Prompt #1: Cross
Sometimes he dreamt of the river. A silver ribbon cutting through boundless fields of rolling white, its treacherous current hidden beneath a layer of ice. Snow dusted that ice too, half hiding another danger, narrowing the breadth of the water, making the ice seem as if it might provide safe footing. Neither thing was true. Beneath that smooth silver ribbon death roared, its frigid song muffled by the silence of winter.
Silvaineaux could feel the river rumbling under his boots even from its verge. Like the songs of dragons it hummed in his very bones, reminding him of its presence. “We cannot cross here.” He said to the others he could feel at his back. “I remember it in summer. The current is too fast. There is…”
But his words might as well have been more muffled than the dirge of the river for no one heeded them. He watched them flow past him in a current of their own, splitting around his form and streaming out onto the ice. He did not see their faces, for his eyes were fixed on the gleaming ice beneath their feet and they didn’t look back. Yet he knew them as they passed by familiar postures, by snatches of their voices drifting back to him on the wind. Ser Valerian, Florent, Seraphin, scores of others he had seen cross another even more permanent boundary.
But then other familiar shapes pushed past him. Honore paused to smile at him as he passed. Inwa, Edarien. Sui.
“STOP!” His own shout echoed in his bones like the rumble of the river but their feet were already on the ice and they did not even look back. Instead he listened to the first thin silvery crackles of the ice beginning to give way. Cracks formed and then spread, swifter than thought, spider-webbing across the river. The rest of Priarch flowed past him, not one of them stopped.
He knew his own armored weight would finish it. Yet, though the ice was now screaming under each of their steps none of them seemed to notice or hesitate. He stood alone on the bank of the river and felt it exulting under his feet.
As the first crack became a break he leapt forward, arms outstretched to catch hold of all he could reach. The ice shattered. He could not feel the scraps of fabric he grasped or the warmth of the body his arm encircled through the metal of his armor. But he felt the river when it reached up to catch him and tore them away again.
The cold of it burned like fire, the current caught him and the weight of his armor dragged him downward. Darkness swallowed him, tumbling him, sweeping him along with scraps of broken ice and bodies he could not catch hold of in the black. The unbroken ice further along the river closed over them and though he lunged at it, all his strength could not mar that silver ribbon.
Silvaineaux woke as he always did from the dreams of the river, to his own thrashing in tangled bedclothes and his shouts echoing off the wood and stone of the walls. His own blood rushed in his veins like the current.
