itsiranoire
"Are you alright?" she asked again, her voice softening further. "You took quite a tumble in the Silverthread. My mate pulled you out." She paused, her intelligent eyes scanning me with a new, sharp intensity. "But tell me... how are you alive? And... human? We have not seen your kind in many turnings of the river. The Thunder-Witch hunts humans above all. She turns them to stone where they stand to decorate her frozen gardens. How did you cross her lands untouched?"
Her words were a bucket of ice water. Turns them to stone. Frozen gardens. The terror of the thunder in my apartment became something specific, and monstrous.
I couldn't speak. My mind was a white, screaming static. *An otter is talking to me. An otter is talking to me. An otter is talking to me.* The rational world I'd built my entire life on shattered like glass. Nothing in my books, nothing in my wildest imaginings, had prepared me for the simple, profound wrongness of this. It wasn't frightening. It was universe-breaking.
"Where..." The word scraped out of my tight throat, a dry rasp. I swallowed, my mouth desert-dry. "Where am I?"