead, which gave me the impression that my skull was about to implode.

The second one was that Araton had not come to rescue me after the fall. And I knew very well why.

Irritated, I touched the hairline near my temple with two fingers. Feeling an instant burning, I drew back my hand with a hiss and frowned at the sight of the vermilion patina on my fingertips.

"You must have hit your head on the trunk when we fell."

I darted my eyes in front of me, speechless. The soldier was alive.

The Glawar waterfall was over two thousand feet high, and even if one miraculously survived the impact, the currents that formed at the point where the sea welcomed the river were too strong for a human to resurface.

Yet this man had been able to. And for the second time, his presence had escaped my senses.

While I was at the tree base, he was sitting near the now leafless frond, in the same position as mine. Under the sun, his hair had already begun to dry on top of his head, while the water trickling from the slightly curled tips drew stripes on his armor. He had a graze on his cheekbone, as well as on the knuckles of his hands, which he held upon his muscular thighs.

He was staring at me openly, a cocky smirk on his well-drawn and full lips. His eyes concealed a predatory gleam that put me on alert.

"Why didn't you kill me?" I asked, glancing at the dagger on his side as I instinctively wrapped my fingers around the hilt of my own.

Even if before we had helped each other to stay on the tree while the fury of water carried us away, it did not mean that we were no longer enemies.

His grin got wider. "I needed you to balance the trunk." He slapped the bark as if it were a horse.

"You could have climbed up in the middle," I pointed out.

"Yeah, well..." He scratched his beard, turning away as his cheeks slightly reddened. "Easier said than done."

Especially with a heavy armor like his, I supposed.

With a sigh, I let go of the dagger and looked behind me to see how far we had come from the coast and find a way from which each of us could return to their respective kingdom.

But I did not see the imposing jagged cliffs from which we had fallen, nor the limestone crags that characterized the Elven Kingdom, or the golden beaches of the Kingdom of Men.

I didn't see the Eastern Lands.

Not even a thin line on the horizon.

We were adrift.