Jonathan was drowning even before the air went away as he was battered between rocks he couldn’t see in the narrow channel. The chaos of the whole thing was made impossible in the darkness. If he didn’t try to swim, then he slipped beneath the turbulent water, but if he did, inevitably he hit his arm or his leg on something as he was swept further into the bowels of the earth.
It was a terrifying experience that was made a hundred times worse as the ceiling above the torrent shrank. At first, Jonathan could only feel it occasionally as he brushed it with his fingertips, but soon enough it was an ever-present hazard that forced him to keep one arm up in front of his face lest he get his teeth smashed out on the rocks as he was tossed by the raging current.
That was bad enough, but after that, the ceiling lowered even further, so that he could only take quick breaths at uncertain intervals as the rock undulated invisibly above him. Then like that, the air was gone. One moment he was gasping into a small void that was only inches wide, but when it vanished, as all the other pockets had previously, there was nothing there to replace it. Not for ten seconds, then not for thirty. There was simply no more air to be found.
The whole tunnel was constricting now. He could feel the periphery of it on all sides of him now. This had the side effect of increasing the strength of the current, pulling him forward even faster than it had before, but he hadn’t been able to resist the current with his swimming before. There was no way that he was going to be able to stop himself now.
Jonathan didn’t even try. It was a waste of energy, and between the cold of the water and the growing urgency with which his lungs were demanding air, all he could do was go limp and drift.
Had it been a minute yet? he asked himself. Probably, but he didn’t think that it had been two quite yet because his lungs were merely on fire. After two or three minutes his body would force him to breathe whether there was air or not, and that would be it for him.
He accepted that thought with more grace than he would have thought possible. He was going to die, but he was strangely at peace with it, just like he’d been when he’d stared down the troll. Why was that? he wondered. He lacked the energy to explore that question fully as he felt himself drifting down, ever further into the darkness.
Idly he found himself wondering if he’d be able to pull the air from the stray bubbles into his lungs if he had been an air blooded instead of a fire blooded. It didn’t matter. He’d gone numb, and other than the gentle feeling of motion in the distance, everything that made up the world he used to occupy had drifted off into the darkness.
He was alone in the void, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to just give up and die. Unable to hold his body back from the inevitable, he exhaled his last breath. Just as he felt his consciousness fading to darkness he was suddenly plunged into the light, and it blinded him.
Was this the afterlife, he wondered drawing a ragged, sputtering breath? It wasn’t the heavens that had been taught to him, but Jonathan was hardly an expert in these things. He’d never died before.
He wasn’t soaring up into the sky though. Even though it was too bright to see what was happening he could feel himself falling. No sooner did he realize that was the case than he splashed down into another pool of water hard enough for it to sting even through the numbness that gripped him.
The water swirled around him again, but this time he could see the bubbles, and he could see the rocky bottom only a few feet beneath him. He was once again submerged, but this time he wasn’t doomed. With leaden limbs, Jonathan swam towards the surface and the promise of the warmth and air that it contained.
His breath came in gasps as he broke the water’s surface. Blinded, all he could do was move towards the edge of the pool and then spend the next minute coughing up water and breathing in giant lungfuls of air while he looked back at the way he came. Behind him was a raging waterfall that vomited forth a constant stream of water, with a dark pool of water boiling and churning beneath it. At the moment that darkness was the only place in the world that wasn’t so bright that it hurt to look at, so he stared at it while he trudged to the water's edge as he tried to figure out how he’d managed to survive.
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That river that he’d been in must have risen to the surface as a spring, which was a lucky thing, but it had been a horrible one-way trip from the Stygian depths. One that he’d only just managed to survive, and not a thing he’d like to repeat ever again if he could help it. Even through the fear and the pain he was grateful, though. When he could finally breathe again, he would get down on his knees and thank the gods for their infinite mercy.
