Chapter 123: Descent
Among the sounds of the rushing waters, the inhalation of a generous amount of air stood out defiantly, as if challenging the forces of nature.
Although, it wasn’t the forces of nature that the kind and compassionate stranger was challenging.
Air turned into water the next moment, and the blue sky had turned into river; the young man dove under the water to fetch someone he thought worthy of life.
And she was worthy. Despite her actions which brought cruelty upon her in the first place, and despite Zan who thought she deserved death.
Wading through the water, the kind stranger turned his head left and right, hastily looking for her body. It had taken him some time to get here, and chances were high that water had already entered her lungs. He had to get her out fast, before she really did die.
The river was not murky, but relatively clear. He was expecting to see her body as soon as he opened his eyes under the vast water…but strangely it was nowhere to be found.
Instead though, under the rushing tides he found a strange oval-like shadow. It resembled a cocoon or a chrysalis, and the water it was seemingly made of was a shade darker than all the rest of the river.
It was…eerie, creepy, and unnatural.
Utterly confused, the stranger hesitantly approached the womb of darkness.
There was something telling him the girl was inside the cocoon of dark water, although there was also something telling him to stay vehemently away from it. Nevertheless, he stubbornly pushed down the rising feeling of uneasiness and came closer.
As he approached, he heard the odd sounds of suckling, slithering and rustling.
Waves of disturbing but muffled sound spread from the darkwater cocoon. Visible pulses vibrated and shook the surrounding water.
Knowing she was in there, the stranger's hand reached forward, and every inch that it came closer to the womb of darkness brought him untold amounts of trepidation.
His hand started to tremble. An intense, instinctual fear brought to him an awareness, a reminder that he was mortal and limited. That in this very moment he should not be trying to save the girl, but choosing to save himself instead. Whatever was happening inside the cocoon of unholy water, was going to happen to him next if he did not get away from it at this very moment!
Only a centimeter of water separated the kind boy's hand from the cocoon, and it was at that point that his hand stopped.
The profound inherent fear had gripped his heart, and he was suddenly bombarded by a dozen concurrent thoughts.
‘Wh— What is happening in there!?’
‘What even is this…thing?’
‘Why is she even in there!?’
‘I– I think I need to leave…’
‘I’m so stupid! I'm so stupid!’
‘What am I doing!?’
‘Why am I even here in the first place!?’
‘Why…’
‘Why?’
When his heart was gripped by darkness, and he was choking in fear and negativity, a critical question suddenly, but purposefully came to his mind.
‘Why am I here in the first place?’
‘It’s because…’
The kind stranger looked intently at the literal object of his fears. Out of every instance that he had ever been afraid, this moment was the one where he was the most terrified.
A good part of him did not even know why he was so struck with terror. The chrysalis made out of gloomy water did not look too disturbing, but instead it felt that way.
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That…thing, made him feel like he was stuck in a nightmare. Intense emotions of spiraling anxiety and hysteria rose inside him at its sight.
It simply didn't make sense how utterly it destroyed his mind and deteriorated his mental health. It had to have been made by the devil. Or one of those demonic gods. Being as close to it as he was, made him realize how utterly wrong it was for the thing to even exist.
…And yet, he did not move from where he floated. A part of him was clinging to an unimportant question, conjured up by his then ill and fragmenting mind.
His skin screamed. The few millimeter-strands of blonde hair he had stood up, wanting to swim away from his head. He was wasting time. Time that he could be using to get further away and save his own hide. And yet he knew this, he felt that dire and dreadfully ominous urgency to flee.
…But his heart rebelled against human survival instinct. Telling him to pursue something higher. And that higher was hidden within a simple question.
Why are you here?
‘Why am I here…’
He pondered on the question like he had lost something valuable. Or forgotten a special, treasured memory.
He pondered, and a single moment felt like a lifetime…but his choice to focus on that question, instead of fleeing or further falling into the madness…was rewarded with an answer, and that answer came from the light within his own heart.
For but a split-second, his heart flashed with a subtle glow again. The light passed through his chest, through the surrounding water, and penetrated through the cocoon of darkwater.
Sensing it, a hand from within reached towards the light, but was stopped by the barrier of the cocoon.
The kind stranger saw her hand on the murky surface that had grown weak and see-through, but the darkwater festered like ink, and her hand was obscured from view.
In that instant he realized then that he was between a cusp. A cusp between that of fear, and saving someone's life.
The awareness gave him a radiant rush of strength, and brought him into another realization: That the choice was still up to him: To fall deeper or to rise higher.
Now awareness of his fear did not mean its disappearance. It still had a wretched grip on him, and even now his hands were trembling.
But darkness gave light the chance to truly know itself, and through the intense fear he felt, he was able to see more clearly what he needed to summon from within.
He closed his eyes, repeatedly trying and failing to calm himself down. After that unsuccessful endeavor, he then tried to muster up enough bravery to beat back the trembling in his hands and the hesitance in his body…only to quickly find out that he just could not.
