Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

Steven clung to his own reins, his knuckles white with the effort, and tried hard not to look upriver. Unimaginable devastation was coming, but watching that wall of water and debris roll down on them would only distract him from his goal: reaching the riverbank.

But the need to know was unbearable, and Steven glanced west. There it was, a roiling, tumbling mountain of water, littered with corpses, rigging, bits of boats of all sorts, and pieces of houses, farms, barns, stables, whatever it had managed to scoop up on its way across Falkan. There was a deafening roar, like a perpetual thunderclap. Steven gripped the saddle-horn – the reins were no longer up to the challenge – and regretted ever looking back.

I’ll never make it. None of us will.

He felt the magic around him, warming the water to a comfortable bathtub temperature as it had in Meyers’ Vale. He tried to project some of that energy into the swirling current around Gilmour’s horse, but he couldn’t tell if it was effective; he was too distracted by the incoming tide and the thunder. Whilst he wouldn’t die of hypothermia, Steven didn’t have much hope that his power would be able to stave off the wave.

He leaned over and urged his horse, ‘Just a couple more feet, sweetie. C’mon, you can make it; swim, girl, swim!’

When the flood finally reached him, it didn’t strike with the force he’d been expecting. It didn’t shatter his bones, or break over him like an ocean wave, like one of those waves out at that beach Mark’s always talking about, Jones Beach. Instead, Steven felt himself lifted, gently at first, and carried on a burgeoning swell. It felt strangely like a roller-coaster ascent, slow and steady to start with, then careening downhill, unchecked. First he could see the top of the riverbank, then the tops of the trees in the distance, the naked branches stark against the slate grey of winter. He was still on his horse, still facing north and still swimming along in the warm-as-a-bath current, when he saw the wave swallow Garec and Kellin and their horses, all disappearing without even a splash. The world pitched perilously as he heard Gilmour shout something, then everything was brown, turbid, cold, and tumbling wildly, both in his mind and in reality.

Steven held his breath, summoned the magic and let it burst forth, a flailing explosion of self-preservation, but he had no idea if it helped at all, because he kept rolling, lost somewhere beneath the surface.

He tried to swim, but it was pointless. The wave was carrying him at better than forty miles an hour. He felt his horse slip from between his legs and go spinning off. For a few moments he gave up and let himself be carried. The muddy water reminded him strangely of the riverscapes of his life in Colorado; it was always the same, no matter which river, no matter what time of year: light brown, almost beige near the surface, giving way to murky brown, then black in the depths, and whether he was swimming, leaping from a rope swing or tumbling from a raft in whitewater, the underside of all rivers was the same, and this one, however huge and deadly, was no different.

Then he was hit A log, or maybe a heavy beam struck his leg just below the knee. He was sure it was broken, a compound fracture, skin and muscles shredded, the knee hyper-extended… he screamed, but he kept tumbling east towards Wellham Ridge.

Tibia and fibula again, he thought. I can’t believe I broke those fuckers again.

His lungs burned, and he grasped his magic and filled them. Thank Christ for that spell. He wouldn’t drown, not yet, anyway. Something hit him in the small of his back, not a bone-breaker this time, but a puncture by something thin and sharp. He cried out, swallowed a mouthful of muddy water and reached back to feel for the injury, but he couldn’t find it. Instead he clamped his mouth shut, biting his tongue when something hit him in the back of his head. That was a rock. His shoulder scraped against something rough, the ground perhaps; then he was following his feet, upside down but moving fast towards the surface and the lighter-coloured water. A foot broke free of the river; he could feel it jutting into the air, as dissociated from himself as the spinning bits of flotsam and jetsam pelting him from all sides.

Steven twisted onto his stomach, lifted his head and managed a real breath, then another. He managed to avoid being crushed by a skeleton of logs still lashed together, maybe the frame for a thatched roof, ripped from the top of a Falkan farmhouse.

Then he was beneath the surface again, tumbling backwards and waiting for the impact that would knock him senseless. Part of him continued to kick and thrash, fighting a madman’s battle, while the rest of him floated, fluid and graceful, watching the devastation unfold and witnessing the carnage in its wake. He didn’t know if the magic was somehow granting him a welcome feeling of distance from the nightmarish cyclone in the centre of the wave but he did summon enough clarity to regret that he had come so close to finding Hannah, only to die at his best friend’s hand.

He stretched out, arching his back and trying to knife through the water like a human surfboard. It was surprisingly effective, and in that moment’s grace, he folded his hands over his face, covering his head while waiting for the lights to shut off.

They didn’t. The tea colour of the surface water – bright enough to give him hope that he might kick hard with his good leg and get free – began to dim. He wasn’t sinking; the surfboard strategy was keeping him afloat, but it was growing dimmer… something was coming down on him. Steven didn’t know whether it was the crest of the wave, finally breaking, or part of the sailing vessel he had seen somersaulting along the watery ridge moments before, but it was large enough to cast a shadow over everything around him. If it was the ship, he would be broken, but if it was the wave itself, he would be dragged along the riverbed and his skin peeled away in an Eldarni version of what Mark liked to call macadam rash.

Gambling that the ship might not crush him to pieces in deeper water, Steven tried to bend his body into a makeshift rudder, to catch the current and force himself towards the bottom, and perhaps to safety. It didn’t work. The current was too unpredictable for him to do anything more than ride it out. He continued to slam into branches and rocks, felt stones and dirt pelt him in a hundred places at once: his face, hands, neck and back, as he waited for five tons of Falkan schooner to come slamming down on him from above.

He rolled into a ball, tucked his head down, filled his lungs and waited, wondering in a desultory manner if Garec and Kellin had survived, and if he would ever find Gilmour again.

It was some time later when he awakened.

What’s broken?

The world came into focus, as light and colour emerged from behind the curtain of hazy grey and blurry black. Eldarn repositioned itself around, under, above and beside Steven Taylor. He was lying in a shallow puddle of mud and cold river water. Fearing to exacerbate his injuries, he didn’t move.

Tibia and fibula, broken; they must be. Head hurts. What’s the head, anyway? Cranium. That’s it, your pointy little head, dummy. That feels broken, too, maybe a hairline crack. Shoulder’s badly scraped… a pound of flesh? Take two; they’re small… but intact, and my back’s all right.

He snaked a hand down his thigh. I can’t have broken this leg twice in four months; I just can’t. He pulled his hand back. Later. Check it later.

Now, what hurts?

That one was easy: everything.

Take your time; let’s see what you remember. What hurts? Ulna, radius, coccyx… that’s your arse, for everyone in the cheap seats, thank you very much… both clavicles, ribs on the left, ribs on the right, and the knee bone, the patella, feels like it is connected to the shoulder bone, which feels like it’s still connected to the grille of a passing garbage truck. That’s it. That’s all I know, good for probably a D+ on your average biology exam.