Pain.

Dull in my body, sharp in my leg, and burning in my chest.

Taste.

The taste of salt, iron, and something bitter I did not recognize filled my shut mouth.

Colors.

Blue, white, red, and azure washing together around me in a blinding swill that burnt my eyes.

I could hear nothing but the sound of the water moving past me.

No.

I could hear nothing but that water in my ears as I was pulled through it.

As hard as I could, I tried to see down to where Bru had taken my leg, but I was bent around the wrong way and could not catch sight of her before the burning forced my eyes closed again.

I needed to breathe more than I ever needed anything in the short part of my life that I could remember.

I needed to go up, wherever up was.

First, I had to free myself from the jaws of the familiar it was trying to eat me.

I extended my left palm down towards where I believed my legs to be and loosed a firework without thought.

It flashed bright blue against something that might've been my own limb and new pain shot all the way up through my hip.

Bru went swimming past me in a blur as I slowly drifted to a stop.

I whipped my head up, down, and side to side, but there was nothing to tell me which way the surface was.

I was drowning, but my chest felt like it was on fire.

I knew without doubt that if I did nothing I would die. Doing something would probably get me killed just the same, but I could not sit and wait for my end to come.

A dream of Anna, alone in our quarters inside Lun Arcanicil, came to the front of my mind. It was not a good dream like the dream of us growing old on Silkcradle. It was a bad dream, one where Precept Seram had to go tell my beloved that I had died and everything that Anna had ever done for me had been for nothing.

Before I could wake up and shake it away, Bru came cutting through the water straight towards me with her rows and rose of terrible teeth on full display.

She was going to eat me.

It would take her more bites than it had for her to swallow Anna's gifts, but in pieces or not she would have her meal. I could see it in her empty black eyes.

The firework it took far more from me than it should have to form met her halfway.

It did not hit her snout like I had intended. Instead, it streaked right into her open mouth and burst the moment after she closed it. A swell of white bubbles, washed it from her and concealed her from my blurry site.

When it passed, she was still and floating in the same direction the bubbles had gone, belly up.

I had killed her.

I was sure of it.

I had learned which the surface was, but no longer had the strength to try and struggle towards it.

I was fading.

I would not be able to keep myself from gasping for air much longer.

The thought crossed my mind to call out for The Mothers in my desperation, but I could not open my mouth to scream no matter how bad I wanted to. Even if they could hear my pleas, there was not enough of my power left to lace my words with.

Bru floated up and I floated down. We were both dead, it was just taking me longer to accept it than it had the little shark.

Just before she faded from my sight, through the froth that my struggling was making, she opened her mouth and a rush of water came streaming out of it.

Durath's chalice, Benny's quills, Bruce's feather, the round stone from the beach, everything that Bru had stolen from me came tumbling out of her mouth.

Apparently not dead, not even a little bit, she gave her tail a violent swish and turned over before disappearing into the rough water.

I stretched out my hands for Anna's gifts, somehow caring more about catching them than I did trying to swim to the surface.

They were too far away.

The thought came to me that the only thing worse than dying was dying alone.

Being underwater made it so I could not be sure I could not be sure if I was crying, but I had hurt far less than I did then and shed tears, so I thought I must be.

The edges of my stinging vision began to blacken and blur. The burning in my chest would have put Rhiannon's pyre to shame. My body was so hard to move that it almost felt like the pressure and weight of Azza's sand.

Lost in the swill of seawater, azure dust, and my own blood, the last thing I thought of was Anna.

I had celebrated smaller victories than that.

My mouth snapped open and I gasped for the air that was not there at the same time that something strong took me by my waist.

There was no pain like when Bru had bitten me. Only the feeling of being held and the slight awareness that I was moving was clear to me.

Silent coughs wracked my chest.

The next uncontrollable gasp I took would fill my lungs with water.

Hold on. The other Autumn in my mind said.

My eyes flitted open and I caught a brief glimpse of the warden reaching out towards me. His beard looked funny in the water, drifting all around him like he had brushed it out in every direction with a comb.

I can't. I told the other Autumn.

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Bru, the warden, Hexis, or whatever it was that was moving me, was not fast enough. My ability to hold my breath would break again, long before I was in the safety of the warden's arms.

When I died, it would break the blood pact that he had made with Alexei.

I've never seen Alexei kill someone, but he did not seem like the type of man to make blood pacts unless he meant to honor them.

I have to.

I couldn't die because if I did, the warden would too. Thinking of a world without the warden in it was a sorrow that was so strong, I managed to keep my lips sealed for another moment.

Water suddenly ran down my face as I was pushed up into open air without any memory of how I had gotten there.

I gasped and coughed and spat and cried all at once.

There was so much sound, so much echoing sound, that I could barely hear the warden speaking, even though he was the one holding me up.

"There you are. It's alright. Catch your breath. We'll be out of here in a minute." The bearded man comforted me, wearing a faint smile that did not meet his eyes.

Somehow I had been brought to the tunnel that had led us to the drowning cave earlier that day. The seawater had flooded it, and there was barely enough room for our heads to be above water. Light came from somewhere, blue light, but I could not see its source.

The warden patted me on my back roughly with his scarred hand, and each impact brought more salty water spilling out of my mouth.

I would've gotten sick and given the warden the treatment I had once given the guard Bool if there had been anything in my stomach to lose.

"We're almost out. We're almost out. We're almost out." The warden repeated, and I believed what he said.

I had never noticed just how blue his eyes were before then. I had seen their color before, but I could not remember where.

"Take a deep breath now, Ire. We've gotta go under one more time. Are you ready?" He asked as he gave my back one final pat.

I nodded and brought my hand up to my face. "Egg. Rat's egg."

