75. Rorax
Rorax took a few steps away from the Guardian and found Milla and Ayres grinning at her through the wall of solid air the Guardian had erected before the trial started.
Milla pressed her palm against the transparent barrier, beaming. “You crazy bitch. How did you do it? You got to the temple after everyone else.”
Ayres wasn’t smiling at her like Milla, but Rorax could see the satisfaction on his face as his eyes flitted over her body looking for wounds.
“I got lucky,” she told Milla. Sweat and salt water dripped down her neck and exhaustion pulled at her limbs. Gods, she had never been so excited for a bath and some sleep in her life.
An ear-piercing scream came from the water behind her, and collectively the whole crowd turned to look.
Stella, Mo, and Isgra had reached the beach and were half jogging, half walking towards the Guardian. Briar wasn’t far behind them, but Enna . . . Enna was still in the water, dark fins circling around her.
Lily was nowhere to be seen.
Enna screamed again, and Rorax took an instinctive step towards the water.
“Rorax,” Ayres growled from the other side of the barrier.
The Guardian accepted the coins from the three girls before she turned and eyed Rorax, considering her with an amused smile. “No one from the opposite side of the barrier is allowed to enter the water. You could, I suppose, but you’ve already won. Would you risk your life for a competitor who would not risk her life for you?”
Rorax gritted her teeth, turning to watch as a dark fin inched closer to Enna.
Rorax had made a promise to herself, a promise that she wouldn’t leave the Realms without an acceptable Guardian when the power passed from the current Guardian to its successor.
If Lily was down that left Mo, Stella, Isgra, Briar, Mairi, Enna, and herself. She couldn’t, wouldn’t leave the Realm’s protection to a House of Alloy citizen, or someone beholden to them. Mairi was barely skilled enough to tie her own fucking boots, and Briar didn’t have the moral compass strong enough to lead the Realms. And beyond all that, Rorax liked Enna. She was her friend.
Enna screamed in terror again, and without another thought Rorax ran back, sprinting towards the water.
“Crow, get back here!” Ayres demanded from behind the barrier.
There was a loud crashing boom, and Rorax looked over her shoulder to see Ayres slamming his fists against the barrier. His eyes were silver and red. “Rorax!” he bellowed.
She turned away and took two more steps until she was knee deep in salt water before a hand wrenched her back.
“Where are you going? You’ve already won,” Isgra snarled down at her.
“Let me go,” Rorax fought to keep her voice even, “or I will dislocate your wrist.”
“She’s already gone. Let her die, you fool.”
For a beat, Rorax stared into the eyes of her dead best friend. The best friend that she couldn’t save, couldn’t protect. “No.”
Rorax ripped her arm out of Isgra’s grip and dove into the water.
She swam furiously, begging her body to find the strength somewhere within her.
She kept pushing, her limbs burning as the adrenaline started to fade from her system. When Rorax was close enough, she ducked her head underwater to see what she was up against.
It was a squid. A giant squid with teeth protracting from its tentacles, who was slowly nipping at Enna’s legs and releasing her blood into the water. The sharks were circling so they could enjoy whatever the squid left behind for them.
Cold fear speared down Rorax’s chest as she took in the blood staining the water.
Rorax thanked the gods that her knife, Glimr, was in its sheath on her back, and with a thrust of her arm she sent it in a tight spiral through the water.
Her knife sunk itself into the center of the squid and its tentacles instantly released around Enna’s waist. Black inky blood gushed through the water, mingling with the red, as the squid”s body slowly floated away.
Rorax summoned the knife back to her and rose to the surface.
She gasped a breath into her burning lungs and reached forward to grip Enna’s wrist. Rorax jerked her forward and Enna crashed into her side. “Come on, swim. We have to swim.”
“Sharks,” Enna said faintly, slumping forward, her forehead thudding onto Rorax’s shoulder. “Let me go, Ror. Get back to shore.”
Rorax turned Enna around, wrapped her arm around Enna’s stomach, and kicked her legs furiously under Enna’s weight to keep both their heads above water. Rorax twisted Enna’s hair around her fist and yanked her friend’s head back so she could see her neck. Black veins were starting to twist up Enna’s throat from under her clothes.
Fuck.
“Enna, I need you to breathe. Stay with me.”
She whimpered against Rorax’s shoulder as Rorax started to haul her through the water.
Rorax could see the Guardian’s wall of magick on the shore, only because a black and red magick cloud was starting to create a contrast. Loud yells erupted from the beach, and she could hear Ayres’s thundering voice the loudest.
