Chapter 290 Ask Me If The Lake Cared

Across the sapphire lake, Serena saw a glint of gold. She began to swim towards it.

A much smaller dragon came into view. It was also made of gold and sat on a rune-covered stone pedestal from what she could see. In its mouth, it held a token the size of her palm.

She swam as fast as she could. But it was at least fifty feet away, at the same crushing depth.

Her Hidden Flame mark seared hot.

Her lungs were already seizing. She had been down too long. The cold had chewed through half her shield, and the remaining half was fraying at the edges. Her fingers were stiffening, fine motor control deteriorating. Her diaphragm was spasming, her body’s involuntary demand for a breath she couldn’t take.

She looked at the token. Measured the distance. Ran the math against her air, her magic, her temperature, and the speed at which her body was shutting down.

There was no math to run. Nope.

She had to surface. The decision was instinct. Her body had already turned upward, legs kicking before her mind finished the calculation, because the animal part of her brain had overridden the stubborn part and chosen survival.

She hated leaving the token behind. She hated that the lake had shown her exactly where it was and exactly how far away it sat, and she hated that the distance had beaten her.

The ascent was ugly. Graceless. Just a body fighting upward through freezing water that seemed to thicken around her, resisting every stroke. The cold gnawed at the edges of her shield in strips, and ice water hit bare skin on her forearms, her collarbone, the back of her neck. Each contact point was a small detonation of pain that her exhausted body catalogued and filed.

Her vision was narrowing. Black at the edges. The surface was a pale disc above her, shrinking as the ice reformed, crystalline sheets reaching across the water and closing the gap.

She kicked harder. Her muscles screamed. Her chest was splitting. The cold had reached her core, wrapping around her heart, and her pulse was sluggish in a way she recognized from Frostborne training as the first sign of something very dangerous.

She broke the surface with a ragged, gasping, terrible sound. Coughing. Choking on air that burned all the way down. Her body convulsed, shivers so violent her teeth cracked together hard enough to send pain lancing through her jaw.

She treaded water. Barely. Arms heavy as stone. The gold glow around her body flickered, dimmed, flickered again. Her magic was guttering like a candle running out of wax.

Was it getting colder?

The ice was definitely closing in, creeping back across the surface in crystalline sheets, reaching for her from every direction. In another minute, maybe two, the lake would seal over entirely.

Serena floated on her back, staring at the constellation ceiling.

She had to go back down.

All the way down. All the way across. To a second dragon she hadn’t known existed, a hundred feet below and a hundred feet away, on reserves that were already past empty. Pry a token from the dragon’s mouth with fingers that were losing the ability to close. And make it back to the surface before the ice sealed over or her body gave out.

Whichever came first.

She lay there in the freezing water and let herself feel the full weight of it for three seconds. The exhaustion. The cold. The isolation. The brutal, grinding unfairness of a temple that had taken everything she had and was asking for more. They said it’d be hard. She’d been warned. She still underestimated it.

Three seconds. That was all she allowed.

Then she started breathing deeper. Long. Slow. Controlled. Forcing her heart rate down by will alone, the way she’d been taught before she could read, because in Frostborne you learned to manage cold the way other children learned to manage a spoon.

The cold would kill her if she didn’t get out. She swam for shore with everything she had.

By some grace she couldn’t name, Serena made it to the rocky shore.

Her fingers scraped stone. She hauled herself out of the water one arm at a time, elbows slipping on wet rock, and collapsed onto her hands and knees. Her body shook so violently it looked like a seizure. From the cold. From the exertion. From the brutal, grinding reality that the dive had taken more from her than she had left to give.

She coughed once. Then again, harder. Blood splattered the stone beneath her. Thick. Dark. Too much.

She stared at it. The cavern’s crystal light fractured across the red in shimmering hues, making it look almost beautiful, which was a terrible thing to notice while bleeding from the inside.

She coughed again, and more came. Her insides burned, hot and sharp, as though her own magic was retaliating against the body that housed it. Her vision went white around the edges. She pitched forward and vomited blood, a violent heave that left her trembling and gasping, hands flat on the stone, arms barely holding her up.

Then they gave out.

She collapsed, then rolled onto her back on the rocky shore, sprawled, soaked, shaking, staring up at the false constellations shifting slowly on the cavern ceiling. Her breath came in shallow, ragged pulls. Everything felt distant. Muted. Slow. A heavy sleepiness dragged at her bones, the kind that felt dangerous, and she wondered dimly if her body was going into shock.

She couldn’t lift a hand to check.

The cold was winning. She could feel it in her fingertips, which had stopped hurting, which was worse than when they hurt, because pain meant alive and numbness meant the body was surrendering territory.

She lay there. Watching the stars move. Letting the truth she had been outrunning settle over her.

Her Hidden Flame mark was boiling and she barely noticed.

This was pushing her to her limits, and she was getting worse. Dramatically. Relentlessly. Worse. Her magic was consuming her from the inside, and every time she pushed harder, it pushed back with compound interest.

She smiled to herself. Soft. Sad. The private expression of a woman acknowledging a verdict she wished she could appeal.

Something in this temple was making it harder for her. Harder than it should be.

Then another wave hit her. She rolled sideways and retched, more blood, and the violence of it left her curled on the stone with her forehead pressed against the rock.

Her mind flickered somewhere between consciousness and the dark edges of something deeper. The waterfall roared somewhere far away. She was so tired. She was so cold. She was so—

“Serena!”