Exile

VI

She fell and heard people shouting. She hit the water hard and its cold punched the breath out of her. The river took hold of her clothes and pulled her down.

She was aware of all of this and yet not, for as she went she opened herself to the Autumnal entelech. It had been her constant companion since childhood. Always there, always churning away just beyond the edge of her awareness like a storm beyond the horizon. The one of the four entelechs that called to her, that shaped itself most easily to her will and imagination.

Earth, rain, decay. Time, change, melancholy. They and a thousand thousand other possible shapes of the Autumnal filled her as she sank. Not rivers or swimming or floating. Nothing obviously connected to not drowning. As the Hervent turned her slowly in its dark grip, ever further from the light and from the air, she heard her own death in the overwhelming rumble of the vast water. Felt it in the awful weight pressing in on her.

Panic stirred as she sank and rolled in the remorseless depths. It pushed away clarity of mind. She gathered the entelech to her. The season was in her favour: the year was waning, and the Autumnal coming into its strongest time. Power and possibility trembled in her mind, in her body. She was blind, here in the chill darkness; deaf to all save the river’s dull roar. She did not know which way was up. But she had the entelech, and she had the one thought that stayed clear and sharp: I’m not dying now. I’m not finished yet.

There was enough in the bottomless silt of the river’s bed that spoke of the Autumnal to give her mind a grip upon it. She could shape it and move it by melding her will with the entelech.

She felt grit on her face. Imagined herself wreathed in a rising cloud of water-borne dirt and clay. Imagined the very earth beneath the Hervent reaching up to embrace her and save her. But the imagining was hard. The visions she tried to shape and express through the entelech were indistinct, blurred by fear and desperation. There was only one answer to that. She let the Autumnal pour through her like a torrent. She did with raw, brute power what she could not do with precision.

Pain convulsed her. Her bones felt as though they crumbled to dust within her. Hot needles rooted around behind her eyes. She saw, within the creaking box of her own skull, the riverbed rushing up, turning the water to thickening mud. A terrible pressure swelled in her chest and rose chokingly through her throat and burst out of her mouth. She breathed in.