Somehow through everything that had happened, I had never let go of the one little yellow egg. I hadn't broken with my working in the garden cave.

The warden laughed his good laugh, but it had never been quite that good before. The echo off the walls and joined with all the rest of the confusing sounds in the flooding cave. "You're a rare sort, Ire. Very rare indeed. Deep breath, hold your nose, we'll be back with Benny before you know it."

I did as he asked. My throat and chest burned as I took the deepest breath I had ever taken. With one hand covering my mouth and closing my nose, and the other still holding Rat's egg like it was the only thing in all of chaos that truly mattered, I felt the water rise up over me once again.

The same vague feeling of movement followed, but I knew it was not the warden moving me.

Maybe Hexis had come for us both. Maybe she was saving me from drowning, yes, but she meant to take me to her nowhere place and I would drown there instead.

If she gave me something like the warden's tether, I wouldn't mind.

A gift from the silken queen would be worth far more than the trinkets that I had lost after all.

The full and distant swirling sound of the seawater in my ears was all I could hear, until they emptied, and I heard the sound of stones crunching under far too many feet.

"You can breathe now, Ire. We're out." The warden sighed as he laid me down on solid ground.

A long moment passed where all I could do was breath.

Warm sunlight beamed onto me. I knew it was the real thing and not Rat's glow.

Flashes of the memories that had just been made ran through my mind so quickly that I could barely make sense of them. The pain, the tastes, the colors, what I had done and what had been done to me, it was so much.

It was too much.

For reasons I did not understand, it made me smile.

The smile grew into a laugh, and I heard others laughing with me.

"THE FRIEND OF MORTWYN HAS PREVAILED." I heard the eagle face of Durath call out in its tombstone voice.

A small weight settled onto my shoulder. "My actions were regrettable, Lady Ire. I am prone to succumbing to my passions. As an apology and for the bravery it surely took to save the egg that I now gift to you, I am in your debt. If you ever have need of me, just call out my name."

"Mama. Mama. Mama." I heard Benny cheer over the sharp clinking of her crystalline footsteps.

A shrill giggle came next and I flinched at the sound of Bru's voice. "You will want to tend to her leg, Morty. I tried so hard to not break skin, but she was so soft. you have to believe me."

"Well done, Bru-Tol. You will be rewarded for your restraint," I heard the warden say as there was a spike of pain in my leg. "Look, you lost a tooth."

Something soft covered my leg and I felt the soothing feeling of the warden's silken tether like I had on my arms earlier.

"All I was doing was being a good little girl, and trying to save her so you don't have to die, and how does she repay me? She tries to kill me. Twice! You should choose better company, Morty. Not everyone is as nice and polite as I am." Bru continued, her voice shifting wildly between a shrill shriek to her skin crawling giggle.

I sat up as my laugh turned to a painful sob and opened my eyes.

The warden and all the familiars were gathered around me in a circle. I had been laid down on a rise of the round grey stones that covered the beach outside of Durath's cave.

High tide had brought the water up so much that I would have been hip deep in it during the sphinx's riddles if we had arrived just a little later.

I felt my bottom lip pucker out and quiver as I met the warden's eyes. "That was really scary."

"You're right about that," He nodded and smiled as he tried his best to light a burner that was too soaked to catch flame. "But you got through it. That's what's important. I doubt your guard will be happy about how things went, but I'm prepared for that."

I took the burner from his hands and used the little of my power that I had left to push the water from it like I would my hair. Still crying, I did the same to his match and handed them both back to him.

"Rare indeed." He grunted as he took a long breath and let out a puff of white smoke.

Rat unfurled his little wings and flew up off my shoulder.

"You are better now. I'm sorry for what I did." I sobbed as I watched him fly away from the gathering around me.

Durath turned towards his cave next, every step he took with his massive paws pushing the mound of stones underneath me higher up.

Bru and Benny were taking turns chasing each other in circles around the edge of the mound. Even they stopped and looked towards the cave.

"Here we are," The warden groaned as he stood. "The invisible hero."

At first, all I could see were the little waves spreading out over the water and colliding with each other. Then, starting at the tips of the strange fluid legs that began to reveal themselves, I realized that I was looking at Deebee.

"Ha! I knew you were an octopus!" The warden shouted and clapped his hands.

I had been wrong about the invisible familiar. He was not big, he was long. All six of his legs shifted seamlessly from color to color as he left the cave. His variegated eyes, with their strange square pupils, watched everyone careful as he crept past all of the familiars and crawled to where I sat.

"Not Octopus. Am Deebee." He said towards the warden, his round head as big as my middle was.

"You do only have six tentacles." The warden shrugged.

One look into his eyes was all I needed to know in the deepest part of my worn out soul that it had been him who had saved me. Deebee had been the one to pull me from the drowning cave and help the warden get me out of the tunnel.

A rare sort indeed.

"I-" I started, desperately needing to tell him how thankful I was.

He held up one of his wiggly tentacles like Precept Seram would a finger to silence me. All of him wriggled and writhed as a seventh leg came unfurling out from underneath him.

The tentacle rolled out like a blanket being fluffed and when the wave met its end, Anna's gifts came spilling out at my feet.

The chalice, the quills, the stone, the feather, they were all there.

"You reached. I have reach." Deebee said, his voice not sounding quite as sad as it had before.

"I-" I started again, unable to do anything but whisper.

Another of Deebee's tentacles rose up and I fell silent once again.

Just like before, an eight tentacle came curling out towards me.

"Ha! You are an octopus!" The warden said as he clapped his hands.

He loved it when he was right.

Bright blue light shone out from the strange cups that lined the inside of Deebee's leg. He held my forgotten werelight out to me and offered the yellow fruit from before.

"Trade now?"

I cried even harder.

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