Garth doesn’t even get a scream. Just a boulder that turns him into paste.
Gunfire erupts around me, but it’s panic, not precision. Shots go wild. The air reeks of sulfur, piss, and blood. I drop two more mags, focus, breathe. Another shot hits an ogre in the throat. He stumbles, gurgles, but doesn’t fall.
“Fall back!” I bark. “Fall the fuck back!”
Nobody’s left to obey.
The last man, Tod, swings his rifle like a club. He lands a hit. Then an ogre kicks him so hard his torso splits from his hips. His legs stay standing for a second—then collapse.
I’m alone.
I bolt through the trees, lungs burning, legs screaming. My boots skid across wet leaves as I crash out onto open rock—and freeze.
The cliff.
I stagger to the edge and gape down. It’s a gods-damned ravine—wide as a canyon, with a river boiling at the bottom likeit wants to tear me limb from limb. I kick a loose rock off the edge. It spins downward forever. No splash. Just the howling wind between.
Then a sound—shrill, shrieking.
A boulder whistles past my ear, so close I feel the heat of its wake. It slams into the cliff beside me and explodes, spraying stone shards.
No choice.
I scream something—I don’t even know what—and hurl myself into the air.
For one heartbeat, everything slows.
The roar of the ogres fades.
The world turns quiet and syrup-thick. My body hangs in the fog, arms flailing, eyes wide. I feel the weightlessness—feel my guts trying to climb into my throat.
Then gravity finds me.
The air screams past. I twist, tumble, crash through mist and shadow.
The river punches the breath from my lungs. It’s not a splash. It’s a body-slam from the gods. The cold is so violent it stops my heart for a second. Then I’m tumbling through black water, spinning, choking, clawing for light. The current grabs me and drags me under.
The river is a bastard.
It slams into me, tosses me like a toy, then shoves me under so long I forget what air feels like. I kick, claw, gasp—none of it matters. The current’s a thousand cold hands dragging me by the ribs, turning me end over end, squeezing the breath out of my lungs until I see stars bursting behind my eyelids.
I break the surface just long enough to puke up river water and scream.
Then it yanks me under again.
I don’t know how long it goes on. Minutes? Hours? It could be years for all I know. I’m battered, bruised, drowning over and over again in a freezing hell with no top or bottom.
Then my hand hits something.
I don’t think—just grab.
A log. Slick with moss, half-rotten and stinking like death. But it floats. Gods, it floats. I hook an arm over it, wheezing, bleeding from somewhere—I can’t feel my fingers, can’t feel my legs, but the bark’s real beneath my nails.
“Hold,” I mutter. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s cracked and broken, like dry parchment rubbing glass.
I clamp down like it’s my lifeline, because it is.
The trees blur past on either side, gray-green streaks through the fog, and the sky’s a smear of ash above. Every second feels like a decade. The current keeps pulling, but slower now. I drift. I float. I bleed.
