Author Games Compilation [Cycle 1]

Task 5 | Natura Nihil Frustra Facit

ROOTS - 5

The way water could be so daunting on the outside but full of tranquility once you were submerged seemed a complete mystery to Follin Ryme. Then again, it could always work the other way, with desperate, winding currents dragging a person under something that initially looked no more dangerous than a small pond. In his case, it was neither. He was caught in a dangerous loop right in the middle, something lethal tempting his body from the depths he sunk to, and the promise of safety that the surface would offer, the same surface he stretched for with reaching fingers. He'd made it to neither end, neither of the extremes. A peaceful calm had settled in the swirling blue, and some part of him might've felt calm had his lungs not been burning for oxygen.

That calm was sitting on rocky waves as it was, and the further Follin sank, the shakier it got, teetering on a quaking foundation. Soon he'd be nothing more than a decoration to the sand and mud at the bottom of the river, a shard of time left to lay there and think over his plights until even thinking was swiftly taken away from him in the sway of water.

He let himself sink.

Time itself went on for a year of five-hundred days. It was nonsense, but for some reason those numbers stuck with him as he fell, giving in to the wilting hums of those who'd died with water in their lungs. It irritated him, time did. It never gave him rest, and when he most needed it to take a pause, to take a breath, it mocked him and sped up, throwing him for a loop he just couldn't untangle himself from. Five hundred days in a year, he thought, but each day is five hours long. They make you commit a horrible crime for an hour straight for seven of those days. One day, one sin.

Have I done something wrong to get stuck here?

Any answers he could've come up with on his own refused to come through, caught behind a clot in his brain, a barrier he put up on his own to keep from thinking. It was strain he didn't need, a strain he didn't want.

Because a barrier in his mind went up, the barrier of his lips went down, letting the water infest his body as soon as it made contact with his tongue.

Then, pain.

The following few seconds, minutes, hours passed in a daze. He knew he writhed in the water, he knew he swung out and around in a desperate attempt to latch onto something that would prevent something he thought he could just let happen. Desperation can do wild things to a person, especially if the person doesn't know just how desperate they are. They scream when they shouldn't, they rage when they can't afford to. Legs kick out to propel them up, only to drag them down.

Follin did all the wrong things, but he never touched the bottom of that river, just the same way he'd done something that could've killed him on that bridge but never struck the rocks below. He was doing something right by doing things wrong, apparently.

In the midst of his struggles, foreign hands slipped under his arms and, like an angel come to salvage his soul, like a poor looter come to salvage his belongings, like the cold hard ground come to salvage his body, he was lifted to the surface of the water. Sometime in the ascension from a watery grave to one less wet, he lost his way with sight and sound, smell and touch had done all but leave him senseless.

When those senses came crashing back to him, he sucked in a great lungful of breath, a hoarse, choked gasp of stolen air. Water dribbled out of his mouth as he coughed it up, wheezing and hacking away the dirty taste that found residence deep in his tongue. His head throbbed each time he submitted his eyes to the light of day, and his skin felt raw and bubbly from the stings he'd undergone. He was afraid to roll to the side for fear of it all peeling off in the grass that prickled the backs of his arms. Instead of touching his own skin, he let his hands waver above the hairs on his arms; there was a shake in his fingertips he couldn't rid himself of. Why is it so fucking cold all of a sudden?