Neils gasped when he saw the river. “Thank God! I’m dying of thirst! Let’s go.”

He started forward to walk down the hill toward the river not far away.

Wesh shot out a hand to stop him. “Don’t go near it. Don’t you see the water? It’s a river of Dark magic. Don’t even look at it if you can help it.” He turned away. “We’ll have to take another route.”

Yann swallowed hard. His dry throat drove him insane. He needed water right now.

The rest of the party must have been suffering from the same thirst, but Wesh’s authority won out over everything else.

Yann didn’t see anything wrong with the river—except that what looked like water was actually some kind of flowing black Darkness alive with glistening waves and eddies.

Yann tore himself away to follow Wesh back down the hill up which the party just climbed.

Yvan, Rien, Niyazi, and Omer all turned away, too. Yann turned to follow them when Barsali’s voice snapped Yann back to his senses real quick.

“Eliska?” Barsali asked. Then his voice spiked with tension and alarm. “Eliska—stop!”

Yann spun around and so did everyone else. Yann’s world crumbled when he saw Eliska walking down the hill heading straight for the river.

“ELISKA!!” Yann roared and rushed over to intercept her.

Barsali got there first, planted himself in front of her, and tried to block her from getting to the river. “Eliska—wake up!” he bellowed. “Eliska—answer me!”

She didn’t respond. She stared straight through him at nothing and kept walking down the hill.

He grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her, and kept snapping in her face until Yann and the others got there.

Yann yelled in her ear ordering her to stop, but she didn’t respond to him, either. She didn’t see or hear him.

Wesh tore Barsali out of the way and shoved in front of her. “Eliska!” Wesh roared. “Eliska, look at me!”

Nothing. Yann’s blood ran cold. He couldn’t even look.

Wesh took a step back to put some distance between him and her. He raised his hand in front of her face.

Before he could do anything, she vanished.

Everyone spun around looking for her everywhere. “There!” Barsali pointed straight at the river.

Eliska stood on a high rock over the widest flow. She wavered there for a second staring down into the Darkness exactly the way Wesh warned everyone not to.

Barsali, Yvan, and Wesh all bellowed, “ELISKA!!” at the same time, but it was too late. She stood too far away for any of them to get there in time. She must have magicked herself there to prevent Wesh from stopping her.

Wesh and the other Watchman sprinted for the river. Yann stood rooted to the spot. He couldn’t move to save his own life.

His stomach plummeted into his shoes when she swayed one last time and then toppled off the rock into the river.

She didn’t dive or even jump. She just lost her balance for no particular reason and plummeted into the churning flood.

The other Watchmen charged the rest of the way down the hill, up the bank, and tried to scramble onto the rocks, but she was already gone.

Yann’s vantage point on the hill gave him a clear view of the river beyond the rock where she fell in. She wasn’t there anymore.

She didn’t bob to the surface, either. She stayed down.

He gulped down the sting of bile in his throat. He should have known that yesterday was too good to last.

He never would have guessed that she could be in more danger from the Dark than any of them. Why didn’t he think of that before?

He had no reason to think the Darkling’s blow damaged her. She acted normally—apart from the fact that her injury obviously still caused her pain.

He told himself a hundred times to tell Wesh about what happened and to ask Wesh to at least make sure she was okay.

Yann would never forgive himself for that and now it was too late. She was gone.

His eyes skimmed the river. She didn’t come back up.

Barsali, Yvan, Wesh, and Omer clambered up the rock to where she’d just been standing.

They all looked down into the Darkness and saw everything that wasn’t there.

Wesh looked away first and clamped his eyes shut. Yann really wished he could look away, too.

Some kind of sick horror made him stand there with his eyes plastered open. She couldn’t really be gone—could she?

Rien, Vidal, Neils, and Niyazi spread out down the riverbank searching for any sign of her coming up for air. She didn’t.

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Barsali, Yvan, and Omer used the rock’s height to search the whole landscape….and then everyone saw it at the same time.

Another figure rose out of some shadow on another rock across the river. Yann couldn’t tell from here who or what the figure was.

The thing didn’t have any arms, legs, or even a head that he could see. Was it another Darkling borne out of this Dark river?

Whatever it was couldn’t have been there before. The whole Watch would have seen it. It seemed to grow out of the lichen and dirt clinging to the outcropping over there.

The men on the rock froze when they saw the figure across from them….and then it moved.

As soon as it moved, Yann realized it really was a person. It was a slender female wearing a full-length robe down to her feet.

Her dark brown hair hung straight down to her waist. Her hair and robe blended together in the sunshine and created the illusion that she didn’t have arms, legs, head, or even any kind of body under that robe.

The next instant, she dove headfirst into the river. She dove with her arms outstretched. No one could mistake that movement for anything but a deliberate dive.

She dove straight in and plunged out of sight heading for the spot where Eliska disappeared.

The stranger vanished in exactly the same way. The Dark waves closed over her head and she didn’t resurface, either.

None of the Watchmen breathed for at least a minute. Yvan, Wesh, Barsali, and Omer stood on the rock staring at the place where both young women went down.

The other Watchmen stood on the bank. They didn’t search anymore. Eliska wouldn’t come back from this.

The minutes dragged one after another. Now what were the Watchmen supposed to do?

Eliska got them to the Ancestral Empire. If they survived this at all, they would survive because of her. Did she know when she brought them here that she would meet her death here?

Yvan and Omer finally turned away, said something to Wesh and Barsali, and started climbing down the rock.