The kind and compassionate stranger was a little confused. Courage was not summoned to beat fear back, it was born by purpose and action, despite the overwhelming oppression of fear.
His chest started to hurt— the air held within his lungs was quickly expiring, and the life of the person in need of rescue could extinguish at any time.
So still plagued by uncontrollable trembling and a deteriorating mind, the boy took his hand back from the cocoon…and suddenly threw his whole arm into the unholy chrysalis. He'd done it with all the force he could, and his body under the water followed him. His entire arm up to the shoulder ended up seeping into the blasphemous object, and he lost all sight of what was happening to it.
The kind stranger was still deathly afraid for his life, but instead of cloudy fear and negativity, there was hope and promise in his thoughts, and courage in his heart.
Penetrating the barrier of darkwater, in an instant he felt a thousand slippery feelers gripping onto his arm. The sickening sensation felt gooey yet strangely solid at the same time. He had felt the skin of an eel before with his hands, and that sensation was similar to what he was feeling right now…except of course, a thousand times more disturbing and icky.
Whatever organism or organisms had gripped his frail skinny arm, had started to slither and slother all over it. It felt like he had plunged his arm into a nest of a hundred mating anacondas, and the heavy pressure under their forceful ravishing had caused it to almost break, and deform. It went without saying the pain he felt made him want to scream, but he held back for obvious reasons.
He moved his arm through the undulation of vile bodies, unrelenting in his search for that hand that had reached out to him, towards his light. Triggered by compassionate will and purpose, the light within his heart intelligently flowed down to his arm.
The kind stranger found his struggle against the vile moving flesh to have lessened, both because of the empowered strength in his arms, and because the vile things moving within the sightless cocoon had shrunk back, feeling the warmth of radiant light.
Given new freedom, his pitiful and abused arm waved itself within the chrysalis until finally, he felt a semblance of human flesh. It was difficult to tell because the girl’s skin seemed to have been coated with some vile substance, but he heaved a sigh of relief when he finally felt bone instead of slippery flesh.
His hand was hasteful and urgent, fumbling around in an effort to find her own. In response to the stimuli of light, a spark of fragile hope reignited. Weakly, she used the last reserves of her tired and broken body to reach out to him once again.
Still fumbling around, the kind stranger made out what he thought to be her chest, and then her shoulder, but along tracing her arm to find her hand, she had found his. Gently, it fell into his grasp like a flake of snow falling onto a leaf, and with one strong pull the girl’s body broke through the murky chrysalis.
The stranger saw as the inky waters parted and scattered, revealing a fatigued and unconscious face. Shortly after reaching out to his hand, she had lost consciousness.
Quickly, he pulled her by the waist and locked her tightly onto him. Truthfully he had never been so close to a girl before. The timid boy would have been blushing, if not for the threat of death and ticking clock. Using his free limbs he then flailed urgently to the surface.
By now the pain in his lungs hurt more than the abuse he suffered at his arm. And the lack of oxygen going towards his head felt like it was splitting his brain in two.
Above him the light broke through the surface of the water. The refraction of the sun’s rays had never been more beautiful to him than in this moment, and he had never been more glad to see them too.
Franky, he had more than his fair share of the darkness of the depths. In fact, he was sick of water in general now.
…Although the waters felt that they didn’t get a good enough taste of him. Sensing the absence of that radiant power, the darkness within the waters coalesced once more.
From out of the broken chrysalis, tendrils and tentacles ripped out from within. Audible cracks and breaks in the water could be heard as they waved and whipped through the liquid. They were furious. Furious at the light, and furious that both prey had somehow managed to wiggle out of its clutches.
One of the tendrils extended longer than all the rest, and reached out towards the boy swimming to the surface. If it dragged the girl down it would have one meal, but if it dragged the boy down it would have two.
The kind stranger was much too distracted with reaching air that he did not notice it. Also, he simply did not want to look back.
What he wanted to focus on was hope, and not the darkness behind him. All his focus was placed on the blurry light in front of him. It was blurry because he was close to fainting, but he was also so very close to making it out alive—- with both of them, alive.
In his vague vision, the light looked like a blurry sun. He was at the very end of a tunnel, to which his eyes, unused to the light, found it pleasantly blinding.
At the same time, the tendril of darkwater was mere inches away from his kicking feet. His legs waved through the water, and the tendril circled one of them in a spiral.
Then like an anaconda…it suddenly squeezed and tightened.
The kind stranger felt a steel grip onto his leg. It was so crushingly tight that he felt the blood within his veins stop at its seizure.
The changes happened too fast, too sudden—- his head was still looking at the blurry light…and that was when it suddenly encompassed all of his vision.
An ocean of light came down onto the river. The light piercing through the water had grown so strong that everything beneath it was illuminated. Sand, seashells, cowering fish— every nook and cranny that the light had not reached before, was nourished and loved by its presence.
Blood started to flow again, as the sudden sensation of his leg being constricted disappeared. Instead, a feeling of joy and lightness filled his being.
In the very next moment, the stranger’s head broke through the water, and whatever had happened beneath the surface, felt like it was all a dream.