Enna had become dead weight in her arms, and her breathing started to grow ragged against her shoulder as Rorax pushed through the water. The yelling on the beach became louder, and she saw Isgra and Briar follow most of the emissaries offshore and turn towards camp as Ayres and the Guardian continued to yell at one another.
Rorax’s limbs started to burn, and she gritted her teeth. She used almost every shred of energy and adrenaline left in her system to move forward, trying to ignore her rising panic.
She and Enna were going to be fish food in about five minutes if she didn’t figure out something fast. But she couldn”t think. She couldn’t think and she couldn’t breathe. Her chest felt tighter and tighter; her lungs were taking in less and less air as panic settled into her system.
Enna’s face dipped under the water just as movement in her peripheral vision sparked a new wave of fear in her chest. A dark fin sliced through the water towards her.
“Enna,” she sobbed, trying to shake her friend and swim at the same time. Enna’s head only lolled to one side in response. They were going to die, and there was nothing Rorax could do to save them. She’d given everything she had. “I’m so sorry.”
Enna didn’t say anything, and Rorax summoned her knife into her palm one last time. She threw it at the shark.
The movement made them slip under the surface, and Rorax inhaled some of the salty sea in through her nose. She kicked up and coughed, trying desperately to expel the water from her lungs.
From beneath the water, Ayres’s voice was muffled, calling out to her, but she couldn”t hear him, and she couldn’t comprehend what he was saying until it was too late.
The shark, with one bloody eye, still raced towards them.
The shark hit Rorax so hard it blasted both her and Enna clean out of the water.
Rorax’s head hit the water first, her vision going dark for a moment before she was kicking again, breaching the surface and desperately inhaling air into her lungs. Enna floated a few feet from her, facedown, her dark hair billowing out around her like an ominous cloud.
Rorax gripped her wrist and pulled her limp body toward her. She hauled Enna’s head up with her arms while her legs continued to tread water, pushing them towards the shore. Enna wasn’t breathing so Rorax slapped her hard and she jerked, convulsing in her hold, expelling some of the water through her nose.
The shore was close now, so close. She gritted her teeth and surged forward.
Enna struggled. “Ror, Ror let me go. I can swim.”
“No,” she gritted out as she hauled them both closer. They must have been twenty yards from the shore when she saw it again, but it was so close, too close. A dark fin.
She couldn’t do anything but try to push Enna towards the shore, and she screamed, “SWIM!” before the shark clamped its jaws around Rorax.
Rorax could barely feel the pain as three layers of serrated teeth plunged into her back, stomach, and hip. The shark jerked her around under the water. She tried her best not to inhale, but as it yanked her back and forth, she opened her mouth to scream, and the water rushed into her lungs.
Her mind immediately became fuzzy, and the pain in her stomach and hips went numb.
If she was going to die here, at least it would be like this, where the pain was almost nonexistent, and she was almost warm. For a heartbeat she let herself give up for the moment. She let herself flirt with the idea of slipping into the ever-beckoning comfort of death, where she would never be in pain and never lose anyone she loved ever again.
Take me, I’m ready. I have fought, and there is nothing more I can give,she thought, as she slipped into the darkness.
Almost as soon as she made her decision to slip under, a hot beam of power shot through her.
Pure energy, rage, and adrenaline consumed every cell in her body. An influx.
Using the strength that the influx fused into her very soul, Rorax summoned her knife to her palm and started to hack. She sliced, stabbed, and plunged her knife into the shark’s gray side until finally the shark jerked, making a small welp of pain, and opened its jaws.
She pulled her flesh off rows of teeth, screaming internally, and kicked away.
With blurry eyes she watched as the shark swam off through the water, its blood trailing behind it, before she turned sluggishly towards shore.
So much of her blood was in the water around her she couldn’t see, so she kicked directly up until her head breached the surface.
She coughed up water and blood, gasping in deep desperate breaths. She looked around frantically and saw that in her struggle, the shark had thankfully moved her even closer to the beach. Rorax pushed herself as much as she could towards the shore. When her toes lightly scraped the sandy bottom, she used her legs to propel herself forward. The movement jarred her injuries, and she screamed internally. Her left side burned in pain. Rorax’s influx was fading fast, her body unable to maintain her strength for long. She got close enough to the beach that she could touch the bottom but she hadn’t been watching the waves. She heard Milla shriek her name, and she looked up just in time to see a giant wave angling right for her.
“Ayres!” Rorax screamed as a wave crashed into her and smashed her onto the shore. She felt her nose crack under the sand, and everything went black.