Beware the Calm

Telepathic Flights

Aeryn was bewildered.

Exactly that. Bewildered.

She couldn't understand - couldn't make sense of what was happening.

Pain flared across her entire body with every laboured breath and she was pulled continually into a blackness that cut out seconds - or perhaps it was even minutes - of the agony, making it that much harder to keep up with reality - if this was even reality and not just some twisted perverted version of the afterlife, or wherever it was that people supposedly went after they died.

Because she'd died, hadn't she? She'd leapt headlong into a raging, swirling river full of rocks and other debris. There was no way she could have survived. But it had either been death by drowning, or death by basilisk. She'd chosen the manner of her own demise, and she'd accepted it as she'd plunged towards the raging rapids below. She'd made her peace with it.

So why was she still conscious? Or at least why was her mind still conscious? Thinking all these thoughts, even if her body was momentarily disconnected and unable to respond to anything but the pain.

She tried to separate everything in her weary mind, which was easier said than done when wavering between moments of blackness and moments of an odd blueness.

The blackness was silent and didn't hurt, but she was still 'aware'.

The blueness was accompanied by odd, muffled sounds and it felt like she'd been hit by a herd of stampeding horses, burned alive, done ten rounds with a judoon and fallen from the top of one of the parapets of the castle, all at the same time.

There were smells as well - blood and stone, mingled with the fresh scent of flowers and another smell that she couldn't quite place. Grass, perhaps?

The air was fresh, at least, and flooded her lungs in ragged gasps, confirming that she was breathing. The dead don't breathe. And neither do they dream...or think. And they're certainly not aware of their surroundings. She could taste something in her mouth as well. Was that water?

Blackness slowly gave way to a blur as something damp and cold touched one side of her brow, followed by a gentle splashing sound.

Slowly, she flexed one finger. Then another. Her hand curled into a painful fist. Then she wiggled her toes. Finally, the rest of her body began to comply, and after several long seconds of flexing the cramp and stiffness slowly from her joints, she determined that she must be laying on her front, somewhere.

She made the mistake of slowly blinking her eyes open to bright sunlight reflected off crystal clear water, making her wince. Her vision was blurry, and her head throbbed with an insistent and unpleasant pounding. Blinking again, her eyes finally adjusted enough to see, and she raised her head ever so slightly, to let her eyes roam around some more, building a picture of her surrounding as the blur gradually cleared. She was lying on a bank of pebbles and other rocks, half submerged in shallow water at the edge of the river. By some small miracle although there was water around her head, it had been shallow enough not to completely cover her nose and mouth, which had allowed her to breath and not drown completely.

She moved one hand slowly, placing it flat beside her and giving a tentative push to test how her body would respond. She immediately wished she hadn't.

The pain was incredible, and she let out an agonised gasp, the breath literally knocked from her as her arm gave way and she fell back into the pool of water again with a light splash, managing to just about keep her face clear of the water and now that she was fully conscious and breathing again, she coughed up a lungful of it that she'd inevitably swallowed at some point without realising.