Collaterals

Fish Out of Water

Harder and harder and harder I clawed at the ground as I pushed my upper body forward, crawling through dust and dirt and sand. The wind had picked up sometime in the night, prickling at my newly welded skin so that I'd shuddered and shivered in the dark: too hot and too cold all at once. I hadn't noticed him come. In fact, had he not struck my sword from beneath me, I might have fallen asleep. It was all I could do, now, to frantically blink away the irritation flung into my eyes from the eddy of dust. I could barely see, not in this dark, and surely not with my eyes sealed shut against this—

dirt.

There was not a moment between thought and action as I grabbed a fistful of the earth beneath me— pebbles and shards of broken stone cutting into my skin— and turned, flinging it at him with a fearful shriek.

It ignited. Just enough so that for a moment, for a blink of an eye, orange specs flew through the air, glinting like the stars above. I watched in terror, hands flat on the ground beneath me as I panted.

He screamed. I couldn't see him, but I heard the shuffle of his feet, scurrying back: one step, another, another, and another before the sound stopped. And then the sound grew louder.
I gasped, clutching my sword as I pushed up off the ground. I saw his silhouette as I stumbled backward, heard his sword whoosh through the air: a madman. He struck through the space haphazardly, and it occurred to me that he was as blind as I was under the dark cover of night. Had it been morning, had I had but a moment more to plant myself on two steady feet, it would have been fine. It might have even worked to my advantage. 

Only now it only served to have me jump back, sword trembling in my hand as I bid myself to calm, to breathe, to steady— I blocked one attack, flimsily. And as I struggled to hold my own—blow after blow settling into my very bones, hacking me down to the ground— I felt it: the weakness. The fatigue of three days gnawed at my flesh and mind so that I could not be too sure if each stomp of my feet found solid ground beneath, or just where each strike of my sword landed. And so when my blade found no parry to bite into, I fell forward.

It was all too easy, then, for his blade to make a home of the shin of my leg. 

I gasped, collapsing instantly. Bile rose in the back of my throat as I heard, distantly, my sword clattering on the ground by my side. 

Only his sword was lodged in my leg, and he'd not yet hauled it out to slit my throat. Like a fish out of water, I flailed, back arched as I tried to force air into my lungs, hand flexed awkwardly as it searched for my blade. The leather pommel had never before felt heavier than when I grasped it, twisting forward and slashing at him.

I don't know where I struck. I know only that I'd scored a long strip of flesh, and that he'd start cursing and shouting. I didn't mean to point my sword up. Even if I had, how would I have known he'd fall forward?

The sound of my breath was the only sign I had that I was alive, the only tie I still had to reality. His weight fell onto my sword, and I let my skull fall back on the ground as my head muddied.

 Breath in, breath out.

 It was all I heard as blinding pain overtook me. What little consciousness I had was drowned so that feel of his body, sliding down my blade, pushing its pommel onto my chest, was a distant thing. And though my head could no longer persuade me to move, some buried part of me knew it was rather unwise to have this dying man fall onto me, especially with a blade between us.

Alas, it was all I could do to scream at myself to move as my hands went lax, my eyelids grew too heavy, and the blade slipped from my grasp.