Yvan and Omer rejoined the others before Wesh and Barsali climbed down.

Barsali waited until last. He kept standing there staring into the Darkness until Yvan called up and ordered him to come down.

The men gathered on the bank shaking their heads. Rien grimaced and turned away first.

Yann suffered another wave of nausea when his father waved the Watchmen to return to the hill where they first spotted the river.

As soon as Yvan got up here, he would order Yann to walk away. He would have to accept that Eliska was never going to come back. Could he really do that?

All the Watchmen turned their backs on the river. It really was over.

They started to walk away, but right at that moment, a splash at the river’s edge made everyone spin around.

They rushed forward and then drew back when the stranger dragged Eliska’s body out of the river.

Yann shot down the hill running his hardest to get there, but once he did, there was nothing to do but stand with the others while the stranger hauled Eliska onto the grass.

Black sludge covered both of them. It ran off their skin, clothes, and hair in thick, gloopy rivulets. It couldn’t be water.

Eliska lay unconscious on the grass, but she was still breathing.

The stranger crouched there like some kind of wild animal. Dark, haunted eyes glared up at the Watchmen from the girl’s face smeared with the same black goo.

She hissed and snarled at them through her teeth. Then she burst into feral shrieks, roars, and maniacal laughter.

Wesh completely ignored her and rushed over to Eliska. “Pick her up!” he snapped at the Watchmen. “Pick her up and carry her as far away from the river as possible. Hurry!”

Yann wound up near Eliska’s hips. Barsali and Niyazi got on either side of her shoulders and heaved her off the ground by her cloak.

Yann and Neils did the same thing with her pants. Yann hesitated to touch the black stuff. It saturated every inch of her clothes and hair, but he had to help her in whatever small way he could.

Yvan and Rien took hold of Eliska’s shirt near her ribs. Wesh and Vidal grabbed her legs.

All the men picked her up and hiked up the hill with her. “Keep going!” Wesh ordered. “The river will cast its spell on her even here. Get her down to one of the other streams. Hurry!”

Yann stumbled under her weight even though she didn’t weigh that much. Her head lolled all the way back. No one lifted it.

The effort strained every muscle fiber, but he refused to put her down. He would have carried her by himself if he thought it would help her.

Wesh directed them down a bunch of different valley turnings before he found a stream he liked.

“Put her down here,” he ordered. “Bring water. One of you light a fire. Get her cleaned up.”

Yann stood looking down at her for a minute. He might have spent the rest of his life looking down at her, but Omer bumped his shoulder and motioned Yann away.

The two of them went into the nearby trees to gather wood for a fire. They both stopped dead when they saw the strange girl hanging around.

The black stuff dripping off her made her look even more feral and inhuman if that was possible. She crouched in the trees eyeing everyone.

She kept shrieking, snarling, and muttering to herself even when the Watchmen didn’t look at her. She scuttled in a crouch through the trees to skirt their camp. She never came any closer.

Rien pulled out his broken longsword, rushed her, and stabbed it at her. “Haa!” he yelled. “Get out of here! Leave us alone!”

“Rien!” Yvan snapped from the fire. “Leave her alone. She just saved Eliska—if Eliska can be saved.”

“She’s an animal!” Rien growled.

Yvan dropped his voice into his chest. “I said leave her alone. Make yourself useful by bringing some water up here.”

Rien backed away from the strange girl. She didn’t leave.

Yann kept an eye on her while he and Omer scavenged the area for as much firewood as they could find. They formed a large stack next to Wesh.

He spent two hours cleaning all the black stuff out of Eliska’s hair and clothes. He stripped her down to her underwear, tore a piece of cloth off his own shirt to scrub as much of the stuff off her as he could, and pulled off his tunic to cover her.

He pointed to her pile of filthy clothes. “You men clean her clothes while I see if I can bring her back. We may have already lost her.”

“What is that stuff?” Yann asked.

Wesh shook his head over the fire while he wrung out his dirty rag. “It’s pure Darkness made solid. The Coil must be becoming destabilizing even more than we thought if the Darkness is invading the Ancestral Empire this far inland.”

“What does that mean?” Yvan asked.

“It means the Darkness will fracture the Ancestral Empire along that river line. It means the Ancestral Empire will fall. We just don’t know when.”

“Then….it could happen soon?” Omer asked. “It could happen….like…now?”

“Not now. That river is too big. It must have been building for a long time, which means it could keep building for a long time to come before the Island collapses. We don’t know. We have to take care of Eliska right now. This is more important.”

No one said anything else after that. Yann, Omer, and Neils got to work cleaning Eliska’s clothes.

The men didn’t have a pot to boil water in, so they found a few flat rocks on the nearby hillsides, heated them in the fire, and then used sticks to lower them into some hollows the men found in the rocks along the streambed.

They boiled water that way and beat out the clothes on the rocks.

The black ooze took a long, long time to wash out. It stuck to every surface with unnatural power.

Yann found himself obsessively washing the stuff off his own hands. He didn’t want it to poison him, too.

The men eventually spread Eliska’s clothes on sticks over the fire to dry. By that time, Vidal and Niyazi showed up with another long-tailed gar that they cooked for the whole Watch to eat.

Wesh stayed by Eliska’s side the whole time. After Yann and the others finished their work, they just had to sit around and wait to see what happened.

Wesh kept laying hands on different parts of Eliska’s body and sending currents of magic through her.

Yann didn’t see any of Wesh’s efforts having any effect—none at all. She remained as unconscious as ever.

End of Chapter 21.