The plunge into the icy river shocks Sigismund right through to his core. It is only luck that causes a sharp inhale before his head fully submerges beneath the water. Water, clear as expensive glass, stings his open eyes as he wildly kicks to escape.

His swift descent and wild kicking lodges one foot between two rocks, one much more loose than the other. The loose stone tips sideways and presses hard against his shin. The swirling current in the violent eddy pushes his body in the opposite direction.

He doesn’t hear the snap of bones breaking in his foot, but he feels them.

Sigismund’s vision blanches white with pain. He grits his teeth and kicks hard with his remaining free foot. Pushing hard against the stone gives him purchase enough to free himself. Wildly flailing while struggling to swim is less effective than actually trying to swim.

But he’s been underwater for too long, and he only has a small quantity of control of his movements as he desperately seeks air. His vision shrinks to a narrow tunnel surrounded by darkness. The water isn’t even that deep. The surface is so close.

His head breaks the surface of the water briefly before the current drags him under again. He gasps and swallows cold water. He grabs sharp stones on the river’s bottom and drags himself upward, kicking hard with his good foot and leveraging himself forward on his knees.

Crawling, humbled, he drags himself forward by inches, finally getting his head above water again. Sigismund finds the river carrying his body downstream and, through his narrow tunnel vision, he sees a green and gray shape ahead that breaks the surface of the shallow water.

Clinging to this one sign of hope, he drags himself toward it. The current drags at his clothing with its stiff fingers. Inch by difficult inch, he makes his way there.

Reaching for the stone, it is only after his hand finds purchase that he realizes it is not actually the safe shore he thought it was.

Sigismund hauls his barely warm corpse up onto the large flat stone, using his grip on the sturdy old bow as a lever. The stone sits directly in the center of the channel, with deeply worn cuts through the earth on either side. To escape, he will require either help or another swim through that frigid water unaided by anyone.

And on the shore, a massive beast still waits for him with open jaws. The creature slavers its desire to feast upon him from the shoreline, and Sigismund recoils in terror. He curls into a ball, arms feebly protecting his badly injured foot.

The light of the sun fails him as he sits on that lonely rock. True dusk is some time away yet, but the trees that obscure the horizon plunge his precarious position into pitch black before the time the almanac would prescribe.

With horror, he realizes that there is no way he will cross to the other side of the stream in the dark. The light of the moon and the stars of her demesne is not bright enough to illuminate the path. He must swim clearly enough to identify its dangers accurately.

He cowers upon the stone, shivering violently. Sleep is a total impossibility. He is cold, hungry, hurt, and that horrible monster is still out there on the opposite bank. He can see the yellow pinpricks of sourceless light that are its eyes. He can feel the memory of that hot breath upon his neck.

He will never forget how close he came to a violent death.

Even as he suffers through the freezing frosty night, and comes closer still to death by exposure. His clothing does, ever so slowly, drip dry. The thick wool offers some insulation, even while wet.

But when the frost finds him in the cold, silent darkness, it is merciless. It gnaws at his bones with teeth sharper than any blade. It bites into his spine and stiffens his fingers. His injured foot turns purple with bruising and blue with cold. He lies awake and suffers.

There is no such thing as mercy from the ravages of nature. One cannot beg forgiveness for one’s mistakes from the weather.

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Sigismund had been told that one’s life would flash before one’s eyes when one experiences a close call with death. And that is not at all what happened to him in the slightest. He instead saw nothing of the sort. He saw water. He saw rocks. He saw algae and twigs.

There was nothing deep or meaningful about the brush with drowning. There was no dramatic light at the end of his tunnel vision. There was only fear and horrible closing darkness.

Sigismund can’t shake the feeling that he has made an enormous error.

He clutches close the murder’s bow as he cowers in fear.

Perhaps, just maybe, freezing to death on a rock in the middle of a river just far enough away from civilization that there is absolutely no chance that anyone could theoretically pass by and rescue him casually is going to be a more horrible way to die than swiftly being rent to shreds. The vicious monster that would do the rending certainly seems to think that rending is the better option.

The pink-fingered harlot makes her grand entrance across the sky with her usual brilliant fanfare. The birds, her heralds, sing her glory as the sun slides into the Eastern sky. Sigismund begrudges her late arrival. Every day grows shorter than the last, and every minute of excess night only adds to the growing coldness in his heart.

Frost grows from his mustache where his humid plumes of breath have condensed overnight. His bitter mood permits no pleasure at how the night has finally ended. Long shadows of the trees march up the river like tombstones. The shadows slowly retreat as cold and hungry night loses its grip on the rock where Sigismund suffers.

The monster does not appear to have moved. Its breath is a great plume of steam that wreaths its great black snout in white. Morning breezes stir the fluffy mane, but it is otherwise not unlike a statue in its complete stillness.

Sigismund experimentally moves his hand, slowly flexing stiff fingers in the chill morning air. It hurts, but it moves. He pushes himself upright, trying and failing to avoid jostling the injured foot.

His clothes are stiff and crackle as he moves. When seated, he has enough room on the rock to stretch out completely and then some. He pulls his naked leg close to inspect the damage.

The bleeding stopped in the night. And the actual scrapes that caused it are relatively insignificant compared to the magnitude of the total injury. Two long scrapes down either side of his ankle mark where his boot’s buckles jammed into his flesh while being shoved under the rock and then were forced through his skin as he removed the foot from under the rock without the shoe.

Pushing carefully against the swollen tissue while trying not to reopen the wound, Sigismund attempts to assess the damage. There is definitely a broken bone or severed tendon. His foot refuses to respond to his requests for it to flex. He is not sure which bone is the culprit, or if a torn muscle would hurt more if it weren’t frozen so solid.

He turns his back on the monster on the shoreline.

It is a deliberate choice. He does not want to face it in daylight any more than he wanted to face it at night. The creature is simply too horrendous to look upon.

He turns his back on the monster, not knowing what it is. He decides that to know would require that he see it as anything important outside of what it means in relation to his personal health and safety and none of that matters.

All that matters is that he gets across this river and off this rock.

So Sigismund sets himself to the task. There is a stretch, just barely longer than his outstretched arm, where the water is too deep for him to even see the bottom. The water in all other places is crystal clear. Just opposite this trench is a wide stretch of shallow water, where he can see weeds bowed by the swift current that covers them.

Deeper water is usually slower moving than the shallows. He experimentally bends and straightens both knees. The broken foot does not cause enough pain for how damaged it clearly is. Sigismund tries not to think about the long-term implications of this.

Instead, he counts the lack of immediately blinding pain as a kind of blessing, and lowers himself into the deep water. Without a backward glance at the monster, he pushes himself out over the deep trench, still clutching his heavy wooden bow.

From far below, a terrible creature emerges. It looks up at him with blind lidless eyes. Whiskers longer than his limbs wave like pennons in the current that drags overhead.

Sigismund now knows how there came to be such a deep trench in the river where it is otherwise shallow.

A catfish larger than two men surfaces from underneath where he desperately tries to swim. Sigismund is not entirely an incompetent swimmer, but his injury and the frigid water handicaps him, punishes him for daring to think he could swim in it.

He struggles, but cannot reach the other side with any speed. The current is just too fast. It is the best he can do to keep his head above the water.

And in that horrible struggle, he realizes he has no choice but to keep swimming forward. The safe rock is already out of reach. The trench widens as he moves downstream. He cannot make it to safety easily.

So he adjusts his effort to move with the current and hopefully escapes the blind catfish.

But he knows well that not far down this river, at the edge of what he has personally explored, there is a waterfall and a horrible drop. If he can’t get out before then, he will surely die.