As his vision began to clear he could make out the rock face, and even a few blurry trees. This wasn’t an illusion or the fantasy of a dying man. He was finally on the surface. He had finally come home. It was a strange thought because he’d been down there for so long though that his own world felt alien to him. He was freezing and practically blind, but all that would resolve with a little sunlight and rest, he thought. He was finally on the surface and free, so everything was going to be okay.
It took him longer than it should to realize how cold that air was. He’d assumed that he was shivering because of the icy water, but it was only after he noticed that his breath was fogging up that he realized it wasn’t just that he was cold, but that it was actually frigid.
Jonathan looked around, squinting hard as he looked around the world. What he saw sent a shiver of fear down his spine: he was somewhere in the mountains, and aside from pine trees and a few boulders, all he could see in every direction was snow. Looking around, he could see that the pool was probably much larger than the small part he could see - it was just covered in ice. As cold as the water might be it was just warm enough to keep the whole thing from icing over.
It was a terrifying thought. He’d managed to avoid drowning, but he had no idea how he was going to keep from freezing to death.
Jonathan looked for anything that he could burn to start a fire, but the nearest copse of trees was almost a hundred feet away. He took a moment instead and stilled his mind so that he could reach out with magic and see if he could locate any firewood buried under the blanket of snow. There was some here and there. He could feel the motes of fire faintly, but as exhausted as he was, he was in no shape to pull from such weak sources.
What caught his eye though was a brilliant ember of fire at the bottom of the pool. Looking back Jonathan couldn’t see what it was, but he knew he had to have it, and reluctantly he turned around and waded back into the icy waters. As much as he loathed the idea he needed any source of fire he could get his hands on, or the cold would kill him almost as surely as the water had.
Even knowing this, forcing himself to dive back below the surface of the water and start swimming down was one of the most terrifying things he’d ever done. He’d almost drowned minutes ago, and his mind hadn’t yet made peace with that fact.
Even as he approached the sun-dappled bottom of the pond, he couldn’t see the source of the elemental power he was looking for, but he could sense it, so he kept going, getting closer and closer to the stony bottom. It was only just before he would have had to give up and return to the surface that he finally found it: his sack from earlier. He had been certain that it was gone forever, but it had been swept along with him by the current and had ultimately been swept to the same location as him. It was a surprise, but a welcome one.
He snatched it up and swam back to the surface as fast as his half-numb limbs could take him. Even though the urge to draw warmth from the fire into his limbs was irresistible, he waited. Drawing heat in the wrong way could cook parts of his body while leaving others frozen, doing more harm than good. He had to stop and focus on that and nothing else.
On the way to the surface, he saw the corpses of the two goblins that had attacked him trapped under the ice and gave them a wide berth. They couldn’t hurt him anymore, but that didn’t mean they weren’t disgusting. When he got to the surface he opened the bag and found everything as he’d left it: the brand, the knife, and most importantly, the powder flask. The powder in the brand must have been ruined or washed away because Jonathan felt nothing from it. The flask though - it glowed with the promise of a whole pile of coal, and as soon as his heart stopped pounding and his lung stopped heaving he was going to devour every last spark if that’s what it took to keep himself alive.
That was hard though when every breeze felt like icy needles assaulting his thin clothes and his wet skin. So, while he sat on a rock next to the water with his eyes closed, he began to very slowly draw tendrils of fire into his body. It was the same skill he’d been practicing for years in the depths but in reverse. Instead of pulling as much fire as he could from his body and dumping it somewhere else, he was pulling excess heat in to bring his rapidly cooling body back where he needed it to be. Even with that much practice though, it still took several minutes before he felt the warmth begin to circulate to his frozen limbs, and even longer before he could finally feel his toes.
By the time it was done, and Jonathan had consumed perhaps half of the powder in the flask, his body was steaming gently in the winter chill and the cold no longer had any grip on him. He opened his eyes and found that he could see a little better at least, so he got up and started walking to the closest copse of trees. What he needed now was firewood. He’d need food and water too, but he could worry about hunting after he’d made sure he wasn’t going to freeze to death. His dwindling supply of dwarven powder was much too precious of a resource to waste frivolously.