Chapter 53: The Waves below the Temple

As Miro rowed the boat towards the temple, the two cliffs behind him created a wind tunnel that sent fierce gusts at his back, rocking the boat and causing it to slowly fill with water. He was thankful at that moment for his confrontation with Hima a couple of weeks earlier. Compared to being entombed in a single block of ice, this didn’t seem quite so bad, and he almost cracked a smile at the thought that she had unwittingly been training him to save her life. Glancing down at the water accumulating at the bottom of the boat, he wondered though if that training would fall short of that result.

From his position at the oars, the slow progress made the bay seem endless and Miro quit glancing over his shoulder at the massive rock walls, which now played the part of the proverbial pot that refused to boil. Instead, he gritted his teeth and simply rowed, focusing on a single spot on the prow of the boat to the exclusion of everything else. Whatever his 3 Strength points were worth, he was using every ounce of them. His muscles strained against two forces – exhaustion on the inside, and the cold on the outside, and when he thought that he should have already covered the length of the bay at least three times, the water around him turned dark and he found himself rocking underneath the hanging part of the temple between the cliffs.

Miro could still make out the distant figure of Peteri on the shore, but could not let go of an oar to give even the briefest of waves. Looking around for what his possible next step could be, he found that the cliff nearest him had a switch-back staircase carved into the rockface leading up to the bottom of the temple. That is, if it could have even been called a staircase – merely recesses in the stone big enough for one foot, the lowers ones slick with an accumulation of algae and seaweed. Using the last of his upper body strength to maneuver towards the steps, Miro could not find anything to tether the boat to in order to keep it from drifting off.

Seeing no choice, he stood up in the boat, the bottom of which now sloshed with water, and nearly got bucked off into the sea as he stepped out onto a surface that was even more slippery than it looked. As he hugged the cliff with his two feet planted on something that barely counted as solid ground, he watched the boat get swiftly carried away by the current.

“Nowhere to go but up”, he told himself as he continued his climb, one hand gripping for any kind of holds in the rock wall while his feet gingerly moved from one step to the next. He thought he was being cautious and he thought he had felt true cold before, but he was wrong on both accounts. Misjudging the width of the next step, Miro’s foot slid sideways and he went plunging into the water, where the frigidity of the sea punished his body immediately.

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Until that moment, Miro never had to test whether in an emergency he would be able to figure out how to swim or not, and quickly found that he in fact could not. All he could muster was to impotently thrust himself out of the water to take unsatisfying gulps of air mixed with sea water and hope that this would be enough. The waves were mercifully carrying him in a direction that would lead past his intended target, but if he didn’t get himself close enough to the rocks in time, he would be gone.

Each new wave fully covered his head and each time it passed he would burst out of the water with a gasp, extending his hand and waiting for it to touch more than empty air. A fire mage done in by water. He had to laugh. In the face of an uncaring ocean all he had left was laughter, and he swore it would be on his lips until his last moment. And it would have been, if his hand had not finally caught something hard, and Miro dug his fingers into the rock with such force it would take his nails tearing off for him to let go again.

He willed himself back onto the treacherous staircase. There was something about the feeling that came with almost drowning that felt like part of him was still in the water – his legs were buckling underneath him and his head swam and he knew if he allowed himself to be taken by this sensation, it would be straight down to the bottom of the Shattered Sea for him. Nausea overtook him and he hurled back into the bay several cups worth of seawater that he hadn’t realized he swallowed during the ordeal. Another wave of lightheadedness passed over him, but he shook this off as well.

Miro renewed his ascent up the staircase even more carefully than before, the slowness grinding him down because it already felt like he had wasted too much time.

How he was meant to cross back to shore was a question he kept from his mind. Just keep moving, like Peteri said, counting the steps, not bothering to look up.

He reached the summit without faltering again, bumping up against the floor of the temple that even here looked as if it had simply grown out of the rock. Above him hung a single brass ring which when pulled revealed a square door just big enough for him to fit through. Something did not feel right about his view of the temple – out here where the wind tried to push him from his precarious perch he was looking straight up, but through the door in the temple he appeared to be looking at one end of a long hallway, something that should have been the ceiling of the temple. He looked down one last time at the waves licking hungrily for his life below and after a jolt of vertigo pulled himself up through the door, finding halfway through that gravity shifted on him and sent him tumbling a couple of feet to a tiled floor.

As he climbed through it, the opening in the floor of the temple became a low window behind him, which somehow still hung above the sea that now dizzyingly stood as a wall in the distance, an effect that was so disorienting Miro had to look away, only to find there was little here to look at without being confused. The grand hallway he found himself in was lined with tall windows reaching up many times his height to the ceiling, the view from them being the very sea that rumbled behind him, though this time properly oriented, showing the disjointedness of the Shattered Sea in all its glory.