Trial of Endurance
The world around you changes; folds in itself, all silver and soundless.
Water closes over your head like a shutting door, swallowing breath, warmth, and thought alike. In an instant you are suspended between two worlds; air somewhere above, darkness yawning below. The swarm’s noise is gone, replaced by a silence so complete it vibrates in your bones.
Light fractures across your skin in trembling shards of gold and blue. Your body moves without thinking, legs kicking upward, lungs clawing for air, but the water resists, thick and endless, pressing the last breath from your chest. Cold seeps into your ribs like a patient blade. Your heartbeat pounds in your skull, louder than ever before.
Shapes drift around you, unmoored fragments of memory and dreams.
A hand you once held outstretched in the dark.
A voice calling your name, warped and muffled by water.
Their faces beckon, tender and distant, and for a moment you almost reach, but your limbs are heavy, slowing, scattering like silt. The instinct to fight upwards surges again, wild and ragged.
Then, through the shifting blur, you see something glowing far below.
Soft. Steady. Like the last drop of hope drowning in the abyss.
It pulls at you without words; a quiet promise, a beginning, or perhaps an end.
Your chest burns. Blackness crawls at the edges of your vision. Every kick is a choice you may not get again.
Every frantic stroke is a scream in silence. Water crushes your chest, steals your lungs, and drags your limbs into leaden oblivion. You claw toward the surface, thrashing blindly, splashing and kicking as the world contracts around you.
Bubbles surge past your face, bitter and choking. A whisper of a hand, a muffled voice, a fleeting touch. You grasp at them and taste the salt of impossible tears.
Every instinct screams survival, but the air above wavers, retreating like smoke. When your fingers break the surface, there is not salvation awaiting for you; only cold and open sky, a world untouched, indifferent. Behind you, the lake vanishes. What's left is a swallow dark creek carrying away everything you clutched to, leaving you bare, trembling, and marked by the ordeal. The swarm is gone, but its sting lingers, embedded in your flesh and memory.
The water presses in from all sides, cold and relentless, stealing the last of your air. Every kick, every stroke feels like wading through molten silver.
Above you, the surface shimmers - unreachable now. Below, the faint pulse of light beckons. You claw through the water, limbs flailing, each movement a battle between panic and reason. The cold wraps around you like chains, pulling your senses into slow, twisting currents.
Shapes brush past, echoes of faces you know, fragments of memories distorted by liquid shadow. A hand reaches for you - or is it yours reaching for it?
Your chest burns. Every stroke is agony, your vision blurring, lungs threatening to betray you, yet the light stretches just ahead, a promise or a trap, you cannot tell. At last, it touches you. A warmth, soft and urgent, wraps around your fingers. You reach, trembling, and the world seems to exhale. The pressure eases, the cold relents, and the light holds you.
You have made it. For now.
All written content is original, drawn from myth, memory, and madness.
All images are generated via Midjourney using custom prompts by the author, unless otherwise stated.
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