Aqueo and his Water Spirit

Chapter 1 - Reborn, the Spirit, and the Lake

    A falling droplet of water made a pleasing resounding tone as it hit something, echoing momentarily then followed by another droplet.

    Aqueo was in a daze. He had been hearing it at the edge of his consciousness for quite a while now. It felt so far from him but he knew it was the sound of a droplet of water hitting water beneath.

    Everything around him was dark and his whole body felt like he was submerged in deep cold water. Uncomfortable. He couldn't move a muscle nor make a sound nor see nor breathe. But this sound he had been hearing, there was something in it. Something felt pleasant inside him every time it resounded. And every time a drop echoed, the next one seemed louder and stronger was the pleasant feeling it gave.

    He clung onto it, waited for it, excruciatingly; for each interval felt like eternity, for in that torture of uncomfortable coldness it was the only thing pleasant that his senses could perceive. For how long, he couldn't tell.

    As if rewarded for enduring the submerged feeling for a long time, a faint light appeared in his whole field of vision, similar to what one would see when their eyes were tight shut while facing the light of the sun. And with it was warmth that caressed his suffering body.

    It took Aqueo by surprise. In that seemingly endless pressure of coldness, the feeling was ecstasy, many times greater than the effect of the sound. So when the light and warm feeling vanished, swiftly as it appeared, and were replaced by the pressing coldness, he felt like a child whose pacifier was suddenly taken away from him.

    His body jerked, his eyes opened wide, his breathing became heavily erratic, his head swung left and right, looking for the light, longing for the warmth. But it was nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be felt. The only thing he could see was the dimly lit jagged stone ceiling in front of him. And that was when he realized that he could finally see, he was breathing and his body was feeling an uneven floor pressing cold beneath his back.

    'A cave,' he thought while looking at the jagged stones in front of him, expanding his lungs as much as possible to stabilize his breathing. He felt like he just emerged from a breathtaking deep dive.

    'How did I get here? Where is this?'

    His consecutive questions were swiftly followed by visions of memories as he tried to remember what happened last: the museum, him taking pictures, the glowing gem, and lastly, him walking in the middle of the street and getting hit by something—he got into a street accident. It must've been some kind of large construction vehicle because he saw it in his peripheral vision just before he got hit. Thinking even further, based on the color of it, and as someone who had been living there for a long time that he knew most of the colors of popular commercial vehicles, it must've been a truck of that construction company.

    He just sighed at the memory.

    'That slam hurt a lot,' he thought as he remembered the feeling of being hit by a truck and sent flying in the air, landing so hard at the cement road, rolling several times on it, hard, and finally hitting the thick, solid railings at the side of the street. It happened so fast yet he could remember how it felt like every moment of it. When he was hit by the truck, his breathing was as if suddenly cut off, and when he hit the cement road, it seemed like all the air in his lungs was suddenly expelled from his mouth and when he was bouncing and rolling hard on the cement road, he felt like his body and his limbs were so fragile that they could’ve been torn into pieces in mid-air, and when he hit the railings, it felt like his world stopped. He was still conscious after, but everything hurt. He tried to breathe but it was difficult and painful. The last things he could remember were the sounds of honking and people shouting and approaching around him while his vision was slowly darkening, the pain dulling, the sound dying. Then everything was dark and silent.