Page 57 of Palingenesis

My teeth chatter, vibrating in my pounding skull as I drag myself out of the water the rest of the way and crumple.

I can’t seem to catch my breath through the trembling, the cold only worsening with each second that I lay here in soaking clothes.

Tearing the rest of them away, not that there’s much left to begin with, I get to my leg and freeze.

Jutting out from the side of my shin, through my pant leg, is fucking bone.

White and jagged, jarring enough that even through my shitty eyesight, I can make it out in the dark.

I lurch to the side and vomit all over the stones next to me.

And when the wave of nausea subsides, the spit I let fly only burning with the sting of leftover bile, my sight narrowing in on the wrongness once more, I scream.

It echoes back the pain I feel and then …

The mountain screams back.

Chapter 30

Shannon

Water laps at my face and a ray of sunlight peeks through the gorge and reflects off the surface, a contrast to all the bullshit that landed me here.

Not once did I manage to pass out.

Even as I used what I could find to immobilize the fracture in my leg, it’s like I left my own body and watched from the outside, guiding my hands to fashion the splint it’s in now. It won’t hold for long, the branches held together with my shoestring and thin roots.

Not that I could walk on it either way.

Gravity alone might cost me my leg entirely.

I checked for a pulse in my foot, something I know to do thanks to the research I did for one of my older books—one with an EMT main character—and nearly fainted from relief when I found one.

But I know that it’s only a matter of time before that fades.

This is beyond bad.

“So very fucking bad.” Even my voice doesn’t sound like my own. Monotone and out of any shits to give, even as I push myself to sitting.

Not that I could explain why I feel the need to. Anything I do at this point is just… prolonging the inevitable.

I am going to die out here.

Whether it’s ten minutes from now or ten days.

I can’t walk, let alone climb back out of this fucking gorge I’ve fallen into, it’s endless appearance stretches for miles in both directions.

There’s no one around to hear me scream. At least, no one that’s close enough to come running so far, and no way to call for help.

My phone is lost to the forest, a sacrifice to the gods among the trees and rot.

I’ll be next.

Still, instead of overflowing with fear, I find that I’m numb. Completely lacking in hope.

There’s no profound meaning found in the calming rapids next to me, or radiating positivity from a poster on an office wall that comes to mind.

It’s just this.